I’m fine with it; it’s people that have undoubtedly been treated like shit by customers letting off steam in general and non-specific ways. Customers, as a whole, are pricks. Part of earning a paycheck in the service industry is swallowing your humanity and being someone’s whipping-boy for a few hours a week. Sure, sure, #notallcustomers, and I’m sure no one would admit to being it (everyone’s an above-average driver, right?), but every day, day after day, you are being shat on for less than minimum wage and a bit of a commission if you manage to sell a cell phone.
Someone wants to blow off some steam by insulting a vague and undefined aggregate in a Facebook feed as they are relieved of their jobs? Awesome, go for it.[quote=“oncebce, post:34, topic:99323”]
That’s part of the problem. Most local RadioShacks I’ve been to in the last few years had morphed into crappy cell phone stores with an incomplete assortment of other items.
And really, even if phones were a good profit item for RadioShack, why would most people in need of a new phone not just go to the carrier store?
(Also, IIRC, those little components had pretty good profit margins too…)
[/quote]
Mostly it’s down to more people buying cell phone than buying inductors. At the point of this transition, the little components didn’t pay for their space in drawers and would mostly sit around gathering dust in most stores.
It certainly didn’t help the store any when that savvy customer came in for an inductor and were offered a cell phone instead, but the idea was that one cell phone would pay for 10 of those hobbyists.
It kind of worked. For a little while. But RadioShack never could manage to be identified in people’s minds with cell phones (and would always lose out to carrier stores and, most prominently, APPLE, even when they did manage the transition).
