Is Radioshack going under?
Yes.
Remember "The Shack".
RadioShack was world renowned. It had been around for 90 years. Your Great Grandparents most likely browsed there a few times. The store was small, and shackish. Their stores went through product changes based on short wave radios, Sony walkmen, and android tablets. In the process of product changes, RS grew into "a multifaceted, multibillion-dollar electronics retailer with thousands of associates, and a vast retail network that included more than 4,000 company-operated stores in the United States and Mexico, and approximately 1,200 dealer and other outlets worldwide.(www.radioshack.com)"
Radioshack was in love with the
high-performance "do-it-yourselfers."
RadioShack traces back to The Hinckley-Tandy Leather Company. It was a supplier of leather shoe parts to shoe repair shops. HTLC was originally located in Fort Worth, Texas, in the year 1919. In 1921, RadioShack, was founded as a retail store and mail-order operation. It was based in Boston. The radio in the name spawned from the first store's criteria to serve the needs of radio officers aboard ships.
"The Hinckley-Tandy Leather Company prospered, and in 1954, it sold its flagship leather business to expand its scope of operations. In 1959, the company shortened its name to Tandy Corporation, and in 1963, Tandy Corporation acquired RadioShack, marking the company's start as a personal electronics retailer. In 2000, Tandy Corporation changed its name to RadioShack Corp., listing on the NYSE under ticker symbol RSH. (www.radioshack.com)"
An enduring American brand was a nice way to describe the company.
I used to like Radio Shack. You did, too.
Trace your way into the past and look at "Radio Shack Christmas (1989)" on YouTube, (https://youtu.be/UjXGbif4Ki4)
Every cool toy, for ten year olds to preteens, was R/C. The huge popularity of 1/10 scaled off-roaders, in the mid-1980s, brought out the Tandy / Radio Shack store released finest R/C car to date – the Golden Arrow Buggy. The buggy platform was licensed and customized from other well known R/C companies.
How many times have you run through Radio Shack over the years? Wow...
Now, the company is going glub-glub. It is going bankrupt. A long time ago, the company began to take some self-inflicted missteps that positioned its money-losing decline. Recently, the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading in its common shares and delisted the company, which had more than 4,000 stores across the country.
Radio Shack rolled down a steep business decline beginning with their inability to keep up with the personal computer revolution. The cell phone kiosks in malls dawned more customers in one day than the RS store would see in a week. Next, RS
failed to ramp up on e-commerce like other giant brand named Web sites. While Walmart, Amazon, and Best Buy websites were seemingly boundless, RadioShack's website didn't allow consumers to shop. It only had store locators and press releases that gave no option for customers to purchase anything. The company never became cool. It stayed in the marketing confusion abyss of the "last stop store". Jon Bois, a former RadioShack store employee, once documented about having to sell "unsellable crap." "Once, his store was required to stock Brum cars, which no one in America had ever heard of. That's because they are based on a British children's television series that only aired on Discovery Kids. It also tried selling a CueCat, which was an infrared scanner that read barcodes, but no one wanted it.(www.cbsnews.com)" RS had a weird mix of inventory as a result of limited store space. The company also failed to find a niche like Fry's, which caters to the electronic home-maker. RS failed.
We were familiar with Radioshack. It was around for 90 years. It is sad that the company is bankrupt, now.
