“Most RadioShack stores have just a handful of employees, most or all of whom will work Thanksgiving whether they want to or not. Retail employees have very, very little in the way of perks, of things that are understood to be sacred. Having Thanksgiving Day to themselves was one of them,” Jon Bois writes for SBNation. “After some pushback from its employees, RadioShack gave in just a little: after originally planning to open from 8 a.m. to midnight on Thanksgiving, its stores will now close for a few hours in the middle of the day so that its folks can have a little bit of family time.”
“RadioShack is a company of massive real estate, and is peddling a business model that is completely unviable in 2014,” Bois writes. “It’s very likely to go extinct soon, and I doubt there’s anything its operators can do about it. In scenarios like this one, there aren’t happy stories or easy answers, and if this were any other company, I’d concede that, perhaps, opening on Thanksgiving is a regrettable but necessary stab at saving the company, employees and all.”
“But as this company has spent the last decade-plus trying to save itself, the happiness of the employees has always been the first to go overboard. Its store managers are worked so hard that they become unhappy, half-awake shadows of themselves. Labor laws have been brazenly ignored. Untold hours of labor haven’t been paid for (when I quit, on good terms and with two weeks’ notice, they withheld my final paychecks for months and wouldn’t tell me why). Lawyers have been sent to shut down websites that have bad things to say about RadioShack. Employees who make a few dimes over minimum wage are pressured, shamed, and yelled at as though they’re brokering million-dollar deals,” Bois writes. “RadioShack is a rotten place to work, generally not a very good place to shop, and an untenable business to run. Everyone involved loses.”
Bois writes, “These are stories from my three and a half years as a RadioShack employee.”
This is a consumer technology business that is built to work perfectly in the year 1975. The Internet comes around, and this, being a technology company, is expected to move on it aggressively and know what it’s doing, except basically nobody really understood the Internet for a very long time. So they whiffed big a few times. Then the iPhone came around and rendered half the stuff RadioShack sold completely redundant. This company needed to become something radically different a decade ago. I just don’t think it knows how to be anything else.
It’s like retracing the steps and doings of a drunk person: okay, here’s where he keyed the cop car. Wait, why’d he do that? I don’t know, but his pants are lying here, so this is before he stripped naked and tried to rob the library.
Read – and laugh – more in the very comprehensive full article – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: At these slow-moving train wrecks, we find it absolutely impossible to look away.
Sad for all the people trying to make a living at The Shack, but the place has been toast for a long time.
Last time I was in a lonely Radio Shack (having that in common with blowing tumbleweed Microsoft Stores) I bought an iPhone car charger. It was DOA. The company is DCW.
I will miss Radio Shack when it’s gone, but people building their own electronics is a thing of the past. Their retail electronics are mostly junk. I go there for now only for the odd battery or electrical connector.
Radio Shack is mega-convenient for the things I do maybe once a year, and there are VERY few people who would try to tackle the same things I do (trying to fix broken electronics before throwing them away, or creating some little doohickey to save time or money). Certainly not enough to keep the lights on. I’ll miss them when they’re gone. 10 minute trip for some $.35 component, or wait a week for the same thing plus shipping.
Sad. I remember going there for power regulators and 7400 logic chips. The world changed and they didn’t.
Radio Shack in Canada was sold, renamed it The Source and is dying almost as fast as as the USA Radio Shack.
I have much affinity for The Shack, and while I hope it stays afloat, I realize it didn’t get on board soon enough. RIP…
Sporting Blog Nation for all the latest tech news.
I went in Saturday to get new timer switches fourth Christmas lights. Quick, cheap and no one else was in the store. Then I had to go back to get some fuses to replace blown fuses on said lights. The problem with Radio Shack these days is that a lot of people only go in for a cheap product like those fuses. That won’t keep them open, but we are really going to miss them when we need more little fuses, or stuff like that.
Remember using my brother’s TRS 80 when it was brand new. He worked in RS as a mid-level manager and the store was absolutely great in its heyday. Sad how innovation cripples once proud businesses …
No, LACK of innovation cripples once proud businesses.
As many others here have said, I will miss them for the convenience factor when I need a small component item, especially when I don’t know what the heck something is called.
Also, I’ve been buying my phones there the last few years. Their service is actually much better than AT&T and Verizon stores, and they give pretty aggressive discounts.
Sad that they waited so long to adapt.
No, you have just made an excellent case how well they adapted and should remain in business. Nobody carries all those products or does it better.
It comes down to not lack of innovation, but the hip flavor of newer generations.
Just ask Woolworths, A&P, McCrorys, Carling Black Label, Piels, S&H Green Stamps, Acme and on and on.
Good business models that the kids won’t touch. It could happen to Apple, or not, but not on the same scale.
I really wish BestBuy would get RS for dimes-on-the-dollar and
A) Eliminate a small bit of their competition
B) Close some stores (there are FOUR in my hometown…really?)
C) Put a Radio Shack sub-store in the bigger BBs like Apple/Samsung.
D Make some of the other RS a BB Express with music and hot items.
When/Win….right?
Meant to add the RS sub-store in BB would obviously just be electronic parts.
Great idea. The need certainly exists.
Best Buy Express. That… actually makes sense.
Sadly, though, I fear BB may be circling the bowl as well.
——RM
Well, there’s always Buy More
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buy_More
Back in the day, electronics hobbyists could walt into Radio Shack and buy all the parts to build a tube or transistor radio, or the parts to fix one.
That day is long gone.
Today, the equivalent is DigiKey. RS could have gone that route (as have a couple of other suppliers) and had everything commonly needed by electronics hobbyists and engineers alike.
RIP RS
I think Fry’s is a better example than DigiKey. Fry’s is the model that Radio Shack should have strived for. Fry’s can fill the needs of ultra-techies as well as most of the general public.
Crap, now where am I supposed to get my radios?
Radio Lean2
😉
And I my shacks?
HILARIOUS!
Oh the joys of employment in the richest nation on Earth where “union” is a four letter word…
YES! Unionize Radio Shack!!!
THAT will save them…..(?)
Well at least they can stick it to the fat cat pricks that exploit them like indentured servants till the inevitable end. They will maybe get more pay maybe get better conditions but surely regain some dignity.
No they wouldn’t.
They would be forced to close about a third of their stores.
Some help!
(“fat cat pricks”…really? A Business Major, I see….)
Tell me, how would RS employees benefit from having their meager paychecks shaved to pay for hookers and blow for mobsters and politicians?
-jcr
As the eye-opening account makes clear, What’s dooming this once-prominent retail empire to extinction is not that ‘times have passed them by’, but their horrible treatment of employees. Too bad to see Radio Shack go, but Good Riddance when they do.
The thing that struck me as odd about Radio Shack last time I was in there was this:
I needed a headphone jack splitter for a trip I was going on. So I figure “this is a classic Radio Shack item”. Off I go, only to find that they don’t have just a basic splitter – like you’d expect. They have only one type, which is all packaged and branded – and oversized for what I had pictured. It was $18.99 to top it off.
Other than that, they had a bunch of headphones, crappy cell phones, and only a tiny area with some cords and adapters.
It’s like a miniature version of the Electronics department of Target or Walmart, with their core concept shoved into the corner.
I’m not sure what the appropriate action would be (or have been), to keep things rolling, but this survey isn’t going to work.