The death--or at least lapsing into a zombie state--of Radio Shack has become something of a punchline in the media; treated with snickering mock anguish like the bankruptcy of the last buggy whip factory.
Radio Shack's relevance has certainly diminished. Technology has evolved rapidly, and for quite a few years it was always at least a couple steps behind.
But some older people, especially those with a geekly bent (like me) remember days when it was the go-to place for reasonably good, affordable tech.
Back in the late sixties I could go there and get replacement vacuum tubes for the amp I'd hacked from a Wollensak M3 music cartridge player, along with speakers, crossover parts, wire and other goodies. Oh yeah, and solder. Everybody used solder back then.
Fast forward a few years, early Seventies, and that's where I went for parts for various car audio installations. They had the 8 track players, primitive power amps, various automotive speakers, and everything else needed to make a formidable (for then) car stereo.
The Radio Shack store was 30 miles away, which meant I was in a fringe area (both geographically, and in terms of life choices) and the only game in town. Live in a fringe area? They had monster TV and radio antennas that helped you get that distant TV station or hot alternative FM station out of Ottawa. Calculators--once expensive rarities--they had some good ones.
Concerned about my parents on the road, they bought--and I installed--CB radios. Bought a pretty decent audio amp that ran years before the controls simply wore out. Same for a stereo cassette player. Lost my (and parents') TV antennas to ice/wind storms more than once, and the Shack made it possible for us to not miss an episode of MASH. They had a great weather alert radio.
But their computer selection after the infamous Trash 80 increasingly became an also-ran. They were early purveyors of cell phones, but not nimble enough to compete as the market expanded. Consumer electronics changed. People wanted cheap stuff that they didn't need to know squat about, and no matter what they carried, Walmart--and later, Amazon--had more choices, cheaper. And the things they used to carry were no longer there. Just rebuilt an ancient set of subwoofers. RS hasn't had decent drivers for a very long time, so they were ordered from Parts Express--along with crossover components, and of course more solder.
So what will happen to Radio Shack? Pointless speculation under the snarl of orange wire.
Wonder what would happen if I snipped it . . .
Supposedly Sprint will be taking over some stores, and theoretically others will be RS/Sprint hybrid stores. Will this work? No idea. If I was Nostradamus I would've bought Microsoft and Intel stock back when it went cheap, and living a bit further above the poverty line.
Could they make a comeback if they somehow managed to get in on if not the ground floor, at least one of the lower floors, of some emerging tech? They've done R/C forever; could they remake themselves as your friendly neighborhood drone store? Maybe become the proprietary providers of some hot new VR tech?
I am afraid it is doubtful; Grampa can't break dance no more. The days of their being anywhere near the cutting edge are behind them. They may be able to hang on selling phones, batteries, antennas for OTA TV, and other odd stuff to a dwindling pool of tinkerers for a while, but the America that went to Radio Shack was the America that got news it could mostly trust, believed in science and progress, and believed that with enough solder you could really make something.