As someone who has been walking into Radio Shacks off and on for a good many years (but was never a TRS-80 owner), it often seems as if there's an awful lot of rose-colored hindsight going on with Radio Shack.

Yes, they carried a lot of DIY components and had individual managers and other employees who could be pretty helpful and knowledgeable. But, mostly, they were where you pretty much had to go for cables and such pre-BigBox and pre-Internet and they had a broad enough retail reach that they were really good for that. And they complemented that with a bunch of toys and (mostly) craptascular and overpriced stereo equipment.

In other words, IMO, they were always a pretty mixed bag and were never particular havens of hackerdom. I'm sure some will disagree but I'd suggest that this is a pretty selective window into how Radio Shack made its money.

BTW, I like the DIY/Maker vision. I'm just very skeptical that it would support the type of real estate that Radio Shack has or otherwise lends itself to a large scale business plan. (Would love to be proven wrong.)

Yeah, I always had a love/hate relationship with Radio Shack. As a kid I loved looking through the catalogs, and I also liked going there to buy semi-obscure parts. It was the only store I knew of in bike-ride distance where I could get any of that kind of geeky stuff I loved. But even as a kid it was annoying, with the sales people who either didn't know what they were talking about, or were more interested in signing you up for the battery club than actually helping you buy what you wanted. As I got older, the stores simultaneously got more annoying (especially when the cell phone stuff started) and less useful. Now I can't remember the last time I bought something at a Radio Shack. I go in occasionally, hoping to find some part or component I need, but these days I always walk out disappointed.

Radioshack was always a vendor of last resort. You'd go there because you couldn't get it somewhere else. They weren't even the best place for honbyists — if you were serious, they simply didn't have the inventory space (like Fry's for example did).

I do have fond memories of their catalogs in the 70s and early 80s.

Not to totally disagree with you, but there's something to be said for walking into a store and holding stuff in your hands before buying it. It's true that you can get any possible component you want from the internet, but on the other hand it's much more fun (funner? Is there even agreement about whether that's a word?) to walk in and fiddle around with components and imagine how you might use them in your own designs. Radioshack has all kinds of buzzers, motors, switches, etc, and some of them are even pretty ridiculous and over the top, which is awesome. You can make your own little Dr Evil Doomsday device for like $10, which is way more entertaining than a movie. I hope Radioshack manages to persist.

"there's something to be said for walking into a store and holding stuff in your hands before buying it."

Yes, I always, every time, end up feeling "This is a PITA having to drive across town and haul the screaming kids and coordinate schedules and park far away and burn more than an hour of my life for the privilege of paying three times as much as amazon prime for the same cable and argue with a teenage sales droid about why I don't want a $25 extended warantee in case it breaks (well, thats more a best buy thing, another place I never go to anymore). Oh and I pay $99/yr or whatever it is for prime which I'm "wasting" if I'm not using prime... I'm never going to this store again and next time I need a HDMI cable I'm pulling out my phone 24x7 frictionless and paying $3 at Amazon, not $10+ at RS after investing an hour". The next time I need a cable or gadget I think about going back to a retail store, cringe a little inside, and whip out the phone and order it online instead.

If you're into "real" electronics I live within 1 day shipping range of Thief River Falls MN (aka digikey) so I pay for cheap shipping and get it the next morning anyway, and there is a huge tigerdirect midwest shipping depot 1 UPS day away (actually less, I've paid for 3 day shipping and gotten stuff in 12 hours before, that was weird). Deal Extreme can air ship me non-UL listed fake FCC cert gray market stuff faster than I can get real stuff from California for less than the shipping from CA, which always freaks me out.

Retail just doesn't have a purpose anymore other than perishable fresh food. Its just obsolete. Like worrying about the disappearance of buggy whip manufacturers, or horse stable facilities in major city downtowns.

(whoops edited to add there is one use for retail electronics and its traveling. The only time in several years that I walked into a retail electronics store was when my bluetooth earbud got drenched in a sudden downpour and wouldn't come back to life while I was traveling far away from home, and I kinda sorta needed it for a business conference call, so I paid 2x amazon price at best buy for a replacement and was fairly happy to do so. So airports, train stations, bus stations, tourist traps.)

"Retail just doesn't have a purpose anymore other than perishable fresh food. Its just obsolete."

Not everyone has internet and not everyone has a credit card or debit card to buy online. There are ways around those like a public library for internet and a prepaid card.

