In response to Radio Shack Expected to File Bankruptcy Today, an EPJ reader writes:
December 2013 I attended a CMO leadership forum in Dallas. At the time, newly instated RadioShack CMO, Jennifer Warren, was a guest speaker. She kicked off the forum with a talk titled "Returning to Relevance." Seems a little ironic now, don't you think?
I was very disappointed in her talk. In a nutshell, she seemed to think RadioShack simply needed to copy Apple's retail model and create a new logo.
This seems to speak to your observation about RadioShack employing far too many retail employees.
Radio Shack lacks the unique and high-demand products that Apple Stores have. Thus they had no way to (meaningfully) emulate the Apple retail strategy.
ReplyDeleteRadio Shack used to serve the electronics hobbyist/enthusiast (hence their name). They got killed by the combination of big retail electronics (Best Buy for consumer electronics generally, and Fry's for the techie/hobbyist) and Internet sales. There just was no longer a sufficiently-large place for high price and small selection consumer electronics retail.
Bingo on this! The internet and cheap electronics sunk their ship. Very few people do their own electronics anymore or fix anything because the market is so efficient now in delivering new/better stuff for less money then the time invested to fix things.
DeleteHeck, an Arduino board can do just about anything a hobbyist would want to do and you can buy them all day long off the internet for $25, configured different ways none the less!
Even further, can you even get an Arduino board at Radio Shack? If you're old & saavy enough to remember what Radio Shack USED to be good for it would seem like they would have them in stock at least? (not that I"d wasted the time going there for one anyway) But they don't...so in essence they lost touch with the "super techy" crowd that used to be their bread and butter.