Analyst: RadioShack to emulate Apple Stores
Forbes reports that RadioShack, in an inspired attempt to evolve from their current retail model (e.g. shoe mall purveyors of third world turdtronics), will "replicate the look and feel" of Apple's retail stores.
The news sent RadioShack shares soaring by nine cents when just the whiff of this rumor breezily squirted out of a Deutsche Bank analyst's word sphincter earlier today. One can well imagine investors' riotous optimism. RadioShack's arsenal of top-of-the-line HAM radios, bolt detectors and answering machines combined with Apple's chic design aesthetic? It's full of stars.
Thumbs up, RadioShack! My only reservation: will I still be asked for my address and phone number by your bed head armada of hipster gadgetistas before they deign to sell me a pack of batteries? You don't want to dilute the proud brand of RadioShack too much. Some traditions should be sacrosanct.
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Arrrg what are they doing to the RadioShack of lore! I miss going to the back of the store and rifling through all the little electronic parts until I found what I needed. There's no asthetic way to put bins of capacitors and spools of wire in an Apple store.
Agree w/ #1 and also want to note, top of the line HAM radios cost upwards of $10,000 and can't be found at Radio Shack(!) (Did they EVER sell an HF transceiver?)
They sold a lot of ham stuff back in the Allied Radio days, but more recently they were all VHF
(and a 10-meter transceiver, which they probably sold primarily for bootleg use). But now they've dumped everything in favor of cellphones. Can't even get a decent SWL receiver there any more.
Yes indeed! Lets finally drive out all those dirty Makers and engineers and welcome in the gullible wankers w/ too much money on their hands!
You can't polish a turd.
I would shop at Radioshack more often if they'd just go whole-hog and put ALL of their merchandise in cubby holes with little masking tape labels. Make it look my garage and maybe I'll actually be able to find something in there.
Also, yeah, I actually had a bit of a nerd confrontation once regarding the "may I have your zip code" bullshit. I shot my mouth off a little and was lucky I didn't walk out of their with a 1/4" jack for a tail. But that was Baltimore so I should have expected a rougher breed of geek.
#6: You can if it's frozen.
At least there won't be lines for their phones...
I fucking hate radio shack. It's not even just for the zip code/phone number/address stuff, it's that you can't just get what you want and leave without being offered some crap you don't want. To wit: a couple years back I went in to buy 50ft of ethernet cable. At the register the guy asks if I would also like to buy a thumb drive. I say no thank you. Then he asks me if I know what a thumb drive is. First, does it even matter? I said "no." Second, I can't help but suspect that he asked me just because I'm female, which kind of made me want to punch him in the testicles. Instead I went home and stapled cable to my baseboards.
Well, why not? Apple stole Radio Shack's pricing model (i.e. sell cheap electronic crap for way more than it's worth)
My only concern is... are they going to 'go mac' with their pricing? I could care less about the packaging and aesthetics of their buildings.
Ask about your phone number? That's child's play now at Radio Shack.
Now, some commission sales rep greets you at the door, and if you ignore that person and just go to what you want, that person will follow you, saying "Hello! Hello! Hello!", until you finally have to shoo them away. And then they still hover.
They don't understand the geek customer any more. At all.
Radio and Shack.
Two words that positively glisten with futuristic promises of digital nirvana.
Buying ones technology at a store named...
Radio (rapidly fading technology) Shack (dilapidated Building) is bound to get a less and less popular. I also hardly ever go down to the Telegraph Shed anymore.
Rename the place the Wave Pod or the Quark Palace and I may think about it.
Last time I simply said no to the address and phone # grilling when I simply wanted to buy batteries, the clerk recounted the time when somebody told him Bill Clinton, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, and he copied it down into their little database. Corporate called back and asked about the president comming in.
Back when they actually sold stuff I needed/wanted, I shopped at Radio Shack all the time. Now I don't know last time I even saw one of their stores.
