Goodbye Radio Shack

[Pennyrick]

Revolving door CEO's

One of the things that hurt RS was the CEO turnover. After 4 CEO's in a space of 6 years, they hired a guy in the late 90's who decided to take on the big box stores. He wanted to outdo Circuit City and Best Buy as well as some regional players so he launched Famous Brands Electronics, then Computer City and then Incredible Universe.

They were all anti Radio Shack stores. I can recall the Incredible Universe store here in suburban Atlanta that opened in 1997. It had an in-store restaurant, a Karaoke studio, a huge game room, rows upon rows of televisions, aisles and aisles of home appliances and very, very loud music everywhere.

It didn't work out very well because the store managers, recruited from Radio Shack had no clue how to run a store like this.

After a few years, they all closed down and some of these locations are still vacant today.

After this expansion, Radio Shack sales jumped to nearly seven billion in 1998. That was also the same year they lost money for the first time.

There is some kind of lesson here.

 

[ARtraveler]

In 1963, the year after I got married, a guy named Tandy bought out Radio Shack (a firm out of Boston founded by two brothers who were Ham radio enthusiasts) and moved their headquarters to Fort Worth where he ran a chain of leather craft stores.

He expanded Radio Shack (named after the place on boats where the wireless equipment was housed) modeling it after his leather business. He stocked thousands of items in the stores that appealed to radio hobbyists… batteries, cords, switches, dials, capacitors, etc. and by 1971 there were 1,000 stores.

I bought my first radio kit at Radio Shack. My first 23 channel CB unit came from there. A set of Radio Shack Realistic shelf speakers were a nice add to my stereo system and in 1979 I bought a TRS-80. A 12 inch monitor with just one shade of gray, 16K of memory and a cassette player where you could save data while waiting for someone to invent a hard drive. What a wonderful thing it was. (The operating system was from Microsoft).

Then along came cell phones and Radio Shack jumped in with both feet. The company changed from one where employees could assist people in hooking up their VCR to their TV to one where all they did was push cell phones and cell plans.
Ask an employee for a Y cable to turn an RF into a mini and you would get a blank stare.

But the monster cell phone company, soon began to kill off their merchandise lines… the GPS, the camcorder, the voice recorder, answering machines, etc. were all swallowed up in one device called an IPhone. The IPhone had negated any need for fourteen of the fifteen lead items in the Radio Shack 1996 catalog.

Ahhh, the catalog. It was a pain in the rear to record your name and address with each sale but it got you on the list to be mailed that great catalog… it was fun to read.

Goodbye Radio Shack… R.I.P.

I was an employee of Tandy Leather Company for over 29 years. Radio Shack was in its infancy when I came aboard as an employee. That really was Charles Tandy's baby and it worked very well for several years.

RS like Tandy Leather took some wrong turns and lost market and customer loyalty. Tandy Leather went out of business but is now back and owned by its former main competitor.

Our local Eagle River RS store went out of business about 2 years ago.

 

[PrairieSpyder]

I was an employee of Tandy Leather Company for over 29 years. Radio Shack was in its infancy when I came aboard as an employee. That really was Charles Tandy's baby and it worked very well for several years.

RS like Tandy Leather took some wrong turns and lost market and customer loyalty. Tandy Leather went out of business but is now back and owned by its former main competitor.

Our local Eagle River RS store went out of business about 2 years ago.

You beat me to it, Dwayne. I was going to add that Tandy was a leather kit supplier before they became Radio Shack!

[Now I feel really old.]

 

[Bob Denman]

:shocked: You're not old: Just Beautiful, with some experience! :thumbup:

 

[Joe T.]

radio Shack Stores to be closed by March 31, 2015:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/255034573/RadioShack-store-closures

Joe T.

 

[SpyderDen]

Having owned and operated a RadioShack franchise for over 20 years, I could tell some stories. Sold mine in 2002 before things started going downhill. Contrary to earlier comments, it was the cellular business that paid my bills. Trying to sell big name items (Apple etc) for less than 5% profit doesn't pay employees. Just my $.02 worth.

 

[2ndChildhood]

I just found out the Radio Shack by me is staying open. And it will be owned by Sprint they think. They're in the process of moving all their inventory back into the store.


ToM
SpyderFest '15

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

[Joe T.]

Having owned and operated a RadioShack franchise for over 20 years, I could tell some stories. Sold mine in 2002 before things started going downhill. Contrary to earlier comments, it was the cellular business that paid my bills. Trying to sell big name items (Apple etc) for less than 5% profit doesn't pay employees. Just my $.02 worth.

Interesting point of view. Thanks for the post.

Den, if you would have been in charge of Radio Shack from 1982 until today, what would you have done differently?

Regards,
Joe T.

 

[Pennyrick]

Having owned and operated a RadioShack franchise for over 20 years, I could tell some stories. Sold mine in 2002 before things started going downhill. Contrary to earlier comments, it was the cellular business that paid my bills. Trying to sell big name items (Apple etc) for less than 5% profit doesn't pay employees. Just my $.02 worth.

This is a quote from an article this week in Bloomberg Business Week on Radio Shack. It's not that the cell phone business wasn't profitable... it was... but apparently to the detriment of the company overall.

Roberts negotiated deals with carriers that gave RadioShack not only a cut of the initial device sale but also payments from customers’ monthly wireless bills. A longtime executive who left the company in the mid-2000s compared the wireless business to a narcotic, with the company bingeing on phone sales while ignoring the other parts of its business. The addiction had consequences. Signing someone up for a mobile contract took about 45 minutes, and many stores were staffed for long stretches by a single employee. Customers in search of help regularly left in frustration, and foot traffic began dropping, says Claire Babrowski, who in 2005 and 2006 served in various executive roles at the company.
The decision to focus so heavily on mobile planted the seeds of what’s happened in recent years, according to Babrowski. “My guess is that, if you could go back to that era, maybe a different decision would have ended up a little differently for RadioShack,” she says.

 

[SpyderDen]

Interesting point of view. Thanks for the post.

Den, if you would have been in charge of Radio Shack from 1982 until today, what would you have done differently?

Regards,
Joe T.

That's a tough one Joe. Being on the franchise side vs corp stores, we had different options. We could purchase the same inventory factory direct and cut out RS cut on the inventory. We had the RadioShack sign to give us credibility so kind of had the best of both worlds. When we sold our store there were about 7500 stores total. About 1/3 were franchise. At our peak we outsold 4 corporate stores combined in Madison WI on computers and cell phones and in a town of 10K. I can't think of anyway we could do that now. Our built from scratch store has now expanded to 3 locations and is doing very well. We did everything from installing TV antennas, towers, car stereos, computer networks in schools, two way radio systems in fire departments, ambulance services, agriculture equipment, satellite systems (even the old 10' dishes). Times are changing and if I had the answers, Radio Shack would pay me big bucks to fix it. OK, I'm done.