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Comment by bigyikes | Hacker News Reader

It's a shame what happened to RadioShack. I liked them for hobby components.

>Items will include “more end products than the stores have typically sold, focusing more on cellphone products, headphones, batteries and adapters, for instance.”

I don't see this as a winning strategy. I can buy any of these items at a number of convenient locations, like Amazon, Target, Best Buy, and Walmart. Why would I choose RadioShack, especially when I don't have faith in their ability to price competitively?

I will go to a RadioShack when I can get things there that I can't get quickly elsewhere.

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> I don't see this as a winning strategy. I can buy any of these items at a number of convenient locations, like Amazon, Target, Best Buy, and Walmart. Why would I choose RadioShack, especially when I don't have faith in their ability to price competitively?

Moreover, that's just doubling down on the same business strategy that already ran the company into the ground. I can't imagine it's going to work any better this time.

Why? Because the shopping experience at all of those places is awful.

RadioShack's advantages, where it had them, were in its convenience and its ergonomics. Get in, get what you want, browse a couple of human-scale shelves, pick up some batteries, and get out zippity-zap. Try doing that at Target.

The check out process at radio shack is infamously part of why people stopped going there - the insistence on getting a phone number or email address

And don't forget the battery-of-the-month club!

I don't recall ever giving one. Of course, the big box stores and Amazon would never presume to do something so outrageous.

One click checkout, now including a warranty upsell, 3 attempts to sell Prime, and defaulting to paid shipping instead of the free option. A marvel of frictionless shopping, brought to you by 40% marketshare.

Are Target shelves not “human-scale”? They’ve always seemed perfectly fine to me, and not especially different from my (distant) memories of RadioShack shelves.

I think it's the most tolerable of the big box stores, but I've never been to a Target where electronics wasn't at the absolute far end of the (enormous, warehouse-sized) store.

Having home electronics at the back of the store is a common pattern. Wal-Mart does the same thing, for example.

There are usually batteries at the checkout stands, though.

That sounds like my Best Buy experiences.

Get in, buy a low-end GPU, or an SSD, or whatever random PC component I don't want to wait a week for, play with the XBox and Macs, check out and go home

The worst part is them completely missing the entire maker revolution. It was perfect for them.

> I don't see this as a winning strategy.

I wonder if most of their storefronts are leased or outright carried on their books (shades of McDonald’s strategy). If they own the dirt most of their storefronts sit upon (they have someone in corporate who manages real estate, but I can’t tell if that is just overseeing corporate property like distribution centers and offices or they pulled a McDonald’s), in some circles the real estate play is the asset and anything else is cash flow to keep the lights on.

Wow that’s their plan? To just be another overpriced cellphone kiosk?

That’s what they were before they went out of business.

> I liked them for hobby components.

Can't you find those at places like Mouser? I thought there were better options for everything than at Radio Shack before they went under.

Yeah totally, but sometimes I just really want that random component right now and RadioShack was there to save the day.

They also had stuff for other hobbies like RC cars which Mouser doesn’t really cater to.

Mouser also has a sea of crap I have to wade through.

Have you gone to similar retailers recently, ones like Batteries Plus?

Batteries Plus is one of the retailers I do go to, though infrequently. Was just there a month or two back paying for battery recycling. I'll usually drop in when I have a lead acid I need to replace like in a mobility scooter or UPS, but that's been a while.

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