RadioShack to Close About 500 Stores Within Months

[Crash2Parties]

31. plenty of new genderation hobbyists

Wander over to hackaday or adafruit or makezine.com to see what they are doing. Mostly microcontrollers, 3-d printing/cnr, and a whole new DIY arena that mixes thru-hole and surface mount. I'd easily and happily compare them to the personal computer enthusiasts pre-1985 -ish, definitely pre 1982/IBM PC.

But Radio Shack has lost pretty much all of their geek credibility. They recently started carrying arduinos, but they shuffle the items too much and worse still, price them far, far above buying online plus shipping. The components drawers (which used to be, what, 6-8 swinging double sided pegboard) have nothing of use to the new hobbyiests apart from basic resistors and caps. No 555's, no optical couplers, etc.. And did I mention only one, really bad quality temp controllable soldering iron?

What could work for them is to start an internal skunk works of enthusiast-buyers coupled with experienced management. If they could regain the hobbyist market, they'd see the rest of their sale go up as well, if only by reputation, if not by actual recommendation.

Last thought: We've romanticized the old RS just a bit. There was a reason the TRS-80 was called the trash-80 & as I recall, they carried a lot of what would now be called, um, "reconditioned" parts.