It's not common to match all that but it will happen. Some people might even like holding something before buying it (pictures can't tell you everything).

"Not everyone has internet and not everyone has a credit card or debit card to buy online."

This seems to boil down to people who are removed from the modern economic system are unable to participate in the modern economic system.

Another way to look at it is we strongly segregate by income, so its quite possible retail will live for a little longer in poor urban areas, although it will be doomed in the 'burbs and is already kinda doomed in rural areas.

"Some people might even like holding something before buying it"

I admit you're partially correct, my short list of "fresh produce" probably needs clothing stores and plant nurseries/garden stores. And some crafts, when I go to the woodworking store I pick thru the aisles finding just the right piece of wood for the job. Fine art, hand made as opposed to mass produced posters or whatever, is probably something best purchased in person.

>Not to totally disagree with you, but there's something to be said for walking into a store and holding stuff in your hands before buying it.

In general, sure.

And, maybe, for a lot of complicated audio interconnections, a physical RS was helpful for tying your cables and connections together. I'm less convinced that's especially important today. Nor are the TV antenna displays.

I sorta agree with respect to all the various buzzer/motor/etc. stuff but those are all ultimately loss leaders--and always have been. The problem is that RS doesn't have any real cash cow business now to support all that stuff.

Isn't part of the general 'Retail business model' issue at present the number of people who walk in, hold it in their hands ... and then jump online with their smartphone and buy it for 10% less?

There will always be a 'need it immediately' market, as there will always be a 'I'm buying it here from a moral perspective', but I wouldn't want to build a business (let alone one the size of RadioShack) just on those target consumers.

The thing is that the Radio Shack model is viable, or at least it seems to be viable in the UK, as Maplin http://www.maplin.co.uk/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maplin_Electronics seems to be doing well for itself at present. And the UK market conditions don't look all that different to those in the US, or at least not all that much easier: Britain has online electronics wholesaler/retailers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnell_element14 , and Amazon, and specialist online IT retailers http://www.dabs.com/ , and fairly-big-box electrical/computer retailers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_World_(retailer) , and a big chain of mainstream catalogue shops https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argos_(retailer) and a famously aggresssive supermarket landscape. So I assume that Radio Shack is either less-well-managed, or maybe just overly burdened with debt.

Maplin have been around since the 1970s when they were the go-to mail order store for British electronic hobbyists. But they're also having issues. Competition on bread and butter basics like cables from eBay and Amazon is killing them on price. Likewise PC World, who are struggling for similar reasons.

Argos and the like sell toasters, watches, cheap jewellery and gardening tools, so they're not in the same market.

Farnell (and RadioSpares, Mouser, and Digikey) are primarily industry suppliers who sell components to the tiny hobbyist market as a sideline, but make most of their money elsewhere.

The real competitors now are companies like Adafruit (US) and Cool Components (UK) who caught the Maker wave and are riding it very successfully - possibly because they sell clever, useful things, and they treat customers like adult engineers, not gullible children.

Radio Shack was already a legacy company by the 1970s, staffed by the kind of marketing geniuses who come up with ploddingly dreadful brand names like 'Realistic' and 'Flavoradios.'

The UK equivalent would have been Amstrad back in the 70s and 80s - purveyors of cheaply made over-marketed consumer electronics to buyers who were clueless about better options.

Clearly, RadioShack doesn't have much of a niche any more. Buyers can get better products more cheaply elsewhere, and the hands-on electronics business has moved in a direction their management doesn't have the talent to emulate.

Adafruit etc. compete for Maplin's core(ish) electronics-hobbyist business, but they largely don't sell hi-fi cables or PC components, for example, and they're not on the high street. Argos does sell a significant proportion of the stuff you can buy in Maplin—blank media, HDMI cables, electronic goods, even computers—for all it also sells many other things which don't overlap with Maplin's stock. Of course none of these rivals is in the same market niche as Maplin (or Radio Shack): if Maplin and Radio Shack were being beaten down by companies in the same niche then it's unlikely that anyone would be questioning whether that niche is still viable at all.

The online maker-shops may even be aiding Maplin in some respects, as they've helped to create and make popular new product lines like Arduino shields and RasPis which Maplin has been able to bring to the high street.

