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.