Somehow I don't think polishing them up to look like Apple stores would change that much; Apple sells a few things I actually want, Radio Shack doesn't.
Instead of changing the facade, how about they, ya know, start selling components again like the good 'ol days? Radio Shack is completely ignoring the boom in DIY and Makers. They are obsessed with iPod accessories, cell phones, and high priced gadgets. They want to be the Sharper Image or Best Buy so bad and its pathetic.
Thing 2: They should drop commission sales. I was in there just last week to find something I needed for my iPod (which they didn't have), and some employee was going bat shit loco about one of the other employees helping "her" customer. This only serves to turn the customers off and make the company look rather petty.
Radio Shack has made a systematic effort to turn their associates into cell phone selling drones by lowering their pay (new pay plan they called it) and removing the commission from the stuff most likely to sell.
When you don't make money they simply tell you "You have to do better in these areas" which are not very likely to sell unless you are a total shark.
If there are hovering monkeys in the store it's because they need to do that to earn a buck under Radio Shack's current employee strangulation plan.
Personally, I don't do that, but then again I'm older and don't rely on the job for my livelihood like so many others do.
I treat folks right and don't bother 'em, but I'm atypical.
This effort should piss some good money down the crapper and make it a perfectly dreadful place to work.
But where to go...
I NEED radio Shack! I have so few options for electronic parts around here it's pathetic. I used to drive down the block & overpay at Rat Shak. Now most of the time I put in an order to one of a multitude of parts shops in Shenzhen and wait 5 days for a package in my mail box. They always smell like paradichlorobenzene (moth balls) for some reason.
Rat Shak is still good for wire, solder, connectors, batteries, fuses & small parts, but that's not much of a business model.
FWIW, around here they stopped asking for personal info several years ago and there was a poster in the store apologizing and explaining the change of policy.
This will look great next to the I.M. Pei-designed "Tandy Leather" Pyramid.
Yeah, I too am grateful for Radio Shack's presence and would be quite sad if they closed down completely. Sometimes I just need a particular component RIGHT NOW and there's literally nobody else who carries them in a 50-mile radius. It's either that or wait a week for DigiKey or Electronics Goldmine to ship it to me. RS is the last retail bastion for hardware geeks in much of the Eastern US; when they go, makers will lose an extremely valuable resource for last-minute panicky fixes to your melted project.
They really, REALLY need to rebrand though.
Will I still be able to use my battery card?
Somehow, I don't think that shelves full of remote control helicopters really fits with the minimalist Apple store aesthetic.
Years ago, after noticing Radio Shack's strange talent for surviving far longer than it should have, I arrived at a theory that the Radio Shack stores would be the last thing standing after the Apocalypse and Mankind's extinction. (The rats -- or maybe the cockroaches -- would assume the sales positions after they evolved opposable thumbs.)
I may have to revise that theory.
"The news sent RadioShack shares soaring by nine cents when just the whiff of this rumor breezily squirted out of a Deutsche Bank analyst's word sphincter earlier today."
I like the grandiloquent nature of this article.
You can't improve the decor of a typical Radio Shack store without making stock changes. A typical urban Radio Shack is a small mall shop loaded with low-cost radios, cell phones, computers, GPS receivers, RC cars, and parts. The retail stock IS the decor, whatever surface isn't covered by clam shells is covered by sales posters. I'd guess RS is going to eliminate more of the catalog and go upscale. So they're going to sell $400 radios instead of $100 radios. They're going to make the stage for product sales look a lot less...cheesy. The thing is, I used to go to RS just for PARTS. I never buy high end stuff there. And...it probably makes sense, the net is filled with parts companies who really don't need a brick and mortar store front to sell stuff. There's one really good parts store in the entire Seattle area, at least, for when you have no clue what you really need.