So while Maplin does have issues to face, it appears to be profitable (it's even been expanding recently) while facing similar competitive pressures to today's Radio Shack. Thus if Radio Shack is bombing in roughly the same niche as Maplin, it's presumably down to inferior management (or maybe debt load) rather than the niche itself being unviable.

Argos is interesting though in how they have combined use of their original retail stores with the internet.

Everyone in retail is doing that - usually successfully, more or less. John Lewis, Debenhams, Sainsburys, Tesco, and ASDA all have pretty much the same click-and-collect or buy-and-deliver model.

A few - Maplin and maybe Argos - have a super-fast same-day delivery option, which is an interesting development. I'm guessing we'll see more of that in the future.

The big question now is - what is mall/high street retail for? It used to be the only way to buy, but when online is cheaper the rationale for spending metric crap tons of money on store rentals in prime locations is getting less and less obvious.

It's not just electronics. All retail is suffering.

There may be a niche for speedy delivery, installation and set-up of consumer electronics and white goods, because no one does an all-in-one like that, and usually you have to wait too long, especially for big items.

But I wouldn't want to try it without crunching a full business plan.

I agree. Weirdly, I find myself coming up with more ideas of what to build when I see the limited options Radioshack has than when I'm ordering parts off the internet. Limits breed creativity, I guess.

I was taught that funner is not a word, but after reading a debate about it I came to the conclusion that fun has transformed into an adjective in the modern English language, and it is therefore acceptable. It's just difficult to hear it because of years of rejecting it, but I can get used to it (I don't think there's anything inherently wrong sounding about it). Just don't use "more" or "most" with "-er" or "-est" (they already imply it), that still really irks me.

My daughter was very underwhelmed with Build-A-Bear, it was a one time overpriced trip that we won't be repeating.

I did buy a TRASH-80 and loved it, go Zilog! Now those poor lovely old Z80 chips are stuck controlling traffic lights, which makes an old assembly programmer very unhappy indeed. I was (somewhat OT) very disheartened when I read iWoz to read how he invented the personal computer yet the TRS-80 was miles more advanced of the Apple II (and the Apple-I really didn't count as a lacked some pretty basic features such as a keyboard, monitor, and case etc) Tandy's saled dwarfed the Apple II too for several years. Yet reading iWoz he tried to give the impression that there was nothing else out there at the time.

Anyway, Tandy, Radio-Shack, their time has come and gone. Nobody cares anymore. CVS sell the same cables and hardware has consolidated, the days of lots of different cables has passed. Bluetooth and wifi technologies are eating into cables time. And Radioshack tried to charge me $14 for simple 1/8" m2m. So I bought it, while in the store, on Amazon using my phone for $2

RS need to liberate the real-estate and make way for something people actually need. As soon as they stopped selling radios I lost interest in their stores. The 19 year olds that work there these days most likely have never heard of SSB. Ask to test a transistor and they won't even know what npn or pnp means.

Good riddance RadioShack

Personally, I increasingly find very little I need (or even want) in shopping malls in general. Though plenty of chains still have a business there.

That said, I do think Radio Shack/Tandy has come and gone. In a way, they've actually done a pretty remarkable job of at least staying somewhat relevant through all these years. But the clock seems to be running out.

Speaking as a data point of one, I certainly have headed there less and less over the past decade or so.

How would she even know what the price of Build-a-bear is?

Presumably she didn't indicate the experience was interesting or novel enough, and hnriot (who footed the bill) decided the cost wasn't worth the benefit.

The maker vision is where it's at! Did you ever get one of their make-a-radio kits? I wrapped my own shortwave coils!

Look at this parts list: who's going to fill this void?

http://antiqueradio.org/econoceanic.htm

I had some electronic kits in that vein--not sure if they were Radio Shack or not. Just observing that I'm not sure how big a part of their business that sort of thing ever was.

I think your link observes though that someone could put such kits together and sell them over the Internet pretty effectively :-)

I've always felt that Radio Shack at this juncture would be more profitable if they created locations that would serve as ad-hoc hacker spaces. Kinda like SF's Tech Shop but for the consumer. I imagine it as a mini Akahabara in your own town, with 3D printers, CNC machines, micro-controllers and SoCs all available to use/purchase, has lessons and other community events and staffed by capable people. Unfortunately I see it only as a maker's utopian pipe dream.

