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A Eulogy for RadioShack

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Re: A Eulogy for RadioShack

#111

Post by pbreit »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #40
morganvachon wrote: post #25

I'd be willing to bet that this is exactly the way it was at most, if not all, corporate RadioShack stores. On the other hand, the franchise stores (which mostly no longer exist) could be great places to shop and to work, because they were owned by actual breathing human beings, not faceless corporate overlords. My first "real" job after high school was at the local RadioShack, which was owned by one of the most amaz…

> It really saddens me to know that he'll likely have to drop the RadioShack name one day soon Could he turn his shop into a for-profit hackerspace that has inventory for projects?

Radio Shack always struck me as a store that could contain a Kickstarter section.

Re: A Eulogy for RadioShack

#112

Post by bigtones »

adricnet wrote: post #2

That's certainly an interesting read... and one I can't really argue with the anecdata of from my own experiences. So I'll add one: After it was too late by that author's reckoning, the parent of Radio Shack tried another venture, a "big box" store called The Incredible Universe. When that failed and they wrote it off, it wiped out the entire profit of Radio Shack thousands of stores for that financial year. I still…

Incredible Universe was started by the CEO of Tandy, rather than RadioShack.

Re: A Eulogy for RadioShack

#113

Post by bsder »

While Radio Shack deserves the scorn, it had two big problems at a crucial time.

1) Charles Tandy died in late 1978. This was right as the computer revolution was taking off and his loss of vision was bad news.

2) IIRC, one of the corporate officers embezzled an enormous amount of cash in the 1980's right as the IBM PC clone business was taking off. This stalled the company at a point when it needed to be pivoting. Unfortunately, I have only my memory to rely on as I can't seem to pull this out of any of the web search engines.

Re: A Eulogy for RadioShack

#114

Post by chipsy »

My earliest memory of Radio Shack(which is probably circa 1990, so even before the name change) is that I walked in accompanied by my mother and attempted to play the display miniature pinball game, and then was yelled at by the manager for this crime.

I've had better experiences, I even got a microSD from them the other day(after being tipped by a friend that they were cost competitive on this one item). But it has never been warm fuzzies.

Re: A Eulogy for RadioShack

#115

Post by linker3000 »

timthorn wrote: post #80
leoc wrote: post #28

> RadioShack is a company of massive real estate, and is peddling a business model that is completely unviable in 2014. We have good evidence to suggest that the RS business model is indeed viable in 2014: it's Maplin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8328621 (followup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8329953 ).

Maplin has been doing ecommerce for over twenty years - anyone else remember CASHTel?

Yep. My Maplin customer number is only 4 digits - which always throws the staff if they use it/

Mind you, Maplin has turned into a UK Tandy and is really no longer a sane source for electronic components. Wouldn't be surprised if they eventually went down the pan or shrunk their stores base.

Remember the orange/green/white collectable discount vouchers you'd receive with your orders.

Re: A Eulogy for RadioShack

#116

Post by [deleted] »

timthorn wrote: post #80
leoc wrote: post #28

> RadioShack is a company of massive real estate, and is peddling a business model that is completely unviable in 2014. We have good evidence to suggest that the RS business model is indeed viable in 2014: it's Maplin https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8328621 (followup https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8329953 ).

Maplin has been doing ecommerce for over twenty years - anyone else remember CASHTel?

[deleted]

Re: A Eulogy for RadioShack

#117

Post by softbuilder »

madengr wrote: post #87
softbuilder wrote: post #68

Radio Shack was always two stores in my memory. There was the legit geeky side with electronic parts, and there's the Realistic/Tandy side hawking so-so also-ran consumer electronics. The perspective always seemed to be that parts were sort of a loss-leader for consumables. The employees almost never knew anything technical, and were often suspicious of nerdy kids like me lingering in the parts section. I remember on…

Ha ha, 0.2 pF are strictly RF SMT caps. Probably was 22 pF.

I think you're right, 22pF. Definitely wasn't anything SMT, this was 1984 or so.

Re: A Eulogy for RadioShack

#118

Post by jrapdx3 »

Honestly, I don't know what to make of the "news" of RS' imminent demise. Just 2 days ago I visited a nearby RS store and bought stuff there. The store was well-stocked and I wasn't the only customer in the store. The employees didn't have that unhappy, "short-timer" look either, that is, didn't emit even a whiff that the store was closing down.

Besides, there are at least 6 RS stores in this city, the furthest I know of being maybe 10 miles away, so I'm guessing there must be a few RS stores out there that I don't know about. Since they've all stayed in business for many years, they have to be selling some items or services or something.

I can report at least two positive aspects of my RS visit. The guy at the cash register actually knew something about the gear I was interesting in and could answer technical questions. Second, prices were low and the quality of items seemed pretty good.

So yeah, there are reasons I would hate to see them go...

Re: A Eulogy for RadioShack

#119

Post by logn »

I wish RadioShack would transition to selling hackable electronics (Raspberry Pi, Arduino, stuff on SparkFun, Maker Bots, etc). That's how they started and now as they're nearing bankruptcy, that market is finally back and getting bigger. Further, most of these parts are made by small-time businesses with suboptimal distribution and RadioShack could be enormously helpful. And I see blogs all the time about how if you have the inside connections to factory owners in China you can get all sorts of cool stuff at very low prices--RadioShack could resell all this.

Edit: but I think RadioShack's future is in the hands of Wall Street types who only see it as an interesting financial instrument where they can cheat some fools out of money before totally liquidating.

Re: A Eulogy for RadioShack

#120

Post by Maakuth »

realrocker wrote: post #107

So last month I was in US for the first time and I was dying to walk into a RadioShack, the temple of cool things as I have been hearing about on obscure and popular electronics hobby forums since I was 16. After checking out 6 stores in 4 cities, I was really disappointed. No cool stuff. All I could find was phone cases, cheap earphones and a few IC's(mildly interesting). To be honest, I didn't know what I was expec…

I had similar experience, but I only visited a single store in downtown San Francisco (near Westfield mall). I thought my sample size was just too small, surely the whole chain couldn't be so lame. It's sad to hear that place wasn't an exception.
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