RadioShack Near Deal To Sell Half of Its Stores, Close the Rest 242
mrspoonsi sends a Bloomberg report about a possible endgame for RadioShack. The company will reportedly sell half its store leases to Sprint, and the remaining stores will simply close. Negotiations are still underway, and the deal could fall through — but as it stands, the stores still open will likely change to Sprint's branding.
Sprint and RadioShack also have discussed co-branding the stores, two of the people said. It’s also possible that another bidder could emerge that would buy RadioShack and keep it operating, the people said. The Chinese backers who took the Brookstone chain out of bankruptcy, Sanpower Group, also have been in discussions about bidding for RadioShack assets, one person familiar with the talks said. ... The discussions represent the endgame for a chain that traces its roots to 1921, when it began as a mail-order retailer for amateur ham-radio operators and maritime communications officers. It expanded into a wider range of electronics over the decades, and by the 1980s was seen as a destination for personal computers, gadgets and components that were hard to find elsewhere.
shame (Score:5, Insightful)
I was so upset when Tandy closed up shop in England, they had the best gear in - not to mention the Battery Club which kept me in PP3s for a decade.
Re:shame (Score:5, Informative)
I'll miss Radio Shack. Maybe not the "shack" itself but the time when it was relevant and one of the few places I could find esoteric parts I needed for some project or another.
Re:shame (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:shame (Score:5, Informative)
At this point the only nod to their heritage is that some locations might have a dusty selection of parts(often still 'Tandy' branded and yellowing with age) hidden behind the iphone cases and overpriced consumer electronics.
... and marked up 500%. Last time I went there hoping to get a cable they wanted nearly $20 for it. Not a complex cable, just a bog standard 6 foot stereo audio cable. I ended up soldering one together from scraps but see now that Walmart has the same cable for $4. Next time I'll just go there first.
Re:shame (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately they sold their souls to the cell phone market, a market that didn't really need them.
When the Tech America stores were rebranded Radioshack.com and then closed, I bought $2000 worth of stuff for 90% off. I guess I'm preversely looking forward to doing that with the local Radioshack retail locations. Get all of the buttons, switches, LEDs, capacitors, and the like that I can conceive of a use for. Maybe even get a handmic for my ancient Realistic 10m ham radio if they've got any dusty boxes in the back.
Re:shame (Score:5, Insightful)
Very true. As a kid in the '80s, I really enjoyed Radio Shack. It was more than just a store. It was a culture. They had the battery club, the cheesy comic book, store catalog, toys, science kits, DIY audio parts for your car or home, anything radio, various loose parts for electronics projects. We were fighting the Soviets and science education was a priority. There was no internet to turn to. If you were patient, you could mail order the part you needed or rummage through a local surplus store. But Radio Shack had it on the shelf for $0.99 - even if that happened to be 500% markup. It was worth it.
Re: (Score:3)
They didn't sell their souls. Parts just stopped being in lots of 5000. I still have a few local stores like Radioshack used to be. I find I use them less and less and favour online stores with bigger selection, cheaper prices, and overnight free delivery.
Those stores who still have "their souls" don't have something far more important: "profits"
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:shame (Score:5, Informative)
If you buy cables at Walmart you're paying too much. They usually have a good selection at the dollar store.
Re: (Score:2)
Bullshit FUD (Score:2)
Springfield, MO... Dallas, TX... Tampa, San Francisco all have caps, resistors, lamp sockets and piezos.
Maybe your market is a dumping ground for dusty Tandy DIPs, I don't know. I'd like to be there for it, if so.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
or Taobao with google translate.
Re: (Score:2)
Bullshit. RS batteries have been uniformly good. I've used them for years. They've managed to keep some quality control over the process or perhaps they buy from somewhat reputable manufacturers.
It's about the only thing I go into the store for.
Re: (Score:2)
I think he means the "free" red batteries that you'd get with the battery club card. Those were perfect for smoke detectors, though, since at the time alkaline batteries would mess with the detector's low battery signal (at least that's what I was told by a Radio Shack manager).
well, i'm looking for the clearance sales (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
None of that stuff was ever on clearance when the place was closing. They stuck sale tags on everything and kept prices the same. Every store does this.
Re:well, i'm looking for the clearance sales (Score:4, Interesting)
None of that stuff was ever on clearance when the place was closing. They stuck sale tags on everything and kept prices the same. Every store does this.
Not exactly true. I purchased some stuff in the last two weeks that was actually marked down at Circuit City, Same at CompUSA. But you have to know the going street price of something, be willing to wait for them to mark it down and be standing there when they do.
