Posted on 09/15/2014 8:19:49 PM PDT by Jack Hydrazine
Gentlemen and gentlewomen of a certain age harbor fond memories of trips to RadioShack. In days of yore, ham radios and homemade guitar amplifiers would emerge from the mysterious jumble of wires and audio components hawked by this unpretentious electronic retailer.
Whatever one’s view of this American institution with about 27,000 employees, it is near death. On Thursday, RadioShack warned that it may file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Well, we are not all geeks building our own walkie-talkies instead of buying them ready to go out of the box.
It sure used to be fun to pull out all those drawers and look at those part though.
Fun aside, I know what you mean. Most their activity seems to be as a cell phone store. But when I need a consumer electronic item it is the first place I go. They are very good at that.
Time to stock up on lithium batteries for my optics!
I hate Radio Shack. I once got into a huge argument with a clerk who wouldn’t sell me a lousy capacitor (less than a dollar!) unless I provided my phone number, name, address etc.
Good riddance.
That was a wonderful time in my life.
The Quick stops and 7/11s used to have those, and the common tubes.
In name only -- do you have any idea how many of those old Lafayette radio's are still valued, collected, and functioning to this day?
Not a hamfest goes by that I don't see Lafayette radio's in one state or another. (State = "fully restored & working" to "handy-man special.")
Who wanted to to go shopping with that vermin?"
LOL. That's what I find at my local stores. When I stop by for a <$20 buy of wires and chips, etc., all sorts of wackos are usurping employees time dealing with all sorts of complex issues beyond the capabilities of the customers and of the employees. It's like being in a cell phone store for stupid people.
Too bad the Sprint Store doesn't sell electrical/electronic parts.
Wow. Forgot about them.
This is a classic example of an inability of management to improvise, adapt, and engage.
The kicker is that these imbeciles kept opening stores like gangbusters when it was clear that they HAD NO SALES!
I was starting to think it was some kind of large scale money laundering organization for the Illuminati, they should have been bankrupt 10 years ago.
The worst smelling man I ever met in my life I met at RadioShack.
Agreed, when it became a glorified cell phone store, it lost so much.
Went in to the Radio Shack near me to buy a capacitor. Might have well have asked for the holy grail — was met by a blank stare.
I never did get my TRS-80. Damm you Santa Clause!
Well if you were, Radio Shack wouldn't be going out of business! (/humor)
Seriously, Radio Shack isn't even good for the occasional spare part anymore. It used to be I could go to RS and find any resistor, transistor or capacitor I needed to fix something. As the years have gone by, the parts they stock and keep in the store just kept dwindling. Personally I knew they were doomed when it cost more to order a part from their catalog in shipping cost alone, than the part itself cost.
Not sure what they were thinking relying on cheap remote control cars and cellphones as their business model.
Yep. It’s easier to shop online than it is to go to the store and shop around.
You've obviously never been to an amateur radio hamfest.......
And I'll toast to its long overdue demise. I often wondered what kind of corporate shennanigans and political donations were necessary to keep RS afloat. Smug clerks demanding personal info as if the cash register wouldn't operate without giving my name address and phone number.
It wasn't just one store. It was a few, in different states, over a couple decades. In the rare event I was desperate enough to see if Radio Shaft carried an odd item, it was the same creepy a$$ cloned clerk pulling the same stunt.
How's that mailing list trolling working out for you now, you arrogant pushy pimple-faced worms? Buh-bye!
The good ol' days .........
It amazes me that I can buy a capacitor at RS for about $1 each or buy a higher voltage rated one from Jameco for a few cents.
Jameco seems to be filling the niche that RS used to fill.
That's not the case. Their business model of having a selection of electronic parts in every store was flawed. Perhaps it was good enough for 1960's when a ham was expected to wind his own inductors and make his own high voltage capacitors. Even making of a power transformer was NOT out of the question, and I had some quantity of magnetics to do so. You could build a radio with parts selected from a list that does not exceed a few hundred items.
However today this is utterly not the case. There are tens of millions of different electronic components today, and you want to have access to all of them because you never know what this or that design calls for. Digi-Key offers mail order of nearly anything you may desire, and their prices are pretty low for a retail facility. (You can do better by going with Avnet and their ilk, but they require volume buy.)
What I'm saying is that RS could not stock enough parts in their retail outlets. It would be outrageously expensive, and they'd never be able to keep track of those parts. (Some of them are invisible without a microscope.) Digi-Key has a single, highly automated warehouse that ships orders within an hour or two from the moment you click "Submit order." You can order by 5PM and receive the shipment by 9am next morning. Or you can select USPS shipping and receive a small box a few days later for a song ($3 or so.) But the real advantage of distributors like Digi-Key, Mouser, Allied, and a few more is that they have a lot of stuff. No single brick-and-mortar store can stock even 1% of what they have. This means that Radio Shack just reached the end of that particular road. They had to change... but they had neither skills to do so, nor wisdom to understand that.
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