Radio Shack – What The Heck Happened?

[bob550]

So I'm doing some research now and apparently it's owned by the same company that owns Dress Barn, Linens and things and Pier 1 and they do have brick and mortar RadioShack stores, approximately 350 around the country.

You learn something new everyday😆

Those brick and mortar stores are independently owned franchise operations. Original corporate-owned stores closed in 2017 during the second bankruptcy.

 

[KevinC]

Perhaps we just didn't want to know. Over my 22 years as a part-timer, I helped numerous customers looking for parts I could have sworn would have been used to construct a timer for a bomb or an illegal surveillance device.

Most of the time they saw me walking to the back of the store and completely ignored me anyway.

 

[trentbob]

Those brick and mortar stores are independently owned franchise operations. Original corporate-owned stores closed in 2017 during the second bankruptcy.

Oh yeah I remember that and all the great deals I got at 75% off on radios, parts, coax, antennas, I was on a scavenger hunt to every store in my area.

 

[bob550]

RadioShack became over-reliant on cellphone sales. In the early days, the mid-90's, RS was one of the few locations you could buy a handset. Once Verizon, ATT, and eventually Sprint began building out their company stores, and franchise sellers began popping up, the writing was on the wall. With RS, you had displays composed of mock handsets, or sometimes with a recently-launched phone, an embarassing paper cutout. Walk in to any carrier store and you'd find actual working models on display. Maybe we'd have the model you were interested in, or maybe we'd have to go get it from another store. It was an amateur effort at best.

 

[bob550]

Oh yeah I remember that and all the great deals I got at 75% off on radios, parts, coax, antennas, I was on a scavenger hunt to every store in my area.

Toward the end during the final closeout sales, I made a purchase so large that my receipt measured out at 34.5" in length. Yup, I kept it as a memento.

 

[trentbob]

As I was saying in my other post my experience with Radio Shack stores started in the mid-60s with my dad taking me, we also would go to the Lafayette store and the many independent ham radio stores.

The guys who worked in the Radio Shacks in the '60s and '70s actually were radio guys, always had available crystals for the area and always had printed out frequency list they would hand out, waiting for the catalog was fun, I couldn't wait to get my hands on one.

The decline was sad but very predictable, it was always fun taking the clueless clerk to school but there were still some Old-Timers that did know a little something about radios and certainly could hook you up with a cell phone.. lol

 

[bob550]

Most of the time they saw me walking to the back of the store and completely ignored me anyway.

Well, we just didn't want to become an accessory to whatever you were doing.

 

[bob550]

The guys who worked in the Radio Shacks in the '60s and '70s actually were radio guys ....

Many employees back then came from the ranks of customers and hobbyists. I used to laugh at the younger sales associates who would rely on me for the more technical information they needed to assist a customer.

 

[n0esc]

So many incredibly misguided and short sighted decisions in the dot-com boom pretty much put them into an unrecoverable freefall. They held no real assets on the corporate real estate side. They were tied to the decline of malls and ever increasing rents with no leverage. Then there was the massive DFW corporate headquarters mistake of leveraging the sale of their downtown twin towers Tandy Center to build a flashy 30 acre 1 million square foot albatross on the river a few blocks away.

Let us not forget the CueCat folly. Spend $7 each to build a barcode scanner that plugs into your PC. To scan barcodes, in the catalog you have mailed to you, to browse the internet. In 2002. The bulk of which shipped to stores as PS/2 interface devices. In 2002. When USB 2.0 standard was already adopted. $30 million dollar investment in that.

