Hey, if I were the type of person who had $20 million to spare, I’d buy it in a heartbeat, and use it to launch my chain of combo stores/cafes/maker spaces.
Daaang, my miserably failed Kickstarter just ended last week! Guys, let’s give it another shot! letsbuyradioshack.com
I knew I shouldn’t have blown my last $20 million buying their predecessor, Phonograph Emporium. I did get some nice equipment out of the purchase, though.
Do I have to give them my name and address when placing a bid??
The phonograph record is totally making a comeback! You should have stuck it out, man!
It is in my house. I bought a NOS Garrard Transcription turntable a few weeks back. 1977, boxed, never used 
Hipster!!! 
I’m too old and cranky to be a hipster. I like my crackly old jazz rekkids tho.
So do hipsters…
If you had $20 million to spare you’d do a lot better building your own brand than trying to make use of the RadioShack brand that has been so tarnished in the last 20 years that it’s almost worthless.
Makerspace is definitely the way that RadioShack should have gone. They could have spun off half their stores under a different name to focus on crappy electronics and cell phones, and still retained what little revenue they had from that.
I don’t know. I think the RS name still has a lot of cultural cachet,and it’s a brand people want to like*. When they came out with that Superbowl ad all I could think was, “No, no, no! You want to bring back the 1980s RS, not get rid of it! The 1970s/1980s RS is what people liked.”
Granted that my perspective is that of a formerly happy RS employee from that era. I left in the mid-1980s when I couldn’t tolerate the micro-management from Fort Worth, and the newly requisite Amway-style district sales meetings with their monthly ritual shamings. The pieces parts were what paid our store’s rent, and yet we were castigated for not selling enough CoCos and crappy RC toys.
*On edit: I think that so many geeks have been so passionately talking about RS’s demise is evidence that the RS brand is still worth something.
Yeah, but it’s different when I do it, see…
Brands are all worthless. The entire idea that a “trusted name” can be bought and sold should inspire caution. And RS is not trusted - or even a particularly good name. You can’t build a reputation upon shifting sand. Anybody who can’t think of a better name for 20 million is creatively bankrupt.
tinfoil beats shellac every time
HIpsters are exclusively playing dubplates now?
and popbawa4u are both brands – they are shortcut that help us identify an entity, to give us continuity to our communications.
When we see a post from popbawa4u we generally know what to expect – a challenge to assumptions, assertions that everybody could be rational if they thought about it, and that money is a joke. Among other things. It’s your brand.
I think there is turnaround potential but I think it would take a real effort to disassociate the brand from the plastic crap and cellphone reputation that it’s gotten. In other words, there’s baggage. But you’re right - there are people who would like to see the brand brought back. I just don’t think that’s easier than just starting a new brand completely. For instance, if Makerbot bought everything but the name, I think that would be a lot better deal for them - no people wandering in to the store wondering where they could get that pocket voice recorder gizmo or whatever, just solid geeks coming through looking for arduinos and some extra filament for their 3D printer.
Great, I can put it next to my typewriter store!.