Personally, there isn't anything at Radio Shack that would make me want to hang out there to wait for the sale...
Re: (Score:2)
The Radio Shack in the mall near me has been having a 25% off just about everything sale for the past few weeks.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And after that? :P
Re:and the Sprint places will dump all of the non (Score:5, Insightful)
Farewell, TRS-80 (Score:5, Informative)
It's a shame, Radio Shack was so early in the PC game with the tape drives, 16KB of RAM, no hard drive, peek and pokes...they catered to the true tech junkies and with just a bit more business acumen, they could have ruled the computer world.
But then Commodore 64 came out with color and games, then came the the 8086 etc., but for a while the real eggheads knew how to play with the machine that looked like it came straight from the Star Trek bridge.
Re: (Score:3)
I always thought Heathkit was more futuristic than Radio Shack. In the late 80's the one by me had multiple Hero robots roaming around the store greeting people, all those weird H-80 machines hooked up to stacks of packet radio gear (connect to other computers wirelessly!) Home automation equipment. And, in the early 90's when they started carrying Apple gear, they had a fully decked-out Mac II with every peripherial you could buy for the thing - external hard drives, tape drive, CD-ROM, stereo speakers, co
Re:Farewell, TRS-80 (Score:4, Insightful)
You hit the nail on the head about being early to the game.
The problem was, then they just sat there. They became a toy store, then a cell phone store. Nowadays, you can't even get special-purpose adapters, just the common ones. You know, like 90-degree USB connectors, or S-Video to HDMI.
If Radio Shack had stuck to its mission, they would be the place to go for 3-D printers, Arduino, HDMI computers, and A/C network adapters.
The fact is, they forgot about us tinkerers, and tried to become mainstream. It may cost them their very existence.
Re:Farewell, TRS-80 (Score:5, Insightful)
Michael Jordan having 'retired,' with $40 million in
endorsements, makes $178,100 a day, working or not.
If he sleeps 7 hours a night, he makes $52,000 every
night while visions of sugarplums dance in his head.
If he goes to see a movie, it'll cost him $7.00, but
he'll make $18,550 while he's there.
If he decides to have a 5-minute egg, he'll make
$618 while boiling it.
He makes $7,415/hour more than minimum wage.
If he wanted to save up for a new Acura NSX
($90,000) it would take him a whole 12 hours.
If someone were to hand him his salary and
endorsement money, they would have to do it
at the rate of $2.00 every second.
He'll probably pay around $200 for a nice round
of golf, but will be reimbursed $33,390 for
that round.
He'll make about $19.60 while watching the 100- meter dash in the
Olympics, and about
$15,600 during the Boston Marathon .
This year, he'll make more than twice as much
as all U.S. Past presidents for all of their
terms combined.
Amazing isn't it?
However...
If Jordan saves 100% of his income for the next
500 years, he'll still have less than Bill Gates has
at this very moment.
Game over. Nerd wins.
Re:Farewell, TRS-80 (Score:5, Funny)
You forgot to add in the babe factor
Sad... (Score:3)
Re: Sad... (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. Craftsman used to be a great brand: I have power tools from my grandfather that still run AND for which I can still get parts (from Sears!). I have bought a few mysef over the last 5-10 years the the quality is rubbish. It's possible for them to turn around, though, should they care to do so.
Kenmore as a brand is actually just a private-label of other "real" brands like Whirlpool. So generally speaking, you can get decent appliances for not a lot of money.
Both of these brands are usually a great dea
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
On the other hand, Harbor Freight now offers a lifetime warranty on their mechanics' hand
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Sad... (Score:4, Interesting)
Craftsman used to be a great brand: I have power tools from my grandfather that still run AND for which I can still get parts (from Sears!). I have bought a few mysef over the last 5-10 years the the quality is rubbish.
Indeed. Craftsman used to be American made, too. Now >90% of all the Craftsman merchandise at Sears is made in China or Taiwan. The quality went away with it. The warranty is still there but that doesn't help when there are fewer stores open shorter hours than there were back in the 80s.
If you're wondering how this happened, just look at the Sears/KMart CEO. He's a devout Randian who is turning Sears into Lord of the Flies as he tries to abolish "collectivism" from his stores. To keep his employees in constant fear he is also known to phone in to company meetings and scream at people from thoussands of miles away on a video screen.
It's possible for them to turn around, though, should they care to do so.
