In hindsight, the smart move would have been for Radio Shack to buy spectrum and become a carrier itself, but that would have been a radical - almost unthinkable - move at a time when the phone companies were buying the cellular licenses. There was a time when the company looked like it was destined to become a force in the mobile phone business, but competing with the wireless carriers proved impossible. (Let’s not forget that Bill Gates himself wrote the BASIC operating system for the TRS80.)īy the 1980s, the company had pioneered the radio hobbyist era, CBs, stereos, and early computers, but - in retrospect - it’s clear that the company made some fatal errors in strategy from which it could not recover. (In 2000, the Tandy Corporation name was dropped and the entity became the RadioShack Corporation.) The 1960s and 70s were probably the zenith (no pun intended) of the brand, with huge sales of audio amplifiers, CB radios, and the seminal TRS80 computer. The Tandy Corporation was a family-owned leather goods company that was founded in 1919 and, over time, acquired a number of craft retail stores, including RadioShack in 1963. You may remember the Tandy brand name being associated with RadioShack. This was the golden age for the radio tube business, and a number of companies founded in that year still exist today, like Avnet, for example.
The first RadioShack opened in Boston in 1921. However, it is illuminating to look back on RadioShack’s history and ponder my second question. It seems as though the financial press has pretty much written off the company. All it did was push the old reliable merchandise into the back of the store. In recent years, however, the stores have filled with toys, TVs, and mobile phones, but that strategy seems to have failed. At that time, it was the perfect and logical place to go for obscure batteries, bulbs, antennas, coax and phone connectors, and odds and ends like alligator clips. My take on the first question is “Probably not.” The last time I was in a RadioShack store was to buy a backup battery for our alarm system, and that was a couple of years ago. My first question is “Will the stores be missed?” My second question is “How could they not see this coming?”
The woeful financial state of RadioShack has been a long time coming, but it raised a couple of existential questions for me. You know the one of the forlorn looking guy wearing a sandwich board with the words “The end is nigh” on it, accompanied by a witty quip or an additional graphical element that made it funny? An old ubiquitous cartoon image popped into my head. Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.I’m feeling a little nostalgic today as I read about what looks like the imminent demise of RadioShack, at least as we currently know it. If you don’t have the ability to search the page, just scroll through each separate closing wave in numerical order and look for the store number.
(You can do that by pressing Control + F if you’re on a Windows PC, Command + F if you’re on a Mac, and if you’re on a mobile device you’re on your own. Take the last four numbers from this URL and search on it on the store closing list. If that sounds confusing, the page’s address will look like this: The store number will be the last four digits of that page’s address. Click on the location name on the map, which will be in red. Here’s the fastest way to check on your local store: start with the RadioShack store finder and search on your location. The list is organized by store number, making it difficult to navigate. ( Here’s a backup in case RadioShack takes the document down.) We don’t know whether this is a final list: it appears to be an exhibit from the company’s bankruptcy filing. Dated Wednesday, February 4, it’s a list of about 1,800 stores sorted into three waves of closings.
This mysterious PDF document has appeared on The Shack’s corporate site. on a Friday? How many of the Radio Shacks near me are going out of business?
Yet you may be wondering: what if I need a soldering kit or a cordless phone battery at 4 P.M. No one who has been paying attention to retail news is surprised that RadioShack filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection yesterday, and that the chain plans to close about half of its stores.