Not even "Weird Al" could save it...
Entry posted by Nathan Strum
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Over my Christmas vacation, it was with a tinge of sadness that I noticed that the Radio Shack I had grown up with had closed its doors.
My Radio Shack.
I suppose I shouldn't have been so surprised though, since I was often puzzled at all of the other Radio Shacks that were still open.
More surprising, was that when I went to go see a movie that week, this commercial ran in the theater beforehand. "Weird Al" Yankovic singing the joys of holiday shopping at Radio Shack, in a Radio Shack the likes of which I'd never seen - clean, modern, organized, inviting.
I couldn't help but think, "Wow... Radio Shack can afford 'Weird Al'? How did that happen?"
My guess is, the boardroom discussion went something like this:
Suit #1: We need a new celebrity spokesperson.
Suit #2: Howie Long and Teri Hatcher aren't hip with the kids anymore?
Suit #3: They never were hip with the kids.
Suit #1: We need someone who can better appeal to our target demographic.
Suit #2: What's our target demographic? People who can't drive all the way to a Best Buy?
Suit #3: People who have never heard of the internet?
Suit #1: No - nerds! We need to re-connect with our core users. Hobbyists, electronics geeks, computer nerds.
Suit #2: Sure! Nerds are rich now! That's exactly what we need!
Suit #3: So we need a spokesperson that appeals to nerds?
Suit #1: Yes! Nerds are hip and trendy right now. What with the internet and texting and MP3s and all that.
Suit #2: And cellphones. Don't forget cellphones.
Suit #3: I'd like to forget cellphones. I still have a hernia from the ones we used to sell.
Suit #1: So who's big with the nerds now? And also affordable.
Suit #2: We should get "Weird Al"! "Eat It" was awesome! And he had a #1 record this year.
Suit #3: Isn't he kind of old? Do we really want to appeal to old nerds?
Suit #1: Nah - kids love him! And their parents love him! It'll be great!
Suit #2: Whole families of "Weird Al" fans, streaming into Radio Shack! Buying stuff!
Suit #3: Yeah... I can see it now. "Hey kids... let's all go down to the Radio Shack to buy some cellphone chargers and hearing aid batteries."
The thing that surprised me most about the commercial, is that I regularly follow "Weird Al" and I never once saw any announcement that he'd made this. And he puts links to almost everything he does on his website.
Maybe he was distancing himself from it, sensing that the end was near for Radio Shack. Being associated with nerds is one thing... but even nerds no longer associate with Radio Shack.
At any rate, the end finally came this week as Radio Shack filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken so long. (Even though I could have predicted this would happen.)
My most recent dealings with Radio Shack have been few and far-between, and usually the result of "Well, nothing else is open, and I don't want to wait the two days it would take to get this online, so I'll see if Radio Shack has it". And as time went on, more often than not, the answer was no - they didn't have it. Their inventory dwindled over the years, as did any concern any of their employees had for maintaining the stores. They fell into disrepair, with half-empty displays and shelves, and the things that used to distinguish them - the oddball adapters, electronic parts, components, project boxes, tools - disappeared. Even hobbyists who weren't already buying everything online were forced to shop elsewhere. The stores became ghost towns. Employees knew almost nothing about what the stores carried, and cared even less. On the rare occasion I could find something useful, I'd usually have to hit up three stores just to find enough stock of an item to make the project work.
Radio Shack's downfall is hardly a recent event. About 20 years ago, around the time I started my current job, we would shop at Radio Shack for parts pretty frequently. But the thing was - even then - we were shopping just for parts. Odds and ends. RCA cables, audio adapters, switches, portable cassette players, 99¢ packages of resistors, VHS tape rewinders, cheap computer speakers - old technology we needed to support other old technology we still had at work. But over time, other stores began carrying those bits and pieces - Best Buy, Circuit City, Fry's Electronics, computer stores, outlet stores - places where we were already buying other equipment, so that the odd trip out to Radio Shack became unnecessary. There were options. There was competition. Radio Shack was no longer unique. It was no longer a destination, but a fallback in case you couldn't find something somewhere else. And this was before the internet.