I worked there out of high school in the late 90s. The sheer amount of tchotchke that kept showing up even in our small rural mall store was overwhelming and of little to no interest for our farming and factory town. And yet the investment in the crap continued to happen, and the handy and convenient selection of parts and hardware kept being relegated to smaller and smaller portions of the store, from full walls, to wing panels, to bins, to drawers, to eventually telling people we could order it delivered, oh sorry, not to you, it will be in the store in 2-5 days, "Sir, wait, did you want me to get that..." "Nevermind, guess you'll just order it from Digikey." "Can I interest you in a GolfScope? They're on clearance for $5"

 

[safetypro79]

I remember the days of Lafayette radio we had one outside of Philadelphia in Drexel Hill. I worked PT for RadioShack at a franchise store in Delaware county. Yes, you’re right those were the days, Crystal scanners, frequency lists and someone behind the counter, who actually knew something about radios but one thing I remember was my friend, and I going on the train to New York City from Philadelphia and visiting some of the old radio shops off of 42nd Ave. And the remembering the “electronics” smell of those old surplus shops that sold World War II in Korean vintage radio gear, some brand new still in sealed boxes for crazy prices.

We had a few in Philadelphia also downtown and I remember in my early days of ham radio in 68 buying two ARC 5’s tx and rx, brand new in the box for $5 each.

 

[MTS2000des]

We had two radio shacks literally across the street from each other I certainly didn't understand how that was sustainable. By the time I entered my senior year of high school all but one remained in my area.

This was the cornerstone of their success and ultimate failure. By the early to mid 00s, big box retail, Chinazon, Ebay and other E-commerce sites pretty much made this business model that was successful in the 70s thru the 90s a huge debt burden. Combine that with fraud to "cook the books" and hide the real losses, RS was on borrowed time from around 2002. Amazing it ran almost another decade and some before it crashed into the ground.

All retail is being put to this test: look at Bed/Bath/Beyond, Tuesday Morning, etc. All these specialty retailers have high overhead with rent, utilities, employees, insurance, and have low daily numbers as their offerings can be found online for less, delivered right to the door. The Scamndemic was the nail in the coffin for many retail.

It wasn't cellphones or "asking for customer info" that killed RS, it was sheer bloat and an out of date business model of thousands of stores that weren't making sales, it's as simple as that. Welcome to capitalism. This is how it works folks.

 

[prcguy]

I started as young kid the mid 60s with the help of my dad and uncle. Radio Shack was always my candy store.

Although there were other makers of scanners for them GRE Japan was their main source of scanners Crystal and programmable and before that tunable monitors. They put out all of the famous legendary radios like that 2004, 5 and 6.

The people that worked at Radio Shack actually knew what they were talking about, why wouldn't they, why would they even be hired if they didn't.

The Tandy Corporation, Archer brand, realistic, all I knew is they always had a frequency list printed up by the manager that they would mimiograph for you and they had most of the pertinent crystals that you needed for the area.

When the cell phone craze came in the late '80s and early 90s they became Cell Phone Shack.. as time went on the people that worked there used to sell women's shoes two stores down in the mall, they got fired and were hired by RatShack, actually no offense to anyone who worked there and knew what they were doing at that time but you know it better than anybody.

Company destroyed itself over many years like I don't know, Bud Light did in 3 weeks. With Radio Shack it took a long time. The writing was on the wall.

During the liquidation sales when it went out of business pretty much the only people left working there where people who did know what was going on. Long time employees..

The stuff I picked up at that time, scanners, antennas, coax which has been well taken care of, is incredible. I remember buying fistfuls of RS 800's BNC of course made by GRE for five bucks a piece.

We know how that's been a success by ramtronix. I also bought up every Sputnik ground plane I could find.

I have no idea what Radio Shack is today on the internet?? Don't have a clue.

Yes, most of what is said here. I started going to Radio Shack around 1968 and it catered mostly to the electronic hobbyist back then. CBs became very popular around that time and they sold millions of them threw the mid to late 70s, then CB had its falling out but that was later replaced with home computers and cell phones. In the 80s I asked my local RS manager what's going on with all the crap being sold in the store and he said the hobby people like myself are dwindling and they have to change their sales model and diversify to stay current with what sells.

I noticed a downward trend in the type of customer from the late 60s until they went under and every year its less technical people and more moms shopping at RS. At the same time I noticed local High School electronics classes started drying up and there is virtually no public schooling in electronics for the last 30+ years, at least in my area. The pool of hard core component level electronic geeks is getting older and dying out with few replacements, so the core customer of the 1960s Radio Shack just isn't there any more.

