Before the 2000s, RadioShack was the place to go if you needed a cable or help with anything tech related. Now, the last brick-and-mortar store in Maryland is closing its doors.
My understanding of the situation, was they lost a lot of customers as companies stopped making things repairable, and designed planned obsolesance into their products. Then as their customer base started getting more busy with work, getting richer and getting older, they just stopped repairing things, opting to throw it out and buy new to save time, or because they had disposable income. Then because of a smaller customer base they started branching out to make a quick buck in other ways like selling you cell phones instead of electronics and repair parts. And then as the newer generations grew up, the radioshacks didn’t really have any repair parts for today’s electronics. They’d don’t sell modern computer components, they didn’t sell cell phone screens to DIY replace, or cell phone batteries, etc. So kids didn’t grow up to become a customer either.
They should have probably pivoted HARD into cell phone repair, raspberry pi boards, etc. Desktop components, etc Instead of trying to a hock an expensive iPhone contract to 55 year old long time customers. They could have been a mini micro center or Fry’s, but instead they went the direction they did…
They tried that pivot at least twice and couldn’t make it work.
It’s the same story as Sears. I can’t find the actually knowledgeable person who broke it down but in the case of Sears all the obvious stuff you thought they should do, they either tried or couldn’t have managed for some good reason. Near the end there was a lot of debt stopping them from getting creative. Many of the typical Monday morning quarterback ideas wouldn’t have worked.
Come on, bro, these guys sat around in board rooms and meetings racking their brains about it, hiring consultants and probably fielding wacky ideas from people’s kids, anything, and they did it for years but couldn’t save the company. Your casual ideas from years later weren’t it.
We’ve pretty much lost our local mall, and a lot of them have closed, not because people lacked ideas, but because fundamental shifts had happened in the market, and the problems that the mall solved no longer existed or were solved better. I noticed that we have quite a lot of thriving retail around the mall, it’s just the actual mall seems to no longer make business sense.
Radioshack is probably the same. I’d imagine that what really killed it is Amazon’s network. Maybe you don’t really want that many diodes, but all 500 of them cost little and will last you years, while Amazon allows you to summon them to your hand like Thor’s hammer.
Radioshack seemed to thrive the most when PC’s cost $4000 for a cheap one and there weren’t that many places to buy one in retail stores. I think all of their strongest product lines and best ideas have just been whittled away somehow or another, with lots of markets shrinking. They sold a lot of random electronics, like clock radios and cheap stereos, all of which have ended up in Walmarts and Targets and such. That handful of electronics parts was their true business, the demand went away, and there was no good pivot.
Cellphones? Who *isn’t *selling those? They couldn’t have become a core business. I get my cellphones from ebay ffs.
Honestly losing consumer demand for a couple of diodes is a big deal. The beauty of selling things like that is that it can cost you 3 cents, you can charge the customer 50 cents, the markup is ridiculous, and the customer doesn’t bat an eye. Bolts and screws are similar business. But sell them something for $3000 at a loss to get them into the store to see the shiny thing and they’ll try to bargain down every nickel.
Nah, I think they were just done. It’s a shame, and I’ll always have fond memories of the stores and the Christmas catalogs, but I think it’s over for them, through no great fault of the company.
I miss the RadioShack that was nearest to me. It was the only one I had ever seen that actually had components and wasn’t just basically a cell phone/RC hobby store.
Sometimes I just want a single diode, resistor or capacitor, and I can’t just buy ONE online. I gotta get like 1000! 😮💨
I know they’re not everywhere, but I’ve bought some components before at Microcenter.
Are there maker spaces near you?
I’m not sure what you mean. Like, hobbyist clubs?
