It’s time for another Flashback post as we plunder the history of this blog to revisit a PopCult post from February 21, 2006. It’s not exactly twenty years, but it’s close enough for government work.
The sad thing about this post is that, now it seems somewhat quaint. I was bemoaning how a beloved retailer had fallen on hard times due to corporate mismanagement. What I didn’t know at the time was that a term wholly appropriate for this would be coined: “enshittification,” first used by Cody Doctorow in 2022. Wikipedia describes it as this: “a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.” While it seems like a crude term, of late it’s been adopted by The New York Times editorial board, which is a good example of how far society has fallen and how hard it must be to write satire these days.
While Doctorow was describing online software and services, the last part of that definition, about maximizing short-term profits, is pretty much why we can’t have nice brick and mortar retailers in this country anymore. An early example of this was what happened to Radio Shack, where new management came in and did what Private Equity firms tend to do, and sold off many of the company’s profitable assets, fired experienced store managers, and re-focused their efforts away from selling specialized electronics with a large profit margin to selling common products that could easily be purchased cheaper elsewhere. In other major retailer failings (and I’ve covered way too many of those over the last two decades), a predatory Private Equity Firm will swoop in, buy up a successful retailer (or other business) using loans taken out against the business to pay for it, then they sell off all the most valuable assets, like real estate and famous brand-names, while charging exorbinant “consulting fees” and plunge the company into a crippling debt, from which they never recover. Sometimes they manage to launch an IPO, so they can soak small investors as well.
This is what happened to Kay Bee Toys, Toys R Us, Sears, K Mart, Big Lots, Joann Fabrics, TGI Friday’s and countless others.
Radio Shack was sort of the canary in the coal mine, and this is a time capsule of me bitching about it back before I fully understood exactly how evil Private Equity Firms are:
The Fall Of Radio Shack
News broke over the weekend that venerable electronics retailer, Radio Shack, would be closing between 400 and 700 stores after posting disastrous earnings last year. This came to light after their CEO, David Edmonson, became embroiled in a scandal over padding his credentials. He stepped down Monday. It’s clear that Radio Shack needs a drastic new direction if they want to stay in business.
I’ve got a suggestion: How about actually having stores filled with electronics and the parts needed to repair them, and hiring sales people who care about what they’re doing and have a clue about what they’re selling?
Thirty years ago, Radio Shack was one of the best stores in the country in terms of customer service. You could buy all sorts of tiny and obscure electrical components. The sales people knew what you were asking for without requiring a four-hour explanation. You could join the “Battery Of The Month” club and get a free battery every 30 days. Heck, even their advertisements were fun, with Lewis Kornfeld’s “Flyer Side Chat” and amusing asides in their catalogs.
About twenty years ago, that all began to change. The corporate culture creeped in and, in the name of boosting the bottom line, the informative flyers were cancelled; the Battery Of the Month Club was discontinued; the inventory carried by each store was slashed to a fraction of what it had been; the sales people were replaced with immobile doofi who don’t the difference between a capacitor and ham sandwich.
If you walk into a Radio Shack store now, one of two things will happen: You will either be ignored completely, or you will be harassed about buying a cell phone. Once you make it clear that you’re not there to buy a cell phone, then you will be ignored. If you manage to get the attention of one of their new sales people, and you ask them for something simple like a phono-plug adaptor, they’ll look at you like you just started speaking Chinese. All they seem to care about is pimping their cell phone plans and pushing their tiny little remote-control cars. I would wager that you can probably walk into more than a few Radio Shack stores, ask for a radio, and walk out empty-handed.
The only reason this bothers me is because I liked Radio Shack so much when I was a kid. I hate to see it wind up as just another carcass along the side of the highway that we call “progress.” Sure, you can get any tiny electrical part you need now on the Internet, but who wants to pay five bucks shipping for a transistor that costs a quarter? Maybe, just maybe, the board of directors at Radio Shack will gamble that a return to their roots will be the salvation of the company. Radio Shack should be the place for the electronics do-it-yourselfer. As it is now, they’re just a lame cell phone store with crappy service and lousy prices. They could be so much more. They could sell raw computer components, build-it-yourself DVD players, VCR repair kits. You can buy cell phones anywhere! I miss the old Radio Shack. It’s time for Radio Shack to get back to what made them cool….in a nerdy sort of way.
2026 Update: Radio Shack still sort of exists as an online retailer (with a paltry assortment of consumer electronics) and a handful of franchisees. We had one locally in Kanawha City until just a few years ago, but aside from the novelty of being a Radio Shack, it had little to offer and hardly anybody noticed when they closed. Things were bad, especially for employees, when they went through their first bankruptcy in 2015. After a second bankruptcy, the name was purchased by Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV), a Florida-based company that had previously purchased defunct retailers Pier 1 Imports, Dress Barn, Modell’s Sporting Goods, and Linens ‘n Things, along with The Franklin Mint. They are trying to use the Radio Shack name to peddle a Cryptocurrency, which resulted in a fairly hilarious ill-fated social media stunt.
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