Tag Archives: Radio Shack

Crosstown Traffic: How much does RadioShack owe maker companies?

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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

From my Facebook Feed: Could this finally be the end for Radio Shack?

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Mike KM5Z posted this article from Bloomberg.com on the Dallas Amateur Radio Club Facebook page that outlines the current negotiations that Radio Shack is making with Sprint Corp.  In the proposed deal, Radio Shack would sell around half of their store leases to Sprint, and close the rest.  The locations sold to Sprint would operate under the Sprint name, effectively ending the Radio Shack brand after 94 years.

Was nice to see the nod to Radio Shack’s roots in the Ham Radio business.  From the article:

The discussions represent the endgame for a chain that traces its roots to 1921, when it began as a mail-order retailer for amateur ham-radio operators and maritime communications officers. It expanded into a wider range of electronics over the decades, and by the 1980s was seen as a destination for personal computers, gadgets and components that were hard to find elsewhere. In more recent years, though, competition from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and an army of e-commerce sellers hurt customer traffic.

Radio Shack is the company that was responsible for my entry into the electronics hobby, which went on to define my career.  In my personal opinion, and I will probably come up with a lengthy editorial about this, Radio Shack numbered it’s days when it left the hobbyist market in the 90s and went on to become a place where you would go to buy a cell phone or maybe an audio cable.  Radio Shack could have saved itself by watching the market when the maker movement started exploding over the last 10 years and re-entering it with more electronics stuff, which they ended up doing by getting into the Arduino and Raspberry Pi market, but it was too little too late.  Online companies like Allied, Digi-Key, and Jameco (to name a few) had beaten them to the punch.  When I was young, if Radio Shack didn’t have it, you didn’t build it until you decided to cough up the high minimum orders, or you just bit the bullet and waited until the next hamfest and hoped you could find the part.  Now, there are many local electronics shops, and the major vendors no longer have insurmountable minimum order policies.  Or you can go on Ebay and get twenty times what you need at the same cost as just a few, if you can wait a week or two for it to get here from China.

Soon it will be time to say goodbye to the Jap Shack.  May they rest in peace.

 

(Published from DFW, Texas)