“I may be dating myself but when I was a kid, RadioShack Corporation was the place to be,” New York Shock Exchange writes for Seeking Alpha. “The stores were cool, innovative, and always had the latest gadgets. Fast forward a few decades later and you’ll find an iconic company being squeezed out by the likes of Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Amazon; RadioShack has been on life support for some time now.”
“For the 13 weeks ended May 3, 2014 the company reported revenue of $737 million, down over 13% from the $848 million reported in the same period a year ago; loss from operations was $334 million,” New York Shock Exchange writes. “The company’s cash on hand was down to $62 million at the end of the quarter due to cash burn gone unabated: ‘For the 13 weeks ended May 3, 2014, RadioShack suffered cash out flows from operations of $38 million. Cash out flows from investing was $10 million. The company’s total cash on hand declined from $110 million to $62 million at the end of the period. Based on its current cash burn from operations of $38 million, RadioShack could potentially run out of cash over the next few quarters.'”
New York Shock Exchange writes, “Yesterday Wedbush Securities cut its price target to $0 per share, citing imminent bankruptcy.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: RadioShack lost its way a long time ago and, at this late date, going back to its roots (electronics parts, cables, etc.) is likely too little, too late. Like most people, obviously, we haven’t been in one in years, but from what we can remember, it seemed like a mishmash of bad TVs, radio-controlled cars, cellphones, and an ever-dwindling area of actual electronic parts, boards, solder, etc. Retailers fail when the consumer doesn’t have a clear idea of what a retailer carries and is trying to sell. What exactly is RadioShack’s raison d’être in late mid-late 2014?
One thing’s for sure: When RadioShack goes tits up, Woz will likely shed a few sentimental tears.
Related articles:
Apple’s retail market share grows as RadioShack and Best Buy shrink – March 7, 2014
Beleaguered RadioShack to close up to 1,100 U.S. stores – March 4, 2014
RadioShack cuts $20 off AT&T iPhone 5 models through December 15th – December 5, 2012
Sprint iPhone 4S to hit RadioShack this weekend, 16GB only – November 19, 2011
RadioShack to sell Apple iPhone 3G and 3GS – November 7, 2009
RadioShack CEO: We’re selling all the Apple iPods we can get – October 21, 2005
That’s a shame. They were a good company. Every now and then I’d use them for certain stuff that wasn’t easy to find elsewhere. Too bad they didn’t figure out how to fit in with the new paradigm in technology. I wish they’d figured it out, but they didn’t. It’s a shame.
WERE a good company.
They lost it when electronic parts became special order only (at a time you can order more for less at Digi-Key or a host of other online retailers), and then decided to ONLY carry second rate phones and second rate computers.
They have become little more than a phone-selling kiosk without the kiosk.
RIP Radio Shack.
By the way, my first computer could have been a Trash 80. I went into the closest store and put down my deposit. When the first one was available to see at a distant store, I went to check it out. Then went to the original store and for my deposit back. Used to buy a Mac in 1984.
The Trash 80 was introduced in 1977. By 84′ they were well beyond that model so I don’t think you got your deposit back for a trash 80..
I purchased a first generation TRS-80 computer in the 70s. It cost $3600 with the custom desk, external 5 1/2″ floppies, 32k of RAM, an uppercase B&W display, and an audio cassette drive to load the operating system into RAM whenever you started it up, which took around 20 minutes. Fluorescent lights would corrupt the RAM in a couple of hours, so you got to start over again. Mine also came with BASIC so you could program your own applications, since virtually nothing was available to buy initially.
I had a blast with it for about six months, then put it under a sheet and got on with my life. That experience sold me on the Macintosh the first time I saw it in 1984, since I had discovered I wanted to use the computer, not just play with it.
I gave the TRS-80 to a local civic theatre in 1999 to use as a prop in their productions. It was actually kind of a neat toy, but I discovered I didn’t have the patience to become a programmer.
While radio shack is clearly on an unrecoverable nose dive, I will say that going into one lately was refreshing: they can repair a cracked smartphone screen, have truly cool remote control toys, and home automation stuff I cannot find at Home Depot or Best Buy. RIP RadioShack
Google put the final knife in RadioShack’s back with its shoddy android products that couldn’t be sold for anything less than microscopic margins. It might work for a street market trader but when you have rent to pay on Main Street then it’s not so much of a viable business model.
