A lot of people think RadioShack should have made the transition to internet sales, but I think that they actually started failing earlier, when they expanded into a non-technical market.
In the 80s and 90s I could go into a Radio Shack and buy resistors, fuses, soldering equipment, breadboards, various controllers and sensors, hard drives, processors: everything I needed to assemble an electronics project, fix a computer, make something.
But in the mid-late 90s they started switching over to a more general consumer model. Bins of parts were replaced by shiny cell-phone display cases. Knowledgeable fat bearded nerds were replaced by skinny college students working a retail job until they got their degree. The last time I went into a RadioShack I just wanted a potentiometer and they literally didn't have any electronics parts.
The tragedy here is that this transition completed at about the same time the maker movement started to emerge a little after the turn of the millennium.
What's even more tragic is that Radio Shack realized they needed to get makers back, and when they started expressing a desire to do so a lot of makers were initially enthusiastic.
But I don't think they ever really grokked what makers would want out of a local brick-and-mortar. They never did fix the sorry state of their loose component selection. The parts drawers are still stocked with 50% stereo equipment parts they haven't been able to sell since 1992, 20% automotive fuses they haven't been able to sell since 1995, 15% standard capacitor sizes for ancient stereo equipment, and 15% components a modern maker might actually need. They should have written all that stuff down and then taken a look at adafruit.com to see what components a 21st century maker wants to buy.
Yes, they did expand their selection of microcontrollers and kit projects, but that's all stuff we've long since gotten used to ordering online. It won't drive feet through the door. They needed to be backing that up with the kinds of stuff a DIYer might want to buy on short notice. A 2015 DIYer, not a 1985 one.
The 2015 maker market is tiny compared to the 1985 one.
In the the UK the 1985 market was big enough to keep a handful of magazines in comfortable five digit sales, and an area of London - Edgware Road - had a component store ghetto where you could almost any part you wanted. (The tiny selection of components sold by RadioShack at ludicrous prices compared, to the epic lists offered by the ghetto shops, made RS a bit of a bad joke in the UK, even back then.)
There was almost no difference between 1985 product tech and 1985 hobby tech. In theory you could build almost any product you could buy out of standard parts, so there was always the incentive - or at least an excuse - that DIY would save you money. (Some people built amazing things to save money.)
In 2015, there's no way you can build an iPhone, a laptop, a games console or an MP3 player from scratch with a soldering iron and a bag of parts.
(If you look at Elektor, one of the surviving hobby mags, you'll see it's full of complicated, difficult hobby projects by full-time engineers. You need a lot more than a soldering iron and a cheap meter to build them.)
Bottom line is that the Arduino/Pi/Beagle/etc microcontroller market is nowhere near the size needed to keep a huge chain like RadioShack profitable.
And there's enough competition in consumer electronic sales to make it almost impossible to offer any other USP.
Add toxic management to the mix, and I'm amazed the company lasted as long as it did.
I won't miss RadioShack. I hope some smaller mom&pop enthusiast stores take over some of the same space - and that they treat customers and staff with much more respect and affection than RS ever did.
Adafruit is awesome, but it's not remotely a replacement for a brick and mortar store. When I went to RadioShack in the early 90s I would pick the core part of what I wanted and then walk around the store visually matching parts to make sure things fit.
This is somewhat less necessary now that there are more standardized connections between things, but it's still nice and it's something Adafruit can't possibly replicate.
They'd still go out of business. Not only is that market for components like that small, the profit margins are too. You'd have to stock a very wide selection of items.
And there's established mail order dealers with cheap overnight shipping and cavernous warehouses (i.e.: Digikey) that have the volume to keep those margin very thin.
started failing earlier, when they expanded into a non-technical market.
Radio Shack was dead when the 80s ended. Look around, where are the small computer stores that used to be all over the place? They went the same way the record store did...
Radio Shack works in an era where computers are $10000, and people build and solder their own computers.
That era is gone. And that's why Radio Shack will die.
Pretending that the 80s market still exists is delusional... and completely ignores all of the companies that clung to that business model that died 10-20 years ago.
I missed the heyday of computing, but I was a kid in the 1990's and still remember going to radio shack to get resistors. I think as we grew out of it, that enthusiast market never really got replenished. My wife has two much younger siblings (13-14) and it's actually kind of surprising how they're less computer literate than we are (30-31). They use Snapchat and whatnot, but don't even know how to make more complicated search queries in Google.
Little bit nostalgic about the BK though. My first real computer was a Tandy we bought at RadioShack: https://parasomia.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/the-tandy-sensati.... I'm pretty much the guy in the article. Eventually maxed it out with 16MB of RAM, a 1.2GB HDD, and Win95.
I don't think you can draw too many conclusions based on those observations. The fact you're posting on Hacker News makes you atypical for your generation.
Look at people like Palmer Luckey. He revived VR and kick started an entire industry from his parents garage when he was 18.
I think we're in living in a pretty amazing time for computing. We're still figuring out what the next wave of computing will look like. Programmers can bootstrap apps and games that reach millions of people without breaking a sweat. Programming is more accessible than ever. I'd chose today over the 80's in a heartbeat.
In the last 5 years Microcenter has been expanding their selection of electronics tools, kits, and parts. Not to mention Fry's which has always carried a selection of electronics tools and parts. They've essentially picked up the market that Radio Shack dropped.
There's one Fry's in a city. There used to be dozens of Radio Shacks. It's a very different model. Radio Shack would have had to close 9 out of 10 stores, and turned the remaining one into some sort of superstore.
