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Comment by hellgas00 | Hacker News Reader

I live in Toronto, Canada where there are a bunch of independent stores that sell hobbyist electronics and seem to make a good profit doing so, so the market isn't dead. I like to buy stuff online but there have been plenty of times where I've been stuck needing a sensor, resistor, or things of that sort, and don't want to wait for 2 weeks for it to ship from China. It's a false premise to say that electronic component sales moved online when these isn't much in the way of a flagship brick and mortar location to purchase these goods. RS made a choice to move away from a potentially growing market, a market that they owned and could have expanded, and inevitably pushed their customers online.

Just my 2c, but I'm amazed that they thought they would move in on BestBuy (and FutureShop in Canada) territory and be able to compete.

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I don't disagree, but there is a scale issue Radio Shack has. As a quick example:

Population of Toronto, Canada: 2.5 million.

From http://wheretobuy.klab.ca/ I see seven stores mentioned for electronic components.

Population (not including the large college population which perhaps adds another 33%) of the county where I live: 155,400.

Number of Radio Shack stores at present: 3. (There used to be two more.)

Even assuming the list for Toronto is only half of the relevant stores, Radio Shack would have to close down a lot of stores to resize similarly for the hobbyist market.

There was, at their peak, around twenty Radio Shack stores in Toronto. They were one of the few retailers in the 1980s and 1990s that would sell you one of something. Larger distributors were harder to deal with, and were geared towards thousands.

Now there's about a dozen stores that sell components to the hobbyist community and university students that need parts for projects. They have a selection way better than Radio Shack ever did.

It's not how many people live in a town that's the factor: It's how many university students you have. The more universities, the more likely you are to have an electronics savvy population. Perhaps the unusually high concentration where you are is due to that factor.

I'll note they're closing one, and of the three, it was the one that still had electronic parts bins. (Admittedly, one of the two others stocks a number of computer parts one might be desperate for, notably replacement power supplies.)

You posted a website that lays out relevant electronic components supply stores in an easy to digest manner. The problem I see is that the average hobbyist might not know where to start without first knowing about that site.

For instance, I used to buy computer parts from BestBuy because it was easy, they were everywhere, and I didn't know about the smaller stores that were better priced and staffed with generally more knowledgeable staff. I knew about BestBuy because it had a large brand identity, and could market to the general population. RS was large enough to market their business stream to the general population, while these smaller stores can not.

When it comes to sourcing components, you are left to do the research if you want to buy from brick and mortar. If you want to buy a tablet or gaming console come to BestBuy because they told me they have everything.

I still think RS had a great model in hobby electronic, and I really think they could have developed that model, not only for their own financial gain, but to the betterment of society. I didn't find out about hobby electronics until I was in my late teens and more substantially early 20's studying Engineering, probably because it was never effectively marketed towards me.

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