Good but long read.
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It was a great store that served an important niche in the market. Frustrating to have to order stuff from Amazon or Ebay now and pay the freight and wait......
Bought my first stereo system in the 70's from RS with my NY Daily News paper route money.....
Bought my first "CB" radio from the shack in '71. Old style 23 channel 4W. Before they were even standard in OTR trucks. Still works great today.
bob
Bought a lot of 'stuff' from them, convenient etc, if they were out of something, they got it overnight.. Now everything is: "Frustrating to have to order stuff from Amazon or Ebay now and pay the freight and wait......" or some other online retailer.....
Radio Shack was awesome back in the 70s... They had all kinds of cool kits to build.. bought tons of CB stuff there back in the day.. every fitting imaginable they had it all... Then they became a cell phone store with some cheap plastic toys.. They would have done much better if they stuck more with where they started stereos, ham radio and more higher end model kits along with all the electronic fittings and such.. but alas now they have gone the way of Bambergers , Gimbles , Caldor, Korvetts and soon to be <sigh> Sears :'(
Scott
We still have 2 Radio Shack stores here in town. They have the same type and variety of items on the shelves they had before the closing/buyout. I guess we are lucky, as the majority of their stores were closed from what I have read.
Its an American retail store mentality, you start with bright energetic, KNOWLEDGEABLE staff, you grow your enterprise, you hire some BEAN counters, fire the folks that know something and replace them with CLERKS, get rid of the little items, replace them with larger more expensive higher margin items and then watch as your competition eats your lunch! So lets see Radio Shack: Great staff, grew the stores, did away with small parts, added cell phones and appliances, hired clerks, and never had anything in stock. Got it! 
Russ
Well.... they outlasted Lafayette Radio Electronics.
I don't think there are enough hobbyists to support a store like Radio Shack, especially when they chose high rent locations like malls for their stores. Until recently, there were two stores in strip malls within 10 minutes from my home, plus two more in the nearby enclosed malls. We are down to one in a strip mall now.
My 1979 Mustang stereo was all Radio Shack/Realistic, my first home stereo as the same. CB, first LCD TV about a inch wide. I could go one and on. But the Radio Shack I knew as teenager hasn't been around for decades and I stop going because they weren't the same.
I became increasingly frustrated with RS. I distinctly recall what I swore would be my last visit to a RS store. It was in a strip Mall in FL in 2012 . Was looking for an HDMI cable. I was already doubtful about going in to RS as I was well aware that it had morphed into a very ugly place full of overpriced stuff. It used to be the "go to" place for reasonably priced cables. (Remember their gray "spaghetti cables?")
They had the cable I needed allright. But the price was absurd! No, I don't recall just what it was but it was utterly preposterous! There were no reasonably priced cables in the store at all. That was my last visit to a RS. I was done with them!
I see I'm not alone.
I just looked at the 1971 catalog (the year I graduated from college) on the website referenced in the article and can't believe the number of things in there I could still use as well as the many items I still have that work, like the air band scanner, and a big ole' pair of stereo speakers I made that are in the basement. Luckily for me, there is an actual retail electronics hobby store here in northern NJ that's still in business where I can get parts and such right away but I loved the catalog and remember when they ended it, I guess about 10 years ago, I felt it was the beginning of the end when that happened. I also remember there was a long period of time, as recently as 5-8 years ago, when no one in the store knew anything about anything and they were only interested in selling cell phone contracts, Obviously, the world changed on them and they just didn't react properly but that's 20/20 hindsight.
Rrman, this is old news. That Bloomberg piece was written two years ago in February 2015, when this happened.
We still have an RS store nearby the OGR World Headquarters in Poland, OH. I used to be a regular customer for the little things that the big box stores didn't carry. However, I haven't been in that store now for several years.
There's still one by my parents, but it's next to useless to bother going anymore as they don't have anything, or know anything.