I've found the easiest way to get the Rat Shack employees from following me around is, when they ask what I'm looking for, I say "tantalum capacitors". That usually works. I think if they focused more on Makers and tinkerers they might be surprised at the increased sales. Frankly, I don't give a crap about how they look, and can't imagine that you can do a whole lot in a typical strip mall location other than take merch out to open it up, which isn't (IMHO) the right direction to be going.
The only times I've ever made a purchase at a radio shack, I treated it like I was going to a hardware store for electronic stuff.
For those who have ever been to a tiny little ACE Hardware store where you think the solid walls made of trays full of parts may actually be holding the roof up, you can imagine my expectations of (or interest in) how the store looked.
Ah, but where else can you find quality Tandy and Micronta products? The saying around here used to be "...where everything sucks, except the solder suckers."
All I have to say is it is fortunate we still have Mouser and DigiKey for parts. I quit buying Rippoff Shack parts about 10 years ago - go in, buy a part, and it ends up being floor sweepings that some poor schmuck put into blister packs. Or, worse yet, buy a 1/8 stereo plug, take it out of the package, and have the tip and center connectors come apart in your hand. THAT was fun. Good thing I did not have it plugged into anything at the time that happened.
Oh, and #28 - those never did suck very well. Spend another $5 and buy a Sold-A-Pult. They work a lot better.
I miss Allied Radio.
@ #17 Strider, that explains it. I went right over to the cell phone display. The odd thing is, there weren't any other sales people in the area, so she would have been the sales rep anyway. Is there a rule they have to say "Hello" and have you respond before they get the commission.
It ain't working, BTW. I walked out without even looking at what I came to look at. You can pass that on to the corporate types.
#30 I don't know what you're talking about when you say someone has to greet someone to get a commission.
Someone simply has to be greeted within 20 seconds of walking in the door.
Just like the phone has to be answered within three rings.
Just a dumb rule about "friendliness" basically.
Also, a distinction should be made between Radioshack corporate stores and Radioshack dealers. Do you know which one you shop at? Thankfully Dealers don't have to put up with 90% of the BS rules and policy of the corporate that make employee and customer alike uncomfortable. no commissions, less enforced store uniformity, adherence to dress codes etc. Also I would imagine only corporate stores will be undergoing the changes in the article as a rule. Support Dealer owned stores over corporate if you like the Mom and Pop feel, some haven't been remodeled in AGES(many of them can get better, or less expensive stuff from other vendors if you ask!)
The Apple stores are designed to make a small number of high priced items fill a very large retail space, so that there is lots of floor space to make lots of sales, which they do very well. Radio Shack stores are tiny , and crammed full of a huge number of mostly low margin items.
Are they (Radio Shack) nuts, or just planing on cashing in their options before this crashes and burns?
Everything they have done since they got rid of the leather craft section of their stores has been a mistake.
If they went out of business entirely, would that open up a niche in the ectosystem for an electronics supply shop?
You know, radio shack doesn't even exist around greater vancouver anymore. One day they all just up and renamed themselves to "the source" with a sub title that shows that they're now working for circuit city.
What's really odd is that other than that, absolutely nothing has changed. Same layouts, same products, same everything.
I think they're moving in the wrong direction. If they gave up what they were never good at (hocking consumer electronics) and became a full-on hobby store, I think they could do great.
Replace the cell phones, TVs and computers that are best bought elsewhere with R/C model gear, more electronics bits, slotcar/bike/etc parts and craftsman tools.
Seriously. If they sold well done electric car conversion kits, there would be lines around the block.
#35 The problem with being a full on hobby store that there are fewer and fewer people are electronic hobbyists. It seems that if radio shack focused on that, they would be out of business in months. More people seem to go to radio shack to buy cell phones that radio equipment.
It seems that changing radio shack to an apple-like store and reaction to that change speaks to a larger problem. Can radio shack survive by parts and high end goods, yea. They don't sell ham radio, which were high end for their time. They don't sell their own audio equipment, which was pretty well like in the industry. They don't sell Tandy branded computer any more. It would seem that radio shack has evolved in the past and will continue to do so.