If this is even remotely close to true, itâs a wildly good thing!
With this story I am beginning to wonder somethingâŚI wonder if the amount of data being sold is at some sort of saturation point where itâs not that valuable any more. If thatâs true, weâll start seeing tech moguls trying to get I-care points by doing an about-face on privacy. But perhaps that is too cynical.
OTOH if you signed up for the Battery Club in the 70s your soul belongs to Radio Shackâs creditors.
Thank god I didnât get in until the 80âsâŚ
When I was working for the RatShack back in 2009, we sales associates were constantly âremindedâ that âcollecting customer information is important at the point of sale. Assure the customers that we do not sell their data or mail them anything.â
I obstinately refused, because itâs a lie. I put a disposable email address into the system the first day I was on the register. By quitting time I had hundreds of spam emails in my junkmail folder.
I never asked anyone for their personal information, and usually just put in âJohn Smithâ 1234 Main Street Ft. Worth TX 99999, john.smith@unfuckable.org
That kept the fucking District Manager off my back. But of course the DM was the one helping associates set ârealistic personal sales goalsâ for their commission thresholds (heâd modify them a day after we set them so that it was impossible to hit commission. Because heâs a fraudulent fuck, and was caught selling cellphones in large volumes out the back door of his home store.)
TL;DR RadioShack management is a pack of lying frauds and I hope they lose everything. Maybe once everythingâs gone theyâll realize that if they donât do an honest dayâs work, theyâll never be trusted by the people who actually make the company its money.
The problem was once the 80s went and took all thier cool stuff back, there wasnât anything interesting left to sell. 
This is a better outcome than Iâd expected; but, aside from âbecause screw consumers, thatâs whyâ, I cannot comprehend why allowing the sale of the data was ever on the table.
Yes, Radioshack is bankrupt, so they have to go to the chop shop and pay what they can to the creditors.
However, when they gathered those customer data originally, it was subject to an agreement that it would not be sold. They never actually possessed a saleable dataset, so it doesnât matter how much they need to sell off what they can, this dataset isnât part of what they can sell off.
The sole purpose of a corporation is so that the executives wonât lose everything if the corporations is sued. Also, employees donât need to trust management, they just have to obey.
If the employees do not trust management, then there is no point in trying to run the business.
Radio Shack in merely the most recent large example of this.
I would like to know where this Shangri-La of management-labor harmony is. My own company is pretty good actually, but there are only six of us.
Okay, but Iâm still keeping the drawer full of big, cheap 5-D cell and lantern-battery flashlights that I got free using coupons.
Worst session of D&D, ever.
The privacy advocate in me is pleased by this news.
The practical side of me is distraught over the amount of wasted man hours that went into collecting data - and rejecting data collection attempts - only for it now to all be destroyed anywaysâŚ
Itâs not like those collection hours would have been put to better use.
By 2009, RatShack had switched over to the only fulltime employees in a store being the manager. Everyone else are part-time minimum wage workers who have impossible commision goals.
If those hours of data collection went away, people would have just had their hours cut.
I was thinking of the hours on the other side of the counter.
Every single in-store consumer transaction they did over the last 40 years (or whatever) took 30-90 seconds longer than it needed to. That doesnât even factor in the mental fortitude and energy that was spent by people who said, âUm, no, you donât get my info.â
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