Wow!! That is an interesting article. I buy stuff from RS several times a year. I ordered several new tips for my RS soldering iron from their website yesterday. I hope that I get them or I have just kissed $20 goodbye. Perhaps I can get my money back from the credit card company if they don't come.
There are two RS stores nearby. I will miss them.
NH Joe
Still have my 1974 top of the line Realistic receiver! Rock on !
ChiloquinRuss posted:Its an American retail store mentality, you start with bright energetic, KNOWLEDGEABLE staff, you grow your enterprise, you hire some BEAN counters, fire the folks that know something and replace them with CLERKS, get rid of the little items, replace them with larger more expensive higher margin items and then watch as your competition eats your lunch! So lets see Radio Shack: Great staff, grew the stores, did away with small parts, added cell phones and appliances, hired clerks, and never had anything in stock. Got it!
Sorry, I don't necessarily agree with your assessment.
I worked at RS in the mid 90s. We were very highly trained. We had to study and take tests in a variety of areas so that we were educated enough to help our niche customers who were very informed buyers. I can tell you that while you may have liked buying small parts they sold very poorly. I don't remember how many inventories I did by hand, but I can tell you that some of the small parts drawers would literally go for a whole year without being opened by a customer. We would joke that if it weren't for inventories nobody would ever see them.
What did sell well at that time? Audio/Visual, Computers, CB/Scanners, and Car phones (bag phones, later hand held). The highest margin product in the store was our RS brand batteries. The only thing they had us push harder than batteries was service plans.
Like many brick and mortar retail business (including hobby shops) the internet changed the game. Some companies were able to adjust and still differentiate themselves and some were not. Think about it, RS was where many hobbyists went to get not just tools and supplies, but also ask questions and learn. Once internet forums (like this one) became readily available the transfer of knowledge and information took a quantum leap. The RS differentiator was our expert people and product availability. Once you could sit at your computer and get access to all of the expertise in the world, any product you wanted, and lower prices it was the beginning of the end for RS IMHO. I'm honestly surprised they have been able to hang on for as long as they have.
... old news. That Bloomberg piece was written two years ago in February 2015, when this happened.
Still have 23 stores in our metro area......
Have to admit it's been a few years since I was in one and that was to buy some replacement specialty batteries....that they did not have.
Radio shack is like model railroad hobby shops. Ain't no more . The ones remaining have nothing.employees know nothing and look at you in bewilderment if you ask a question. I went into an RS store some time ago looking for some tuner cleaner. Three sales people came over to help me. Finally one said to me that the store does not Carry any food products. When I told him what tuner cleaner was he said he thought I was talking about Tuna fish. I do not know if the store is there anymore. There is no reason for me to go back there.
This is like Western Auto, a long favorite store wherel once bought batteries and tires. I hope the local hardware store hangs on. It is amazing what the big boxes don't stock, or want to sell you a bag of 100 when you need 2.
ChiloquinRuss posted:Its an American retail store mentality, you start with bright energetic, KNOWLEDGEABLE staff, you grow your enterprise, you hire some BEAN counters, fire the folks that know something and replace them with CLERKS, get rid of the little items, replace them with larger more expensive higher margin items and then watch as your competition eats your lunch! So lets see Radio Shack: Great staff, grew the stores, did away with small parts, added cell phones and appliances, hired clerks, and never had anything in stock. Got it!
That matches my experience.
They ran out of stuff that was the only thing I went there for.
Instead they just kept trying to sell me a cell phone contract. That might have had a higher profit margin for them. There were better places to get cell phones from. So they lose. I probably wasn't their best customer anyways.
I always like getting greeted by some young, just out of high school person, who knows more than I do about what I really need. After all, they were trained.
"YOU NEED THIS PHONE!"
I, too .. spent a lot of time in RS. When I was a teen and a young man we had one in my home town, and next to it was a "record store" .... another cool place back in the day.