I have fond memories of Radio Shack from when I was a kid. I still have the first soldering iron I ever got from them. I miss being able to go in there to find some resistors or capacitors.
The first letters of your sentences don’t spell Heathkit — are you breaking the code intentionally? 🙂
I was in one the other day in a rather quiet small mall in Newhall, CA to buy a car charger for the iPhone. There was no one else in the shop. I asked the guy if he was having a nice quiet day. One other guy popped in and then we both were gone leaving the kid in charge to his quiet day again. I pondered how they could keep this up so this headline is not unexpected.
I love “real” electronic stores and they are getting fewer and far between but Radio Shack caters neither to the pro nor the consumer very well. Still they were useful for while there, now a casualty of time and moving technology.
Yeah. Same here. RadioShack was a magic place when I was a kid. First electronics kits. Where I got everything for my sick little projects. Thanks to RadioShack, people living in my house were ahead of the curve on living under unwanted surveillance.
“ARE YOU IN THAT TREE LISTENING TO MY CALL???”
“NO! But if Grandma is coming over can she bring D batteries?”
Good times.
SAVE RADIO SHACK!
The Internet gets behind every stupid thing in the world…
Probably won’t work.
Pour a bucket of LEDs over your head and see if it goes viral.
Lights bucket challenge
The challenge might have a lot of resistors. 😉
i stopped going to the shack for one reason: Prices
In the past whenever i went there to buy a cable, i was completely turned off by their atrocious prices for these cheap looking cables that were significantly cheaper either at walmart or monoprice.com
I won’t miss them at all.
to survive, i think they should close every single store and go exclusively online. they still have big competition from amazon, walmart, mono price etc, but with name recognition they could have lots of success just selling their products online out of numbers warehouses around country
or to grow, they need to be in the maker movement and have facilities where they supply parts, machines to make parts and the smarts to put them all together.
That was the quintessential “radio shack” where we high school students way back would get together to hack up radio receivers, transmitters, VTVMs and other things from Heathkit and then things we created ourselves as we read Popular Mechanics and other magazines.
I suspect it is just too late for Radio Shack. You can’t do anything with the crummy items I’ve seen in their stores lately. Sad.
They deserve to go bankrupt. Their store employees are idiots. I called a Radio Shack recently to find out if they had power over ethernet injectors. They’re response was “what’s that?” I ended up going someplace else staffed by people who knew what that was. It reminds me of their old advertising slogan… “You’ve got questions? We’ve got answers”. It should now be “You’ve got questions? We’ve got blank stares”.
in their defense, i’ve gotten plenty of blank stares from apple store employees. they purposely hire people with no knowledge so the only thing they can tell the customer is what they train them to say
I’ve seen that at Apple stores myself, and what’s really scary is that some of them have been Mac Geniuses! I once upgraded someone’s RAM right there at the Genius Bar because the MGs turned their nose up at the Crucial RAM that the customer brought in to have installed. I just happened to have the right size screw driver in my laptop bag, so I did the install as they stared daggers at me.
Had the same issue where I live last week with personnel here. That was a very nice gesture on your part. Wish you’d been in my area. 😄
Nice going, Howie. Good Samaritan, you are. And anti-snob, that’s extra points.
I used to work as a Mac Genius, and I think it’s ridiculous that Apple has this dumb ass policy of not installing third party RAM. Crucial is the consumer brand name of Micron. I’ve seen a lot of Micron RAM in Apple systems, so it’s not like this woman brought in some skank “value RAM”.
I used to work in an Apple store about 8 years ago. Back then it was real enthusiasts of the Mac. Just due to the sheer number of employees now, they’re just employees. It’s like anywhere else – some are great, some aren’t and many are just there to work as if it were anywhere else.
That’s not an excuse. Apple can still have better policies, and they can still hire better people.
In their defense, not everyone knows what a ethernet injector is. DC power over an ethernet cable to a breakout box.
I would have explained what it was and teach that associate something new.
I did explain it. Then the idiot proceeded to argue with me about what I should buy when he didn’t know the first thing about networking.
My second computer was a Tandy 1000SX. I remember putting a 20MB HDD that was on a ISA card. I can still hear the “whirr-clunk” sound it used to make. A few years later I bought a 3200 486SX. Then afterwards they started selling crappy Compaqs and I hardly went into RS anymore.