This, again and again. There's probably a lot of disjoint hobbies that they could cater to, too. Radio-controlled, for instance, constantly needs lots of little parts (repairs after flight crashes) as well as space and gear to make the repairs. HAM radio guys go gear-crazy, and often have to tune their sine waves and what-not. C.f. the various posts on HN about drones and UAVs, etc.

++ We have a Hobby Town USA near by, I went in looking for arduinos and stepper motors for robotics projects. Big fat NOPE. I don't imagine the market for these is very large at the moment, there's a lot of STEM knowledge required to buy the components and build from scratch. Pre fabbed kits suffer the problem of high price tags making them a difficult or impossible purchase for most families of young children who would benefit. So we have Lego Mindstorms for the foreseeable future.

> Remember those popular Radio Shack 50-in-1 science project kits?

You know...that's a great idea. I'd go to RS to sit through a Saturday Arduino kit class or something.

I don't think it's a viable business model. The margins on a 50-in-1 kit are huge, because it's really just a handful of cheap components, a box, and a manual, which is a sunk cost after you've paid the author and printed it.

Classes are a whole other thing. You need to market them hard, you need repeat business, and if you're not running them every day you're spending a lot on retail space for a limited return.

Also, Internet tutorials. And limited interest in most of the world.

Unless you can supplement classes with a stream of high margin sales, they're not going to keep you afloat for long.

Well, the idea is that students would buy the materials needed for the classes at the RS they're in. A bit like Wine stores and Home Depot do. But those are huge facilities and spending a little money on a classroom isn't a big deal percentagewise.

So your general points stand.

Isn't that exactly the quandry RadioShack is in, though? They need to pivot, fast and hard. Rip out those stupid mobile islands and the hard-sell mobile device employees and host maker-spaces.

RS kind of was the original maker space. They could take that market back.

I remember their p-box kits [1]. I definitely remember buying and building the one-tube AM radio kit. If they brought these back, I'd probably buy and build a few of them.

[1] a list of them, with photos of the manuals and circuit diagrams, and photos of completed kits: http://my.core.com/~sparktron/pbox.html

This sounds pretty great, the biggest hurdle would probably be the fact that most current Radio Shack stores are very small relative to the space that would most likely be needed for these kinds of varying DIY projects. Though I haven't been in a Build-a-Bear in a while, maybe ever, so maybe they could use that size model since those stores aren't enormous either.

Retail space has to be partly fungible? They sell off some percentage of their stores so they can build out a few larger spaces in malls or strip malls. Make the new spaces big, Apple-grey-and-white, well-lit areas with 3D-printers and soldering guns.....

There are leases and investors have already nixed a plan for RS to do a massive dump of retail locations.

The DIY/Maker ideas are certainly interesting to me; I'd probably frequent such a store. Though I doubt the business model as a retail operation at scale. But converting Radio Shack to this? Existing store design/location would often not be suitable. Many employees wouldn't be suitable. The company is in financial trouble. If it's a viable business plan, why bring in the legacy that is Radio Shack?

Yeah, I doubt it's feasible at this point -- dollar-valued stock and all -- but would have been a possible move back a bit.

I think nothing will turn them around. Look at all the local bookstores and video stores that are gone. There are lots on online DIY electronics websites. Want cheap cables got to monoprice.com. Times have just changed for Radio Shack. A lot of what you mention above are niche activities that will not substain them much longer.

> A kid ... with all of the tools (soldering irons, etc.)

I'm not sure how well that will work in today's overprotective environment where some parents won't even let their kids touch a pair of scissors. Whoever starts a DIY shop nowadays had better have billions of dollars' worth of insurance as well as a highly competent PR team.

I went to elementary school when they still allowed fourth graders to participate in AM radio assembly contests. Kids were expected to bring their own soldering irons and (gasp) lead. The vapors probably gave a bit of brain damage to all of the brightest kids in the class... but hey, at least nobody made a fuss about kids burning themselves (or one another) with those irons.

I think you may be onto to something, a good model to look at is Sparkfun (sparkfun.com). What you describe is very similar to what they are doing and they have been very successful, and they have a great model for combining brick and mortar with online.

But SparkFun doesn't own and operate any purely retail stores, do they? They package many of their products for retail in e.g. RadioShacks, but that's very different from actually being a chain of retail stores.

Apropos Tindie, as well. https://www.tindie.com/

I think this would be a cool store, but I'm not sure the market is big enough (certainly not with the number of locations they have).