RadioShack Prepares Bankruptcy Filing

The 2015 maker market is tiny compared to the 1985 one.

In the the UK the 1985 market was big enough to keep a handful of magazines in comfortable five digit sales, and an area of London - Edgware Road - had a component store ghetto where you could almost any part you wanted. (The tiny selection of components sold by RadioShack at ludicrous prices compared, to the epic lists offered by the ghetto shops, made RS a bit of a bad joke in the UK, even back then.)

There was almost no difference between 1985 product tech and 1985 hobby tech. In theory you could build almost any product you could buy out of standard parts, so there was always the incentive - or at least an excuse - that DIY would save you money. (Some people built amazing things to save money.)

In 2015, there's no way you can build an iPhone, a laptop, a games console or an MP3 player from scratch with a soldering iron and a bag of parts.

(If you look at Elektor, one of the surviving hobby mags, you'll see it's full of complicated, difficult hobby projects by full-time engineers. You need a lot more than a soldering iron and a cheap meter to build them.)

Bottom line is that the Arduino/Pi/Beagle/etc microcontroller market is nowhere near the size needed to keep a huge chain like RadioShack profitable.

And there's enough competition in consumer electronic sales to make it almost impossible to offer any other USP.

Add toxic management to the mix, and I'm amazed the company lasted as long as it did.

I won't miss RadioShack. I hope some smaller mom&pop enthusiast stores take over some of the same space - and that they treat customers and staff with much more respect and affection than RS ever did.

If I were CEO, I'd become the Linux Store to compete with the Apple Stores and the Windows Stores -- there are some of those aren't there? There is a market for main-stream Linux and there's no retail presence.

Going further Radio-Shack has a computer brand, "TRS". Get some low-end white-box laptops, slap Ubuntu on them and hire a few one-eyed-man-in-the-land-of-the-blind Linux "gurus" and have at it. It's the modern analogue of HeathKit but with a more fundamentally useful demographic.

Their real-estate holdings are a match for computer shops - second and third tier retail space with small footprints. Apple has validated the idea that computer shops are viable...it's not just the Apple branding that makes them work, it's also the fact that if you're looking for a computer, you're not in a place with most of its floor space devoted to televisions.

The other big change is that smartphones and tablets have proved that operating systems are not that important to users. A lot of people are fine with an old version of Android rather than something more polished...never mind the Kindle's success...or all the variation between website widgets and app interfaces . People have been exposed to a lot of variation, and have learned adaptation techniques. A computer doesn't need to look like Windows or OSX to keep people from freaking out.

RadioShack has the experience in high-touch sales and the infrastructure to pull it off. All that's needed is the will.

Actually the Microcenter near me (Chicago), has expanded their selection of electronic components significantly in the past couple of years. What once was one rack is now an entire wall, with Sparkfun, Adafruit, Parallax, and Seeedstudio stuff, Arduinos, Beaglebones, and Raspberry Pis, and plenty of resistors, transistors, and other individual parts.

Not really.

I'd love to know how a high traffic site is supposed to sustain itself with millions of hits every month without advertising if the site itself is free and the users would otherwise scoff at paying? If it were an easy fix it would be happening already.

Yea man! It's my favorite pizza place in NYC :)