Adafruit, Sparkfun, et al, might like a word with you. Even though they are smaller businesses, they are thriving, there is nothing to say that they would be if RS had taken the same road.
Radio Shack is a retail store with many locations. There are not many people that have an immediate need for Rasberry pi components, they order online. So that model is dead. Radio Shack despite this does indeed still devote a small area of the store to things like this.
There are not many people that have an immediate need for any one particular item in a dry goods store on any particular day. The same is true for other stores and was always true for nearly every item RS carried.
I think the arguments ITT boil down to: did the internet kill RS, or did RS finally succumb to its own poor management.
Small floor-plan dry goods stores aren't exactly a booming business, either.
> I think the arguments ITT boil down to: did the internet kill RS, or did RS finally succumb to its own poor management.
And the answer is "yes".
(In longer form, the internet was a key factor in a shift in the retail market for the classes of goods RS sells whose nature RS's management was slow to recognize, and reacted to poorly.)
Adafruit is in Manhattan.
The only chance they had to stay relevant was to challenge the Best Buy's of the world, but they failed to do that.
>The maker market isn't nearly large enough to sustain a company of that size.
Well, neither are any of the other markets RS targeted, obviously. I wasn't proposing that RS go all-in on Raspberry pis.
>The only chance they had to stay relevant was to challenge the Best Buy's of the world, but they failed to do that.
Best Buy is not exactly killing it, but RS could have probably done something interesting there, I agree.
They tried -- back when what is now RadioShack was Tandy Corp. and Radio Shack was one of its units, it tried with the Incredible Universe stores -- but gave up because at the time their boutique Radio Shack stores were more profitable than their big-box Incredible Universe stores.
Of course, for widely-held, publicly traded corporations, there's a strong and often hard to resist incentive to do what maximizes results for the next earnings report rather than long-term resilience (if nothing else, because what will do the former is often much more clear than what will do the latter.)
I think a brick-and-mortar boutique electronics retail chain could work on that model, but I think it'd be easier at this point (or any time in the last decade or longer) to grow it from scratch than to turn RadioShack into it.