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From familial experience the best way "kids these days" can experience a Radio Shack store from 30 years ago, is simply visit Best Buy. Imagine the small legac
by VLM 12y ago
From familial experience the best way "kids these days" can experience a Radio Shack store from 30 years ago, is simply visit Best Buy. Imagine the small legacy physical media section replaced with a small parts section, that's about the only difference. Then shrink it at least 10x to physically fit the smaller RS store footprint.
A Best Buy IS just a giant 1985 radio shack with lower prices, more selection and legacy media instead of parts. It really is that simple.
Journalists can't talk about "big box annihilating small retail" without offending the very popular big box advertiser contracts so we're being treated to an absolute flood of "it must have been feng shui" or "it must be those darn nerds" or "it must be bad luck"
- emerod 12y agoNo, Best Buy is more like RadioShack as it was becoming when it was self-destructing 15 years ago. Fry's (which ironically took over an Incredible Universe location where I live) represents what RadioShack would have naturally turned into with proper business strategy.
- smacktoward 12y agoFry's, which has 34 locations, seems an odd choice to point to for what a company with 4,000+ locations could have aspired to become. If anything it reinforces the thought that the "maker" market is far too small to have saved RS by itself.
- emerod 12y agoPrecisely. They needed to ditch the old Neighborhood Hobby Shop Full of Expert Geeks marketing strategy in order to be competitive in the mass consumer market. Radio Shack was always targeting the mass market. It would have required a huge change of internal culture in the 1990s for Radio Shack to actually cater to the niche hacker/maker community.