“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.