They could cut their workforce in half, but that would mean just one person per store.
Does this mean I can’t buy parts for my Tandy Color Computer 2 anymore?
Maybe we can start a RS ice bucket challenge?
LOL.
The first computer I learned on was an Apple ][. But the second one, and the first computer that I learned on at school, was a TRS-80. I remember coding games on a simple LAN network of TRS-80s (it let 10 or so computers share the same floppy drives). One of the few things I did in my nerdy, horrible childhood that was popular with other kids.
I’ll miss Radio Shack.
——RM
I recently went into Radio Shack to buy Arctic Silver. There’s two close to me. It was easier to go there than to go to Fry’s.
However, I find little reason to go there, but maybe once a year. I better return some cables I bought, before it’s too late.
Fry’s rocks. Burbank store is something special.
Yes the Alien Attacks Fry’s Store by the airport with the spaceship “crashed” into the front of it. Melted army jeeps, etc. inside (by death rays). Fry’s is still good but not as exciting a place as it was 10 years ago.
Yes I agree, but they aren’t perfect. There are times I need something and they don’t have it. That means I have to go on-line.
Which brings me to this point. Seriously there are specialty stores in most communities that have the stuff you need. But, we don’t know about them. There needs to be a way (I am saying this, because I don’t care who does it) – there needs to be a way to search for a need/task, and results will pop up, who’s close to you can handle that task. Some stores specialize in electronic components, better than Fry’s, or fasteners, better than Home Depot. If you need a specific capacitor or a specific bolt, you can find it locally, without having to go to Amazon for it.
Yeah, but Fry’s has been making changes over the past year (at least at the two Phoenix stores) that indicate IMO they’re in trouble, too.
Selection is down in every department. Every section has had old shelving replaced with new that is much shorter. A person my height (6’1″) can easily see over shelves. Before, the space above was storage for merchandise. There’s nothing there now.
The DVD/Blu-ray area takes up the same floor space, but the selection is a ghost of what it was a year ago. It’s the same with the video game and book/software departments, which are now combined in a single area only half that of the old video game section. The former book/software area (six rows that must have taken up a tenth of a store’s floorspace) is now a toy/”as-seen-on-TV” gadget department.
Best Buy isn’t any better… but at least they don’t have a toy/”as-seen-on-TV” gadget dept.
Checking out new media releases each week is about the only thing that gets me into these places. I like to shop local B&M and I’m willing to pay a small premium for the gratification of getting it now… rather than waiting for online orders to arrive. Imo, if current trends continue, in a year or two I doubt I’ll have much reason to visit either even once a month.
Ah, man! I would kill to have a Fry’s here on the east coast. Those stores are awesome.
The closest thing we have is Micro Center. They are great but they aren’t as good.
Radio Shack is nothing like it used to be. As the name implies, they have deep roots in short wave radio. You used to be able to go there for all sorts of parts, solder, soldering irons, etc. There was a time when many of the stores were staffed by people who knew a lot about amateur radio. Sorry to see them go.
The biggest problem is that RadioShack doesn’t carry anything anymore except junk. Went there to look for an HDMI adapter but nothing.
Let me add to the piling on.
Over the summer my daughter was going to Europe, so we went looking for a set of international power adapters and a small voltage converter for her trip. Just the kind of thing Radio Shack should specialize in, right? Nope.
They did not have a kit of adapters like everyone else had; theirs were all sold separately for about $19 each! Right there in the store I opened the Amazon app on my iPhone and found countless kits of adapters for $15 – $20 or so including carry cases. Told the guy “nevermind” and left.
I tried to shop local, tried to be a customer for them, but they just don’t have it anymore.
Did you ever notice that, as you enter a Radio Shack store, you trip a light beam that rings a doorbell in an obnoxious, cheap-electronic “Deeee-doooo”?
Then, before you recover from that, an RS salesman is in your face asking you what you want.
I have mixed feelings about the loss of Radio Shack. They sold a lot of crap, had knuckleheaded employees and usually didn’t have what I wanted but they were the only game in town when there was nothing else around.
I’m sad. Now I don’t know where to get parts to build my Flux Capacitor and Mr Fusion drive. 😉