I'm not saying that's not what should have happened (though the big box stores are now beginning to see the writing on the wall, as much of their business goes online), or that it wouldn't have extended the life of the Radio Shack brand another five, ten, maybe more, years. But, it would have also been the end of the Radio Shack of my childhood (then again, that Radio Shack died years ago anyway).
Microcenter is pretty awesome (has its flaws but it's basically what I always wished Best Buy and the like could be.
It ain't gonna happen but Microcenter doesn't have locations in many areas so I'd love it if they bought up a bunch of the little Radio Shacks and turned them into spinoff/satellite "Nanocenters" or some such. Maybe just stock the small stuff (hobbyist electronics and other things that don't take up a load of space) and rotate in the most popular/in-demand items from their normal stock.
The volume and low margins of their bigger stores would help with costs that would be harder if they were only the smaller shops but it would be a cheaper way to bring computer hardware and other electronics to brick-and-mortar stores that are closer to more customers.
I realize this would probably be a mess and never work due to market changes but it's a nice fantasy.
Have you seen Fry's selection of electronic components lately? There are 3 within a 30 minute drive of me, and I visited all 3 of them in one day trying to find a component without having to order it online. Their selection was not any better than the local Radio Shacks. The selection of components at RS were in drawers and was not impressive. The selection at Fry's was also not as impressive, but since they were just on hangers on a fairly large amount of real estate, all of the bags were yellowed and nasty looking. Some of there stuff even had a layer of dust on them.
I'm not trying to bag on Fry's, but I would not be surprised if their component selection gets eliminated to make space for refrigerators, microwave ovens, and color TVs.
Perhaps it is a niche market. That said, I was really looking for some brick and mortar resources for a ham radio, some coax, and some resitors/circuit kits the other day. I actually thought of RadioShack, but thought "no, I'm not looking for a cell phone."
There is still a market, though small, that RadioShack gave up on.
You got the cause and effect backwards. They expanded into non-technical markets because the technical market was failing.
>resistors, fuses, soldering equipment, breadboards, various controllers and sensors, hard drives, processors: everything I needed to assemble an electronics project, fix a computer, make something.
Almost nobody uses any of these. Those who do it as a hobby and don't wanna pay corner store retail for products. Microcenter is essentially the only one selling half that stuff and they can support like 1 store per major metro area. And they don't even really sell resistors and sensors.
Nobody repairs electronics anymore.
The tiny niche maker movement could support a radioshack like store. But radioshack is a corner store. More like 7-11 than a microcenter.
They have to tell resister for 400 bucks to keep 5 thousand stores open.
Actually the Microcenter near me (Chicago), has expanded their selection of electronic components significantly in the past couple of years. What once was one rack is now an entire wall, with Sparkfun, Adafruit, Parallax, and Seeedstudio stuff, Arduinos, Beaglebones, and Raspberry Pis, and plenty of resistors, transistors, and other individual parts.
The last time I went to a RadioShack, I was looking for a resistor. I checked their website, which said my local store had it in stock. When I got there, I found the electronic components stuffed in a dark corner and the smaller components were all mixed up in the wrong drawers. After a few minutes of searching, I didn't find the resistor I needed, so I asked the only employee in the store where it might be. She told me that if it wasn't in the drawer, they don't have it. I said "But your website says it's in stock," to which she replied "Oh we never update that."
I always call the store to confirm if the website is correct. And half the time, they don't have in stock what the website claims. That may be why the employees are so eager and helpful in looking for the part.
> The tragedy here is that this transition completed at about the same time the maker movement started to emerge a little after the turn of the millennium.
Maybe it's simpler than that. For makers, maybe Radio Shack succeeded because there was no internet yet. Once the internet really took hold, there was absolutely no need for a Radio Shack (at least no what Radio Shack traditionally was).
If that's the case, then RS was doomed no matter what they did. Maybe they even saw that coming, and tried to survive (although fail they did) by shifting away from that disappearing business.
It's ironic that on a nearby block there was once a Radio Shack next door to Blockbuster. Both of them could not overcome the competition brought upon by the Internet.
Actually, even though many people think like this I don't think Radio Shack made the wrong move. Before the internet you needed a place like Radio Shack for all the electronics and super early computer guys. But nerds (like me) moved to software and the few remaining people still building physical stuff could generally get the parts they needed online.
Radio Shack actually tried to move back into resistors and Raspberry PIs, but nobody goes to a physical store to buy that stuff anymore.
Radio Shack wasn't large enough in most malls to offer a variety of home electronics like Best Buy, but cell phones were high margin and viewed as a commodity by consumers, which is why they moved into them. It isn't simple saving Radio Shack. They probably would have been better off splitting the brand into a small store (Radio Shack) and a larger box store where they could have competed more effectively.
I think their expansion was actually quite brilliant. The store ended up selling just the high-margin items (cords, accessories, etc) that stores like Best Buy and Circuit City would upsell to offset the cost of low-margin, big-ticket items.
The only thing I can think of that could have helped them prolong their agony is to join with the iFixits or iCrackeds of the world --back in the early 2000s maybe had they been the 'geeksquad' then again, maybe not. But they didn't even try...
In the 80s and 90s I could go into a Radio Shack and buy resistors, fuses, soldering equipment, breadboards, various controllers and sensors, hard drives, processors: everything I needed to assemble an electronics project, fix a computer, make something.
But in the mid-late 90s they started switching over to a more general consumer model. Bins of parts were replaced by shiny cell-phone display cases. Knowledgeable fat bearded nerds were replaced by skinny college students working a retail job until they got their degree. The last time I went into a RadioShack I just wanted a potentiometer and they literally didn't have any electronics parts.
The tragedy here is that this transition completed at about the same time the maker movement started to emerge a little after the turn of the millennium.