I didn’t watch the superbowl, nor am I watching the olympics – vicarious athletics is not my thing; I find them neither entertaining nor educations and hence unworthy of my time and attention span. So I missed the Radio Shack commercials on their reorganization. But I have read about it on-line. And frankly I am bemused.
The dying of Radio Shack is not new. Radio Shack is essentially a child of the great hobby time of the ’50’s and ’60’s. Despite a few Lafayette and Allied stores, who mostly sold kits, Radio Shack was the electronic hobby store, an offshoot of Tandy’s leather working hobby store. It was the place an amateur or small scale professional electronics person, mostly not educated electronics engineers or technicians, went to get parts and the occasional assembly. Except for soldering irons and hand tools they were not a tool store but when you were building an amplifier or a controller of some sort they were the place to go when you suddenly realized that your design was wrong and you needed a major change in componentry.
At this point it should be pretty evident that what made Radio Shack successful was its effective uniqueness. So long as society in Amerika was hobbyist, at least in the hinterland, and there was no competition, Radio Shack was a success. In a sense they were an ideal Amerikan store since most of what they stocked had their name on it and that was the only place you could get it. And the only distance buying was through a store, for something available but not locally stocked.
Sadly the electronics hobbyist thing stuttered. The first strong sign, the first nail in Radio Shack’s coffin, was the transistor radio. That was the first thing wanted by lots of folks that was cheaper to buy built than as a kit or project. By the time that the digital computer became a manufactured thing, and Radio Shack did away with their named line of computers, the lid was hammered down strong. Radio Shack no longer had uniqueness, except for aging electronics hobbyists.
Now, Radio Shack is one among many of electronics retailers who are absent loyalty. Since they no longer warrant the goods they sell – the manufacturer does that – the only loyalty is to the lowest local price. And with the internet and UPS, local is national. At least.
So Radio Shack isn’t going to get well. At least not unless it becomes unique again, and does so where it has no effective competition, and there is no sign that their management knows this or can make it happen.
RIP, Radio Shack.
Simple Country Physicist 