- This may very well be RadioShack's final holiday season. Jon, a former employee, looks back on a strange, craven, five thousand-fingered strip-mall monster from a forgotten age.
I greatly enjoyed this article, I remember just a few months ago remarking that RadioShack was going to be going out of business soon to some of my co-workers and they were shocked. I really see a cool opportunity here though, with things like arduino, raspberry pi, and hobby kits where someone could build little hacker shops. For a lot of these projects you don't even need to solder (especially in the case of the pi). I really believe there is a real case for "Bring some stuff in, we'll build a cool creative project together" "Make your dad/mom a cool interactive decoration for an event" "Learn how your phone becomes a phone" You get people in to learn about these tools they can use, start communities where people can talk about their projects and people will buy from you. This is the current way that comic book shops are staying in business even against the relentlessness of digital books. They have communities of comic book and game enthusiasts. What is cool is that Micro Center already has an area devoted to this stuff (but they don't really flaunt it too much, its all shoved in the back). I always see kids there fascinated by the robotic parts wanting to get their hands on it. People love to learn new things, and it's sad that RadioShack went into market for cell phones instead of people.
When I was a kid, Radio Shack was the place I went to buy resistors and capacitors and transistors to make the things I made with them. It was awesome. The guys working in the place knew their shit, and I would stand around chinning with them for hours. Today, you could do the same thing with computer hardware, but RS just totally screwed the pooch.
Thanks for the badge kleinbl00, without you introducing me to Jason Hirschorn's daily newsletter, I'd have never sourced this post.