OGR Webmaster posted:Rrman, this is old news. That Bloomberg piece was written two years ago in February 2015, when this happened.
We still have an RS store nearby the OGR World Headquarters in Poland, OH. I used to be a regular customer for the little things that the big box stores didn't carry. However, I haven't been in that store now for several years.
Yep, knew it was 2+ years old, but still fun to read though towards the end all the clerks were "deer in headlight" starers!!
I believe, but don't quote me, that you can run a RS store under name license, but you buy all the inventory and up to you to sell it. No returns or buy backs. Its all on you what you THINK the customer base is and wants......
But I could be wrong on this point. I know of one RS store in Iowa were it is half RS and other side is an Ace(?) hardware. Owner is electronics knowledgeable which helps.
banjoflyer posted:My town still has one. Recently after a clerk swooped in on me to see if I needed any help I asked if they still had a selection of rectifiers for AC-DC conversion. The "Deer in the Headlights" look in her eyes was startling. I can't really blame her as I'm not really schooled in everything electronic myself.
Mark
Just for fun I was Christmas help at a RS store. Being an engineer I was conversant and helpful for someone looking for that left handed widget gizmo. After a week or so I was pulled aside and told you're here to push the high price stuff not the nickle dime parts or cables, and stop with the sketching diagrams (even if no one else was in store). Push those cell phones and computers and especially lie through your teeth about how valuable service contracts were (after all look at the fat commissions you will make (like I needed more money than I was earning)).
Needless to say, Dec 26th I was asked to not come back.
Good riddance!! But boy the markup were astronomical. Just move the decimal point one or two place to the right.....
Engineer-Joe posted:ChiloquinRuss posted:Its an American retail store mentality, you start with bright energetic, KNOWLEDGEABLE staff, you grow your enterprise, you hire some BEAN counters, fire the folks that know something and replace them with CLERKS, get rid of the little items, replace them with larger more expensive higher margin items and then watch as your competition eats your lunch! So lets see Radio Shack: Great staff, grew the stores, did away with small parts, added cell phones and appliances, hired clerks, and never had anything in stock. Got it!
That matches my experience.
They ran out of stuff that was the only thing I went there for.
Instead they just kept trying to sell me a cell phone contract. That might have had a higher profit margin for them. There were better places to get cell phones from. So they lose. I probably wasn't their best customer anyways.
I always like getting greeted by some young, just out of high school person, who knows more than I do about what I really need. After all, they were trained.
"YOU NEED THIS PHONE!"
Those kids were paid a minimal salary plus commission. If they wanted to make any money they had to sell the high margin products/services. Selling $5 of parts to someone that knew exactly what they wanted wasn't going to cut it. This obviously irritated you as one of those types of customers which just enforces my earlier statement that if you didn't need/want "trained" advice and you weren't interested in being sold a phone or sales plan then you were a customer the RS was going to lose once the internet made other options viable. I can tell you for certain that you were not the type of customer that RS wanted.
Erie_Lackawanna posted:Radio Shack was awesome back in the 70s... They had all kinds of cool kits to build.. bought tons of CB stuff there back in the day.. every fitting imaginable they had it all... Then they became a cell phone store with some cheap plastic toys.. They would have done much better if they stuck more with where they started stereos, ham radio and more higher end model kits along with all the electronic fittings and such.. but alas now they have gone the way of Bambergers , Gimbles , Caldor, Korvetts and soon to be <sigh> Sears :'(
Scott
They did have some cool science and electronics kits but they also sold a lot of cheap electronic games and toys, under the Tandy name, that were clones of the popular name-brand games from 1 and 2 years prior.
At the end the help was far less than knowledgable.
All these posts referring to the percent markup are humorous. Yes mark ups on anything in the parts aisles was HUGE, but not so for more mainstream items like computers, radios, phones, etc. Nobody had 350% markup profit on stereos.
Yes, the percent markup on the parts/tools and the like was a huge percentage, but there is/was not enough volume of sales on those items to pay the bills.