The only way they could possibly do that would be by shit-canning their idiot CEO. Unfortunately when he took control he also made it nearly impossible to fire him. He'll ride that ship down and then find some clever trick to cash out.
Re: Sad... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
He also pitted the different sections of the company against each other. Rather than cooperatively working as a whole unit to make profits, he seems to think that making the online regular store compete with the brick-and-mortar store, and making the online outlet store compete with the brick-and-mortar outlet stores is a good idea.
That is exactly what I meant by the Lord of the Flies reference. He basically has scared the employees into stabbing each other in the back. At some point he might actually come to realize that Atlas Shrugged is fiction and not a how-to, but by then many thousands more will be out of work because of his religious fanaticism.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Sad... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sears could have used their warehouses, their parts centers, their service centers, and even square footage that had been retail floorspace or the auto center or such to warehouse items for distribution to reach that huge number of people it had ready access to. Instead it launched a poorly-executed, nearly impossible to use online catalog and let it stagnate for years before adding a broken marketplace and a halfhearted facelift to make it somewhat work.
And then came K-mart...
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Losing the factory and designers is a loss to American consumers. Losing a brand name is meaningless.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Sears might make it to see 2016, but it would surprise me tremendously if they made it to see 2017. A couple months ago a couple of us in the office were talking about the stock market and we were betting if RadioShack would see 2015 or not...I was thinking they'd made 2015 but probably not Q2 2015.
Sears I'd place probably as a Q2 2016 failure.
Re:Sad... (Score:5, Insightful)
but they just don't have anything to offer anymore
First Radio Shack sold radios, which enabled technically-savvy people to communicate.
Then Radio Shack sold simple computers, which enabled technically-savvy people to run applications to improve their lives.
Now, everybody carries an advanced radio/computer in their pocket, they're sold at RadioShack, and the nerds declare a tragedy.
Re: (Score:2)
Now, everybody carries an advanced radio/computer in their pocket, they're sold at RadioShack, and the nerds declare a tragedy.
I think they're declaring a tragedy because you can't build an advanced radio/computer for their pocket out of parts purchased at RadioShack.
There should be Raspberry Pi / Arduino parts all through these stores, They don't take up a lot of floor space and there is interest in these DIY Electronic projects. Instead it might as well be called CellPhoneShack: Full of tons of phones fr
Re:Sad... (Score:4, Informative)
They do sell Arduinos and gear. The problem is the markup is way too high, so the only reason you go there is because you need it RIGHT NOW and don't want to wait/pay for expedited shipping.
Re: (Score:2)
Every Radio Shack I've been to in sdrawcab Nebraska and Iowa has had Arduino stuff in stock in the the last few years. You should go check it out.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps "don't have anything to offer anymore" is the wrong phrasing. Rather, they don't have anything distinctive, yet are generally more expensive or come with more restrictive policies than Walmart, Best Buy or Amazon, while not offering better sales service.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Sad... (Score:4, Interesting)
And I won't be the least bit surprised when it happens. Last year I ordered a drill press from Sears online, to be picked up and paid for at the local store. No confirmation of the order via email, and when it was supposed to have arrived, the store said they hadn't received it but would call to make sure it was delivered the next week when they received their regular shipment from the warehouse. Called the next week, still not there. I went out and bought a press from another place, and never heard back again from Sears.
When someone orders several hundred dollars' worth of product and you can't even be bothered to follow up on that order (or even deliver it), you don't have a sunny financial future ahead of you. Sears used to be a great store, but management at all levels seems to be a pack of idiots hell-bent on driving it into the ground.
Going out of business? (Score:3)
Maybe putting out another Super Bowl commercial [youtube.com] this year would have helped.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When I first saw the commercial last year the beginning made me think they were going back to their roots, back when they were relevant. I was thinking they'd have things like everything you need for a diydrone, 3D printing, various electrical components and such.
Instead they tried to be a cell phone store....I think.
Re: (Score:2)
DIY electronics/Maker support needs to stock lots of different small items that no
Hard to decide... (Score:4, Insightful)
... if I'm sad or happy about this.
Back when I was a kid, Radio Shack was a place where you could buy electrical components. Sure, they sold RC cars and stuff at the front, but at the back you could buy breadboards, wires, resistors, capacitors, microchips, etc. it was great.
In the past 15 years, most of that good stuff is gone: Radio Shack is nothing more than a non-denominational mobile phone store.
So, since they aren't much different than, say, Best Buy, or any number of other similar retailers, it's no wonder they are going under.
