Some of y'all might like to have another source for yer atomic bits:
Weird timing after a very good Super Bowl ad. I thought they’d follow with some news about changes in their stores...not this.
I’m surprised it took this long.
They should have died 10 years ago.
Like the Super Bowl ad said - the 80s called and they want their Radio Shack back.
It’s almost useless to go there... They used to have lots of IC’s and components, but not anymore.
As the joke says, “try and find the radio”.
Remember back in the day when they wanted your address if you bought anything? Even batteries?
Rumor floating around was that they were required to report your component purchases to the FCC if it looked as if you were in the process of building a pirate radio station.
The last three times I was in Radio Shack, they did not have what I was looking for.
A really weird mix of items if you ask me. A lot of Chinese junk.
Wow...great news...more people on unemployment to grow the economy.../S
I have 3 RS stores about equidistant. One would suffice if the inventory is kept up.
If I was at the top of RS, I would specialize in big trends.
Right now I would specialize in dumping cable TV, in favor of OTA antennas and streaming internet systems.
I don’t know where to go to find people with the knowledge about this. Have been going stepwise on my own.
Watched the Super Bowl on Fox San Diego with a cheapo antenna. But I need a better antenna.
For streaming Roku is tops.
Try to buy a decent portable AM-FM radio in a Radio Shack.
Not that you can purchase one anywhere, but one would think that an outlet with the name Radio in it would offer something better than a once $5.00 Dollar radio for less than $40.
Not.
The selection of radios there was very small when I was shopping so I continue to use a 30 year old boom box when I sit outside in warm weather.
Some of y'all might like to have another source for yer atomic bits:
I went to Best Buy over the weekend looking for a kids’ LCD tablet. The guy looked at me like I was from another planet. He called over two other employees just as clueless. I finally asked could they PLEASE look it up in their store inventory database? Jeepers, that should have been their first thought! They didn’t have it. Went to RS, the guy knew what I was talking about, knew where to find it, knew how to use it. I was impressed.
in our town, the local lumber/home improvement dealer bought the franciise just as the RS store was about to close...he dedicated a decent size portion of his store for the franchise and it seems to be doing just fine...
My niece was a “manager” in one of their stores for several years. It seemed like an awful job. I think her true rate of pay per hour was barely 4 bucks taking into account all the unpaid hours she had to put in.
She quit and got a job with the govt. Now her true rate of pay for the hours she actually works is stunningly high, LOL.
Sad to hear for this old RS hired hand. What most people do not understand is RS never looked to hire geeks they wanted sales so hired sales types to push stuff out the door. The name and address thing was for the flyers their main marketing tool at the time. I worked through the transition from the old paper handwritten tickets to the first POS systems where they asked for the last 4 of your phone number. They used to grade us on the legibility of the hand written tickets. Every floor employee except the manager was paid on commission so the talented ones sold computers, tv’s, and stereo’s. I liked hitting a lot of nice singles and did fairly well got good at drawing up the loop and selling the components so one could record one show on VCR while watching a different one on your TV appx $35 worth. The manager on the other hand was paid on the store’s profit and the profit was in the small pack stuff resistors fuses etc every $1 sale was about 95% profit vs computers at maybe 5% profit.
I don’t think wings and rainbows are going to see them through....
Scrooge Alert: Boycott Radio Shack this Christmas
November 25, 2013
AFA is calling for a limited one-month boycott of Radio Shack over the company’s censorship of the word “Christmas.”
For years, Radio Shack has refused to use the word Christmas on its website, in television commercials, newspaper ads and in-store promotions, despite tens of thousands of consumer requests to recognize Christmas and in spite of repeated requests from AFA to do the same.
http://www.afa.net/Detail.aspx?id=2147541490
They have to cut some costs somewhere. That Super Bowl add was expensive.
The big appeal for Radio Shack was for “do it yourselfers”. When high schools still had electronics clubs, it created lots of customers for them.
The way they could have kept up with this was to move into educating their customers. There are tons of DIY electronics books out there. Imagine if they had just a single computer and printer. They choose from a list of maybe 1000 projects they could build at home, and get a printout of all the parts they need and how to assemble them.
Instead of getting the parts themselves, they could get a kit delivered to that branch of RS. The whole kit would have a set price. They could build themselves their own computer, which you could actually do back in the 1980s.
