This, combined with notoriously inept employees, is key. Sure, it’s great to have a place to get cables and plugs and things in the neighborhood… but when they cost 2 or 3 times as much as Amazon, or even the Target that’s 10 minutes further away, your whole business model is “desperate/clueless people”. And yes, it’s great that they still cater to hobbyists, but when the employees don’t even know what an HDMI cable is, there’s no way they can help me find an obscure connector or transistor.
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Radio Shack is a microcosm of the immense damage done to our culture by Harvard Business School, which has been indoctrinating MBA’s (and therefore capitalism) for fifty years with an unethical shit storm of elitism, neoliberalism, Libertarianism, and free market fundamentalism.
What has happened to Radio Shack has happened to all of us, save the 1%. Radio Shack is America. Downsized, outsourced, bankrupt, squeezed dry. And all according to plan. This is what happens when Republicans run the joint.
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I didn’t notice that was an Onion piece, and after I read it I thought to myself, “how refreshing”.
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Would @LDoBe like to weigh in here, as a former employee?
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I could tell you radio shacks business model in two words, but they would never admit it.
Burner phones
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Yeah, I’m lucky in the sense that my guy at Radio Shack is a ham radio operator who’s worked at the location since it opened in the 70’s.
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Kinda like a potato clock, I’ve always wondered if I could build a Ham radio.
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Three linear taper pots cost me $15.00 because I needed them that day and didn’t have time to go to the real electronics store across town. I seriously, if briefly, considered making one with paper and a pencil.
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Am I the only one who remembers when Radio Shack was a dual store with Tandy products, including such non-electronic stuff as kits to make the following?
It really was a Maker store in the beginning, and not just for electronics.
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How do you know what your potato clock is wondering? 
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This is my conflict:
I was born and bred a maker by Radio Shack. Everything from the Forrest M. Mimms books to the “My First Electronics” lab kit was part of the genesis of a lot of my interest and and abilities in making.
I’m, well… nostalgic about it. Sure it’s expensive, but I’m not going to say, “good riddance” if it disappears. There are even maker memories I wish i had, like playing around with Trash-80s, which sounds like it was a hell of a lot of fun.
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Here try this one.
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You. I like you.
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I remember when this hit the catalog and then, very briefly, the stores:
I couldn’t get one to make a sound and yet it was still fun to play with. (It’s also around the time that Dad brought home a copy of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.)
EDIT: I’m not sure what $450 would equate to these days, as I’ve already admitted my skewed sense of inflation.
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There are some retail stores that I wish would just die already. Montgomery Wards was one of them. Radio Shack is another. Sears, though it has a storied history and I love my Craftsman tools and was a fan of Die Hard batteries, is quickly becoming another I wish would die. Especially since I heard they sold the Craftsman brand.
Fuck them and the Wall $treeters that sink all this shit. There is no loyalty anymore.
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