The last major purchase we made from Radio Shack for work was about 10 years ago, when we bought several 27" TVs from them (because they were cheap). But all of the TVs failed within just a few years. You get what you pay for.
As a hobbyist, I found fewer and fewer items at Radio Shack that I could use. Their electronic parts selection, which used to be massive, became effectively useless. I used to build stuff with parts from Radio Shack all the time. There was something reassuring about knowing that you could go down to the store whenever you wanted, to pick up a few parts to make something useful or just for fun. As a kid there was a joy to be found in looking through bins and drawers full of parts, to imagine the possibilities of what you could create. Wishing you had just a little more money to buy that cool looking switch, or that LED display, or any one of a hundred or a thousand other things.
Radio Shack, even when I was a kid, had a reputation for selling cheap junk. Their batteries were cheap, and went flat faster than any other brand. They sold cheap speakers, car stereos, audio gear, microphones, and all sorts of things. I owned a cheap little mixer so that I could mix my own cassette tapes. My old car had an all Radio Shack stereo that I installed - an AM/FM cassette player, dual slim 7-band graphic equalizers (one for the front speakers, one for the rear), the front doors had 5 1/4" three-way speakers plus another 4" pair, the rear window had 6" x 9" three-ways, and the trunk contained a dual 8" subwoofer that I built using Radio Shack's book on how to build speaker enclosures - including hand-wound crossovers. My main home speakers are still sitting on Radio Shack speaker stands. Right now, where I work, hooked up to a brand new 46" HDTV, we still have an old cheap mini Radio Shack amplifier and Optimus AV speakers because they happen to work for exactly what we need. I still have four more of those speakers hooked up at home as my surround speakers. I still have an old pocket Radio Shack AM/FM radio that I keep around in case of emergencies. I have a Radio Shack stopwatch. I still have a bunch of old Radio Shack project boxes sitting around (some with projects in them). I still have a Radio Shack desoldering iron. Two of them, actually. One at home, one at work. I still have a couple of Radio Shack digital multimeters, and sound level meters (which we still regularly use at work). And a Radio Shack electronic studfinder. There are old Radio Shack cables, adapters, and who knows what else, tucked away all over the place. I probably still have a broken LCD watch pen sitting in a drawer. And yes... a lot of it, maybe most of it, is cheap junk.
But maybe that's what made Radio Shack so... magical. We knew it was cheap - but it put things into our reach that maybe we otherwise wouldn't have been able to grab ahold of. My high school electronics teacher always dismissively called it "Battery Shack", but of course that's where you had to buy parts for his classes. It was where everyone went to buy parts to build things with. That's just what you did. It's where you went to find things to create stuff with. To explore. And Radio Shack carried all of the weird, oddball, and interesting electronics that other places never did. Need an adapter that turns your car's 8-track player into a cassette player? Yeah - Radio Shack's got you covered. Crappy handheld electronic games that were five years behind everyone else? Check. A cool-looking pocket TRS-80 computer with an LCD matrix screen? You got it. A battery-powered portable TV? How about five of 'em! Radio Shack had your back for the weird, fun, cool, goofy and stupid stuff you wanted, needed, or were just fascinated by. Was it innovation? I don't know. But it was fun. It was fun to walk through their stores, or flip through their catalogs, and just marvel at the weirdness, the coolness, the usefulness, and the uselessness of it all. Radio Shack used to call itself "The Technology Store". And it was. It wasn't always great technology, or quality technology, but it was undeniably fascinating and they put it within our reach.
