[NJARC] Radio Shack is Burning

[Walt Heskes]

Every one of us has at least a story or two about an unhappy experience at Radio Shack. Maybe it was an item that caught your eye and your imagination and you had to have it. And, maybe you got it home only to find that someone else had once bought that same piece of merchandise only to discover that the darned thing didn't work and that it had to be returned to the store where a careless clerk simply returned it to the shelf for someone else to buy and return. That strategy may have helped Radio Shack improve its same store sales but it alienated many loyal customers. 
I would submit that one of the early indicators of Radio Shack's demise was its decision to stop printing its product catalogs. The last issue in my collection is from 2002. The cover shows a pretty girl in a fashionable pose. It could be the cover of a woman's fashion magazine. It's impossible to provide the analytics to support my theory but I suspect that the culture at Radio Shack was somewhat embarrassed and ashamed to admit that their loyal customer base comprised the geeks and nerds whose technical interests sustained an entire industry of electronics parts suppliers. Instead, the gurus at Radio Shack preferred a path that morphed the stores into Toys-R-Us meets Circuit City. Dweebs and solder smokers seeking discrete electronics components were directed to a small area in a corner at the rear of the store. 
The bulk of the floor space was dedicated to the same sort of junk you could find in any Walmart or Target department store. 
 I've stopped buying batteries at Radio Shack. Wegmans supermarket sells their own brand of equally capable batteries for less money. 
These days, in the remaining Radio Shack stores in my area, the sales staff usually outnumber the customers. 
The latest item I have purchased was an amplified speaker and I had to return two defective units to the same store until I finally found one working sample at a different store. The item was out of stock in the online store. 
Maybe Radio Shack needs to change its name to something more appealing and appropriate such as Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe. 
Walt 



iMail from Walt's iPhone

On Jun 23, 2014, at 12:00 PM, njarc-request at mailman.qth.net wrote:

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