Then as others have mentioned, on line purchases and cheap offshore suppliers have put a lot of brick and mortar stores out of business, they just can't compete with the cheap prices.

 

[trentbob]

I still use that table top Radio Shack Radio, can't remember when I got it but very sensitive for AM dxing to this day.

Slide rule dial monitor was my first Public Service receiver. Started about 10 or 11 years old I guess, I was 10 years old in 1963. My first shortwave was the guts of an old wooden stand up Zenith radio with 200 ft of copper wire.

I remember having one of those plastic Archer radios on my handlebars of my Stingray bicycle with the leopard banana seat around 12 years old in 65. My dad got me my CB call letters then.

RatShack was important to me when I was growing up and like the others here watched it's slow demise.

Posters here are all accurate as far as exactly what happened to the company, so many contributing factors.. SMH.

 

[KB4MSZ]

"You've got questions, we've got blank stares."

A blank stare would have been better.

Back in the early 80’s I went to a local Radio Shack to see about buying a CB radio that had SSB capability. There was a tall square glass case near the front of the store which contained the mobile CB’s. Not all of the units were turned to where the front panels could be seen clearly, so after staring at them for I guess 15 minutes or so a salesman came up to me and asked if he could help me. I said yes, I would like to know if any of these models include sideband. He answered “yes, all of our mobile CB’s include the mounting brackets”.

 

[redbeard]

There was NO upside to selling a phone at full price. None. Zero. If someone came in and said they wanted to buy a phone outright when I was slinging phones, pagers, and PDAs, I’d develop a sudden case of not being able to converse in English.

Sure, there’s a price listed but you weren’t buying one from me. A move like that would get hours of coaching/lectures and some guaranteed payback like less scheduled hours or hours outside of your availability. “Go buy your phone from the carrier” is what would eventually spill out of my mouth.

Well that's a sh*t way to do business, put an item on sale/clearance then refuse to sell it. Not every person is off-contract and can re-up for a new contract and get a free or $.01 phone. That's the point of the full purchase price, printed on the sales tag. That type of garbage is why my favorite store turned into the biggest example of disappointment.

 

[RFI-EMI-GUY]

If you ever find yourself in Socorro, NM there is a RadioShack still open there. Tons of NOS parts and gadgets from the past on the shelves. RadioShack in Socorro , NM

The couple that owns it don't use cellphones and communicate via amateur radio when necessary. HF rig humming away behind the counter and a pretty cool collection of old radios and electronics where the old DirecTV display likely used to be.

I wonder if the one in Taos was still there with the million dollar view behind it.

The Soccoro store probably gets by on emergency runs from VLA for resistors and capacitors!

 

[n0esc]

Well that's a sh*t way to do business, put an item on sale/clearance then refuse to sell it. Not every person is off-contract and can re-up for a new contract and get a free or $.01 phone. That's the point of the full purchase price, printed on the sales tag. That type of garbage is why my favorite store turned into the biggest example of disappointment.

But that is precisely the problem that plagued RS at the time. The business model from corporate on down was build on locking people into those contracts to get the residuals. Everything the store was slinging in the mid 90s on was at the hopes of locking that contract. MSN internet, Dish Network or DirecTV, and whatever national regional or local cell service provider they could contract with. All in the hopes of securing that monthly injection of cash, at the front end loss of giving the phones, satellite dishes and whatever else away for free. Back in the day when phone service contracts were $100/mo and RS was getting their percentage cut, selling you the phone at $200 lost them money in their eyes.

 

[hill]

I see people that must have bought stuff from the closing down Radio Shacks with large bins of parts and orher Radio Shack brand stuff selling at local hamfests.

 

[redbeard]

I see people that must have bought stuff from the closing down Radio Shacks with large bins of parts and orher Radio Shack brand stuff selling at local hamfests.

Oh yeah I went on many a shopping spree at closing stores buying stuff for pennies on the dollar. At one store I even rolled up the front carpet inside the door with the RS logo on it.

 

[mmckenna]

At one store I even rolled up the front carpet inside the door with the RS logo on it.

Score. I'm sure there are some out there that would totally geek out over having that in their ham shack.