When Radio Shack really began to click with me, was when they began opening up their Computer Centers back in the TRS-80 days. I was incredibly fascinated with computers in the late 70's/early 80's, and Radio Shack set up these Computer Centers where you could go in and just bang away at the keyboards for hours. My friends and I would hang out there after school (when we weren't at the video arcades, naturally), learning BASIC, running programs, and printing things out on silver thermal paper. The store just let us in - a bunch of kids - to do that. To play - yes, but also to learn. I never learned how to program very much - but it was a great deal of fun. So much so, that I still vividly recall staying there so late one day, I missed a dentist's appointment, and got in a lot of trouble for it. I have yearbooks signed by my friends specifically mentioning our times at Radio Shack. Along with the arcade, the mall, and the movie theater... it was one of our hangouts.
While in high school, one of my best friends saved up enough money for his own Trash-80. Besides playing blobby adaptations of arcade games, we spent hours - and I mean hours - upon hours playing Zork, logged into the University of Washington's VAX, or trolling various bulletin boards. I later typed up some of my college papers on his TRS-80, including one where the computer crashed, and he somehow managed to recover it from RAM (I have no idea to this day how he did that... but he now works at Microsoft, so there you go). Was it the best computer out there? Did it have the best graphics? Of course not. But it didn't matter. Because it was his. His computer. That was an incredibly rare thing back then for a high school kid. He worked hard to earn that money, too. And he chose to buy it at Radio Shack.
The problem was that Radio Shack never figured out how to hang onto that magic. The magic of technology. Of weird, cool stuff. Of things that fired the imagination. They never figured out how to keep walking the line between being the place that sold cheap junk, but also being the place that always had cool cheap junk. After awhile, they just had junk. And that's all that people remembered. That and cellphones. Radio Shack was way ahead of the market on cellphones - but by the time the market caught up to them, they had already been left behind by it. They often led the way, but then got stuck in one place, never moving ahead until it was too late. Instead of being the place to go for the latest cool thing, they became the place where everything was just old. They had forgotten how to keep up. They'd lost their relevancy, but worse than that, they'd abandoned the niche that made them unique. That made them fun. Making fun of Radio Shack as a kid had always been with a wink and a nod. Now, people were making fun of them because they had become old and pathetic.
Looking back - I wonder if they had kept a stronger emphasis on personal computers, maybe they could have done better. Build and sell cheap PC clones. Keep the Computer Centers for training. Focus on repair and service. Become the family-friendly source for personal computing. Be the Apple Store, for the non-Apple crowd. Maybe they could have survived long enough to partner with Microsoft to have stores-within-a-store as part of their recent "let's copy Apple" retail initiative. Radio Shack certainly had the real estate for it. I'm surprised Microsoft didn't have a hand in their buyout just for that reason alone. By its very nature, the computer industry is always going to have some cool thing people will want. 3D printing would have been right up the old Radio Shack's alley. Don't we still have a need for a "Technology Store"? Maybe they could have been the place to go to learn how to "cut the cable" featuring the latest DVRs, set-top boxes and digital antennae. Or they could have become a center for home automation integration - Home Depot sure isn't going to help you out with any of that. They completely, and repeatedly, missed every opportunity to get into video games. Quadcopters have become a "thing" recently - but by the time Radio Shack noticed, nobody was paying attention to them anymore. Nobody would risk buying anything there, because it was no longer a trusted source. Everyone knew Radio Shack had become just a joke. A joke with bad service, old products, and cheap junk. Not even a hint of the magic, or wonder, or fun, or goofiness remained. The opportunities were there. But they couldn't see them. Maybe they grew too big, too old, and too slow to change with the times.
Maybe though, their downfall was inevitable. Maybe the age of the hobbyist, the tinkerer, the enthusiast, the discoverer, has moved on from needing a place to congregate. The internet has supplanted Radio Shack in every way, shape and form. You can browse an endless array of weird, cool and cheap junk online, and have it delivered to your door. You can connect with likeminded people without setting a foot outside of your house. Maybe even if Radio Shack had done everything right - the end result would have been the same.
Maybe their time had just finally passed.
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