Like Jonathan, I worked there in the early to mid 90's, in my case during breaks from college. I learned during that time that I was not true "sales person" material, as I had difficulty convincing people they needed something they did not. However, my manager appreciated my technical knowledge and ability to help customers with most needs if they needed support help, so he was willing to overlook my not normally making any of the key measurements of $ per receipt, $ per line item on the receipt, etc. He and I had a generally happy co-existence. While I did not generally make a lot of money based on commission, there were exceptions occasionally when something in my specialty area was on sale (radio scanners, etc). (I also took every single certification test, so that looked good for him to have an employee that fit that corporate "desirement" for employees)
I'm obviously not a professional retailer, but from my memory, in those days $$ out the door was much more important than the percent profit on what you sold. Even if I sold $300 worth of parts over a day or 2 that was 75% profit(maybe more), it did not look as good as selling a couple stereos, or other big ticket items even if the raw $ worth of profit was lower on those big ticket items than it was for all the parts sales.
There definitely was at least an item or 2 that was a head scratcher that would even be hard to justify to a customer for someone with true sales skills. I remember when they tried to introduce a tower PC with nothing in it except a 486-66DX2 motherboard (which was probably the top processor speed of the time) as a "build what you want" (add everything up separate - memory, HDD, etc) experience. That mostly empty shell was around $1500, IIRC (maybe came with keyboard/mouse for that price, but nothing else until you added items on)! I certainly never was able to sell a customer on that route, but it was an attempt at getting away from just the pre-configured PCs that might have fallen short in one area or another for different applications.
While I am not generally a fan of service contracts (aside from a contract I have on a dehumidifier for the train room right now), back in the days I was there, the RS line of covering things that might even be the consumers fault (dropping, etc) was pretty decent. It may have said such things were officially not covered, but many times they were. I recall a hand held scanner coming in once that literally looked like it had taken a bullet in the area of the speaker and whatever electronics were behind it. I recall my manager at that time being flabbergasted that they actually fixed that under the service contract, but they did.
-Dave
New Haven Joe posted:Wow!! That is an interesting article. I buy stuff from RS several times a year. I ordered several new tips for my RS soldering iron from their website yesterday. I hope that I get them or I have just kissed $20 goodbye. Perhaps I can get my money back from the credit card company if they don't come.
There are two RS stores nearby. I will miss them.
NH Joe
As stated in other posts, the risk there was several years ago (when they were in actual bankruptcy). If you ordered recently, you will not likely have any problem.
And if you still have 2 stores nearby, they probably aren't imminently in danger of closing (unless through normal business course of events it's deemed not beneficial to continue for that specific store). The mass closings were also about 2 years ago.
-Dave
My first train came from Western Auto in 1957.
I am having fun reading all of these posts. RS is a company that didn't pay attention to their OWN customer base! So far none of you have mentioned their golden opportunity piece, the TRS 80. They were really on the cutting edge and in those late 70's years had knowledgeable staff and Tandy management were really smart folks. When the technologists were replaced by the bean counters they lost their key 'smart' personnel.
You al have related that once upon a time they had smart folks and you went there for answers. When the answers stopped so did you! Hmmmmm. Russ
A very good friend of mine has owned a Radio Shack franchise for probably 30 or 35 years. He's gone through about every electronic craze since CB radios were popular.
Initially a lot of the RS locations were franchises with individual owners. Eventually the company began not renewing the franchise agreements, forcing the owners out of business. Shortly thereafter, a company owned store would open nearby.
He had a friend who owned a franchise that wanted to relocate their store to a nearby town and needed permission from corporate. The owner met every criteria set by corporate but they still refused his request. Shortly thereafter a company store opened in the same town.
Lionel Grandpa posted:A very good friend of mine has owned a Radio Shack franchise for probably 30 or 35 years. He's gone through about every electronic craze since CB radios were popular.
