Crosstown Traffic: How much does RadioShack owe maker companies?
Adios, Radio Shack — shamelessly stolen from somewhere, I’m sure nobody remembers who to give credit to for this. I borrowed it from Adafruit.
Since the Dayton Hamvention, I have been kind of lax in visiting the blogs I like to visit so I have been catching up lately. This story is from the Adafruit blog on May 16. Radio Shack filed for bankruptcy in February and, as in all bankruptcies, they are leaving many creditors hanging–not only banks and such, but vendors as well… and not just the big vendors. Smaller hobbyist vendors like Seeed Studio and Parallax will probably take a loss as well:
Seeed Studio is owed the most: $806,051.63
Maker Media (MAKE Magazine) is owed two amounts: $28,017.00 and $78,713.66, total of: $106,730.66
Magyc (Arduino) is owed: $105,235.15
Parallax is owed: $77,953.94
Velleman is owed: $31,002.00
littleBits is owed: $19,100.00
Afinia (3D printer company) is owed: $1,727.52
To put this into perspective, Radio Shack only owes Apple $38,584.19.
Something to remember if you start a small company catering to the maker movement and decide to distribute through a large chain. Adafruit themselves managed to avoid losing any money in the process by declining requests from Radio Shack to sell their products:
A few years ago RadioShack contacted Adafruit in an effort to stock our products in their thousands of stores around the USA. This sounds like a dream come true but we decided to decline and focus on our online store and partners who could supply a retailer with Adafruit products.
Published from DFW, Texas