If they still sold components, I'd mourn their loss. Since they don't, I'm not sure I'll be shedding any tears.
Re:Hard to decide... (Score:4, Informative)
If they still sold components, I'd mourn their loss. Since they don't, I'm not sure I'll be shedding any tears.
They do, they just make them really hard to find and the selection is pretty much worthless if you need much beyond a 1/4 watt carbon resistor or a basic connector. I think they carry 2n222's and a compatible PNP transistor but they are crap with 1 in 10 with enough current gain to actually work. They have a few outdated op-amps and on or two 74000 chips last time I looked. All the interesting stuff disappeared long ago and what's left usually doesn't meet specs. (I've had to throw away over half the resisters for being out of spec last time I got them there). Buy at DigKey or something, you will save money in the long run.
I'm NOT feeling bad they are closing up shop persay. I feel bad for the people who will lose jobs and for the creditors, but I won't miss the stores..
Re:Hard to decide... (Score:5, Funny)
I've had to throw away over half the resisters for being out of spec last time I got them there
You should have just painted new color codes on them.
Re: (Score:3)
What a lot of people on /. don't seem to realize is that the brick-and-mortar electronics supply business was mostly kept alive by repairmen (yes, there used to be people who actually made a living off of repairing TV sets and stereos) and A/V technicians. When the repairmen went, the electronics components business went with it, left hanging by the thin thread of hobbyists and EE undergrads. And then online retailers like ebay soaked up the remnants of even that market. There is still a tiny market for A/V
Re: (Score:2)
That seems to be the dilemma at a lot of places these days, even the front-runners like Best Buy, Target, etc. Newsflash to CEOs: if I go to your store's website to do research on your products then you need to make it easy and obvious what you have locally _today_. Ship to store is just a waste of everybody's time - I'm going elsewhere online at that point. If I'm in the store physically, you need to have the selection of products people want.
good (Score:2)
Radio shack is in a hurt, a pruning is good, you dont need one in every mall and every freaking po-dunk town
After talking with the manager of my local shack, who is staying open the one's all in our area are in mall's where no one goes and the rent is obscene, then there is the self competition, Radio Shack A doesn't stock X but Radio Shack B does stock X but not Y, its a fucking pain in the ass, now 3 stores are consolidating into 1, which is good cause I am sure as hell not chasing radio shack to give the
Good Bye RS It's been nice knowing you (Score:3)
Time to board up that Shack and go home. Where once you excelled as a mail order company, you have fallen victim to E-Bay, mail order and big box stores, not to mention your own hubris. How long did you think you could charge outrageous prices for that substandard product to the hobbyist? I can get cheaper cables from Amazon and electronic parts from Dig-Key (and others) in just a few days, and I won't have to throw out 60% of the parts for being out of spec.
It's been a fine run, right up to the part where your customers left you and you started to try pump the bilge water selling Cell phones and overpriced accessories of all things... Say WoHo for the bean counters and MBAs who did you and Circuit City the same...
Re: (Score:2)
RS... I thought your were talking about RS Components for a second.
Re: (Score:3)
Gotta wonder how RS Components are still in business too.
In my part of the world they'll sell you a bag of 5 resistors for 25 cents - and overnight courier it across the country for free...
Maybe If They Sold Some of This Good Stuff... (Score:2)
I would love to see an Actobotics parts playground in every Radio Shack! [servocity.com]
Allied (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
The electronics hobbyist market still exists. People just order stuff online now. It's cheaper and there is a wider variety.
Who wants to pay $2 for a 10 pack of resistors that cost $0.001 each?
Re: (Score:3)
My local stores as far as I know quit selling electronic components, like resistors, at the last time I went there.. All the isles were replaced with cell phone cases, remote controlled toys and other stuff. This was several years ago, I never went back looking for parts like that.. Now I am building stuff with a Raspberry PI, Audrenio, etc and I would have gone a few times if I thought there was a chance they had what I needed...
Fry's Electronics (Score:3, Informative)
You're both wrong. The market exists and is doing well. Just look at Fry's electronics. A good quarter of the store is devoted to things like packs of resistors. They do have things like appliances, cameras, and TV's as well.
Radio shack could never decide if they wanted to go 100% geek or 100% consumer electronics. So they just kinda did both and neither well.