Initially a lot of the RS locations were franchises with individual owners. Eventually the company began not renewing the franchise agreements, forcing the owners out of business. Shortly thereafter, a company owned store would open nearby.
He had a friend who owned a franchise that wanted to relocate their store to a nearby town and needed permission from corporate. The owner met every criteria set by corporate but they still refused his request. Shortly thereafter a company store opened in the same town.
Millennial bean counters at work.. Today, companies complain about "no employee loyalty"... What happened to company loyalty to their employees?? GONE.. Glad I'm retired!!
Woodson posted:Millennial bean counters at work.. Today, companies complain about "no employee loyalty"... What happened to company loyalty to their employees?? GONE.. Glad I'm retired!!
AMEN brother!!! Same here. After 9-11, my avionics company couldn't shed employees young and old fast enough. From what I hear from those who are left is a work,work, work or else culture has pervaded its atmosphere. Many oldsters counting the days until they"pull the pin".
RS, since about 1965, was basically an electronic "convenience store." They didn't have much, and what they had wasn't the best, but they were close by and had a lot of commonly requested items. Like any convenience store, they got in trouble when they stopped being convenient!
We have two stores here in Frederick, but the sell mostly the same, stuff that you can buy in any other store (many times for a cheaper price). Had a store in Rockville (where I work) about 30 miles away that had lots of parts. Use to stop there to get stuff for the layout. The good store (Rockville) is gone, but the two local (Frederick) stores are still open.
My greatest fear is that when my 1975 RS receiver needs parts, where will I find them! 
We bought a really nice pair of bluetooth speakers for the living room recently so I sold one of our stereos. Sold the Sony Receiver and the 6-disc Sony CD player, and kept my 1975 RS receiver and 1977 direct-drive Technics turntable for the train room! 
Jim
rrman posted:Woodson posted:Millennial bean counters at work.. Today, companies complain about "no employee loyalty"... What happened to company loyalty to their employees?? GONE.. Glad I'm retired!!
AMEN brother!!! Same here. After 9-11, my avionics company couldn't shed employees young and old fast enough. From what I hear from those who are left is a work,work, work or else culture has pervaded its atmosphere. Many oldsters counting the days until they"pull the pin".
I was lucky enough to "pull the pin" early (58).. Loved my job but could no longer deal with the administrative BS..
Its called "change". RS is a "dated" store
Theres no longer a big market for items to cobble together your own electronics when you can walk into a "big box" store and grab an "already built" reliable electronic whatever. Sony and Panasonic surpassed Realistic during the demand for big home stereos in the 70's and 80's. They then marketed to the demands for smaller electronic music devices like the Walkman.
The cellphone is all anyone needs for they're electronics anymore. Phone, TV, Stereo, Camera, Videocamera, and computer all in one. RS's attempt at selling cellphones was too little to late.
Not entirely the same but ,when is the last time you rented a movie from Blockbuster? Folks here doing OGRs online subscription, will you be suprised when the printing company closes?
Had RS found a way to continue being profitable, it would have been nothing like the store everyone remembers anyway. The old RS of the 70's is just not relevant in todays society.
JD-train, I am in the same boat as you.
My Realistic STA-2150's tape monitor button is starting to get flaky. I stopped using a cassette player years ago, but still run a Dual 1258 turntable and Sony speakers through the thing. Even though I don't have a tape player anymore, that button is important because I run the whole works through my desktop computer and that is the button that does the job (used to do a lot of music editing and vinyl restoration converting the music to different formats). I guess that when it poops out I'll just be out of luck. Looking at various modern brands on the internet, I haven't seen any that has the right connections in a combination to replace the current receiver.
I pulled the pin at 67 then found out our company never paid into the pension fund. 28,000 people left with little or no pension. Worked for them for 51 years. They are now out of business. Nobody was ever held accountable.
To keep it on point I shopped at RS allot thru the years but the changes to RS have changed my shopping habits.