Re: (Score:2)
Which Fry's is that? The one's I've seen have one aisle of the most common cruft components, and the rest of the store is "other". When it comes to electronic components, I *am* the target customer, and I would never think of shopping at Fry's first, or at Radio Shack first, either. But... it is common for me to have an order Digi-Key every month, and every couple of months an order to Mouser and SparkFun, and a couple times a year to Adafruit. And several times a year I upload gerbers to a PCB fab hous
Please mod parent up (Score:2)
I'd agree the market quickly expanded, but Radio Shack did a poor job of maintaining it's supremacy in it. Frys and Microcenter kick butt for brick-n-mortar tech hobbiest stores. Digi-key is great for 2-3 day delivery. Even a small town like Anchorage, Alaska, supports a big-box store full of electronic components called Frigid North. http://store.frigidnorth.com/ [frigidnorth.com] I don't feel sad. They all represent what Radio Shack was well-positioned to be, but blew money on NFL Superbowl ads instead of revamping t
Didn't happen that way, not even *close*. (Score:5, Informative)
Um... most folks can't remember that, because it never happened. Tandy [wikipedia.org] bought Radio Shack in 1972, and then Radio Shack bought Allied Radio [wikipedia.org] in 1970 and merged them. (Prior to that, Allied Radio had been a subsidiary of Columbia and a competitor to Radio Shack.) They were only briefly known as Allied Radio Shack, before Allied was spun off by court order and it subsequently died. On top of that, Allied pretty much followed the same path as Radio Shack - it started as a parts and components dealer, but by the 1960's it had long since become a consumer electronics dealer with a strong sideline in parts and components.
The reality is, Radio Shack hadn't been wholly dependent on the electronics hobbyist market since the 1930's - when it entered the hi-fi market. In 1954, the Realistic brand was introduced as it began to move into the more general consumer electronics market. By the early/mid 1970's, though the product mix varied by store (especially if your local store was independently owned), the transition company wide was largely complete - viewed as a whole they had become a consumer electronics store with a modest sideline in hobbyist parts and components. The advent of the personal computer was a decade away.
There are many causes to Radio Shack's decline and fall, but moving away from the electronics hobbyist market played no significant part.
Memories (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Memories (Score:4, Funny)
ah yes, way back when apparently you could cram a sentient AI into 400MB and have enough room left for the entire contents of a city library....
Re: (Score:2)
Wikipedia is several TB (that's just the text) (31GB 7z compressed/5TB expanded as at 2011) and still not sentient. It might be an amazing thing, but we're not quite at the point of removing all the zeroes yet, huh?
Re: (Score:2)
enwiki is ~40GB expanded as of 20150112. Do you mean with images or all languages?
Re: (Score:2)
that's current pages only at 42GB (as at Feb 2013). More than double for current pages with linked user and talk pages, the full history dumps for ENWiki runs (Feb 2013) to TEN Terabytes.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki... [wikimedia.org]
So no, that does NOT include images or any other language.
Re: (Score:2)
Ah, I see; thanks!
(That's not really that relevant to keep for vast majority of applications, though - and an AI knowledge base does not need to contain these for sure.)
Re: (Score:2)
yw. By the way, after a bit of hunting around, I found a wikix howto that describes the state of the Commons database (where the images are linked): as at March 2008, it stood just over 420GB. To borrow "Libraries of Congress" analogy, that's about 1,050 Johnny Fives. :)
Re:Memories (Score:4, Interesting)
weird, the Radio Shacks near me still have the hanging stock in back with the resistors, caps, LEDs, transformers, ICs, voltage regulators......sucks to be where you live, I guess.
Re:Memories (Score:4, Interesting)
My local Radio Shack still has these things too (thankfully!). I needed a couple of non-polarized capacitors recently to change the frequency cut-off for dome tweeters in my Jeep - and sure enough, they had 'em, and on a Saturday afternoon too.
I think the problem is, they got rid of most of the other gadgets and electronics we came to know and love R/S for -- and the substitute inventory isn't worthy.
For example, I remember when you could count on R/S for a whole line of voltmeters. Everything from a pocket-sized analog cheapie to fairly nice LCD digital models. Now, I'm not sure if they carry more than 1 or 2 and they're likely not to even be in stock in a given store. And how about soldering irons and accessories? Again, they might have a tube of solder for sale, but not sure they have replacement tips or several models of pencil type irons and guns of various wattage?
And what happened to the car audio stuff?! I know people never did really respect Radio Shack branded car speakers or amps. But you know? I'd sure like to be able to drop by and pick up an amplifier install kit with all the appropriate cabling and connectors, or various noise filters. And as long as they're carrying everyone else's gear these days anyway, it'd be a great opportunity to "one up" the big box retailers who have increasingly limited car audio offerings in stock. Carry the items you normally can only get via mail order right now, like the Asian GPS stereos designed to look and fit in place of specific factory originals.
Here too (Score:2)
In the end, it's too bad (Score:3)
I was a teen in the glory days of Allied and Lafayette catalogs when Radio Shack was nicknamed Rat Shack but everybody else died and Radio Shack remained as the place to get many components.
article is misleading? (Score:4, Insightful)
ars technica makes the point that neither radio shack nor sprint are willing to comment on this story, let alone confirm it.
http://arstechnica.com/busines... [arstechnica.com]
Discount-o-rama! (Score:2)
The store by me turned into a "clearance" center, which means they are closing I guess. Got an Arduino Yun + LCD touch shield for close to 50% off. Gonna go back for more...
There are still a few good electronics stores left (Score:2)
For anyone in the greater Seattle area looking for a good brick-and-mortar electronic components store, check out Vetco Electronics in Bellevue. Lots of great stuff...
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't that the one that moved from lower downtown? That pissed me off. I hate Bellvue.
Ironic that they are selling to Sprint (Score:3)
Its ironic that they are selling to Sprint given that its the cellphone crap (and their stupid requirement that everyone who enters the store has to be given the cellphone hard-sell BS) that has caused so much of their problems.
Thanks Tandy (Score:2)
I miss the old days! (Score:2)
POS (Score:2)
"by the 1980s was seen as a destination for personal computers, gadgets and components that were hard to find elsewhere."
It is still the place to find computers, gadgets and components... from the 1980s...!!
Re: (Score:2)
I wish!!! Those gadgets and components from the 1980's were rock solid. There are a few items still there, like the mini-amp, but not like the old days. If they had continued stocking those 80's products, they'd probably still be alive today.
I've been preparing myself for this day... (Score:2)
...since I knew it was coming for years, but it still will be hard. The first computer I ever programmed was a TRS-80. I used to book programming time at the local library on their Model III. I worked there in the summers in college after the store manager overheard me giving advice to a fellow customer and offered me a job on the spot. When the manager wasn't looking, I'd read the ham radio and electronic books by Forrest Mims and write down important scanner frequencies from their police scanner books.. T
I think this article says it all.... (Score:2)
"Then in the back, nestled in a corner are the Arduinos, Maker Kits and littleBits DIY items of fun. They’re next to the wires, transistors and soldering guns.
The items that could have made RadioShack the darling of the Maker movement are shoved in the back and ignored. A layer of dust settles on the boxes."
http://thenextweb.com/opinion/... [thenextweb.com]
I will miss them.. (Score:2)
... but I admit its all nostalgia
I cant think of how many times I thought "I will just go to Radio Shack and get that cable/adapter/thingy I need"
Now I just use Amazon prime like everyone else or a dozen others. Their prices always sucked because they knew they were the only choice you had.
It used to be the coolest store at the mall. Realistic audio gear, CB radios and all things cool and very geeky.
I'll miss you Radio Shack. It was a good run. You just couldn't stay relavent long enough. R. I. P.
Computer Components (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If they bring their cash back to US, they'll have to pay tax on it.
Re:R.I.P ....sadly this really isn't supprising... (Score:4, Informative)
Went to one just a few weeks ago looking for volt meter....it was just pethetic looking in the store. Like almost no stock of anything DYI related. Sad....
Don't go to Radio Shack for a volt meter. You can get better volt meters from Harbor Freight... Usually for free with coupon. (I know I have a drawer full of unopened meters from them.) Unless you want one that's accurate, then hit up E-Bay for a fluke...
Actually, don't go to RS for even a cell phone, unless you already know exactly what you want and they can make you the best deal on it (unlikely).....
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Immigrate to China.
Re: (Score:2)
There are loads of independent parts stores around me, but I live in job-shop-land (small companies that do short production runs of industrial control panels / tools / etc...) There's a store, still in business, where I grew up that still has a tube-tester. They're more like the REALLY old-school Radio Shack. There's one on the other side of the city that carries nearly every component you could want.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Sigh, and I posted without realizing I wasn't logged in. Dementia is coming on fast.
Used to be the TRS-80 go-to guy in highschool, owned a Tandy 1000HX (It was a giant leap from my TI-99/4A, but the TI still works), that developed random floppy read/write errors, I solved it by gluing pennies to the read head of the drive, eventually it would go south, and I would glue another penny on, then one day, I sheared the head off when I put a disk in, because the spring had suddenly decided to stop holding those p