[OT] RadioShack declares bankruptcy

Nearly a century after it opened its first store and sent out its first catalog, RadioShack (RSHC) declared bankruptcy on Thursday.

It has struck a deal to sell up to 2,400 of its approximately 4,000 stores and wireless company Sprint (S) will create a "store within a store" in up to 1,750 of those.

RadioShack said that its remaining stores are expected to close.

The company's franchise locations, as well as stores in Mexico and Asia, are not included in the deal.

But RadioShack is not completely going away. Customers will still be able to purchase RadioShack products, services and accessories at the approximately 1,750 stores where Sprint will open shop. In fact, Sprint will occupy just one third of those locations, where it will sell devices and plans. The stores will be "co-branded," according to a Sprint spokeswoman.

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Referenced by: HKEPC

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Reply to
Mr. Man-wai Chang
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I find this not only sad, but also upsetting. It's not that I was ever a huge fan of RS, but their closing will bring a final end to all electronics home repair and hobby. I was into electronics real much as a young man in the 60s and 70s. THe main reason I got out of it was because of two things, 1. Intergrated circuits (Chips) made many of the circuits very difficult to trace and unlike tubes and early transistors, part numbers often meant nothing and replacement parts could not be found. 2. All the old electronic parts stores vanished.

All that remained was RS for buying parts. But their parts selection get worse and worse over the years. Yet, there was still a place to buy a capacitor or some electrical solder or a switch. Not to mention all the adaptors they sold for audio and video cables.

When RS closes their stores, that entirely ends all home electronics hobby amd repair. If there is no place to buy parts, there will no longer be any home repairs or hobby at all, and RS has been the last of the stores to sell parts.

For example, my tv quits. I open it and find a bulged cap in the power supply. The cap costs $0.79, but to order the part online I have to spend a minimum of $50 to get free shipping, or will have to pay $10 shipping for that $0.79 part. Then I cnt just drive to RS, but have to wait a week to get the part in the mail. I finally get the part, replace it and find a power transistor is also bad. So, once again, I have to spent $50, or spend $1.88 plus $10 S+H to get that part, and wait another week.

Finally, after 8 months, and spending $380 (of which $350 was spent on shipping), I have completed the repair on my tv, which could have been replaced with a NEW TV, for $249.00.

Which means why even bother fixing any electronics anymore..... Just toss it in the trash.....

I guess the only people who will be able to do an electronics hobby or repair shop are those who have an unused room in their home, and invest $10,000 to stick up on quantities of capacitors, resistors, semi-conducters, switches, and every other part that might be needed, or will just take up space on shelves and go to waste as electronics change....

  • THE END IS NEAR * For everyone who still likes to putter around or repair electronics.... VERY SAD INDEED!
Reply to
electron206

The end came many years ago. RadioShack has not had hobbyist bent for a very long time. ...Jim Thompson

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Jim Thompson

But Your Honor, how do you recycle those wastes? They are toxic and kill us! :)

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Reply to
Mr. Man-wai Chang

To be fair, modern electronics are no longer just about resistors and capacitors. Without CIRCUIT DIAGRAMS AND PROPER TOOLS, it's just not possible for average consumers to buy parts and repair their own e-devices.

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Reply to
Mr. Man-wai Chang

More correctly, it's because modern day e-devices are NOT designed and constructed for maintenance! You need laws and regulations to enforce that.

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Reply to
Mr. Man-wai Chang

Sparkfun.

DigiKey.

All Electronics.

Mouser.

Beagleboard.

Arduino.

Raspberry Pi.

Etc., etc., etc.

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Reply to
Tim Wescott

Yep, they are all there and none of them have brick and mortar stores, at least not in my area. So I can order parts online and pay $10 or more for shipping + handling , everytime I need a $1 part, plus wait days or weeks to get it shipped. *NOT*

Reply to
electron206

I won't deny Radio Shack was handy, but so much of the mythology of the place seems to represent Middletown Iowa or some other small town.

When we got Radio Shacks here in 1972, there were still the old school parts stores downtown, there was a cluster of them. Slowly they died, but there was a place further out, and it's still there. There was another one, that lasted till the later nineties. But at the same time, new stores were coming in. There were the distributor type stores, which I admit were more troublesome for small quantities, though I did get some Motorola ICs that way about 1973. But Active Electroncs came along, initially it was like Poly-Paks, a tiny reception area where you filled out your order form, and then someone would collect the parts for you, but that soon changed so the common parts were on pegboard. I'm not sure what happeend to them, I had an urge recently and discovered they no longer have a store here.

But there's even still a relatively recent store that is akin to the old style stores, though I've only been once. They certianly cater to the hobbyists.

That's on top of the period when "clone building" was common, so there wre all kinds of store fronts selling components, so long as they were used by the Apple II and then later "IBM PC".

I guess we've had it lucky here, but I find it hard to believe this is unique. Yes, there have to be lots of smaller places that can't support such stores, and they aren't what they once were, but they do exist.

I think of all the articles that specified Radio Shack parts because Radio Shack was handy, but I wonder if that set up a dependency. People never looked further than two blocks over where the nearest Radio Shack was.

Michael

Reply to
Michael Black

Or, you could just man up a bit and order a stock. You can get 20 times more parts, of better quality, for the same money Rat Shack would charge. A couple of weekends spent mowing lawns would get you a pretty nice setup, and quite usable scopes are available for under $100 on eBay.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

You all gave me an impression that RadioShack had turned itself into a cheating company after going public... :)

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Reply to
Mr. Man-wai Chang

Digikey's minimum shipping is $3.22, which is cheaper than the cost of gas for me to get to the closest Radio Shack, and the parts show up here only two days later.

Plus a $1 part from RS only costs $0.10 or so from Digikey.

I like Radio Shack, but I stopped going there a long time ago.

Reply to
DJ Delorie

A lot of places don't give you the choice. They don't want you ordering one and twos, they want a minimum of each. And yes, the set of each device often is cheaper than one at Radio Shack.

Michael

Reply to
Michael Black

If you're looking for excuses to be a nay-sayer, at least be accurate.

DigiKey generally ships the same day that I order, if I take the trouble to check stock when I order. And if you order it shipped 1st-class postage it's fairly cheap -- my last three orders from DigiKey had shipping of $3.04, $3.92, and $8.38 -- and the $8.38 order was in a fairly large box. 1st-class postage usually takes two or three days to get here (Portland Oregon area) from Thief River Falls, and it comes straight to my mailbox.

Let's see: $1 plus $3 shipping is $4, which is probably $4 less than I could get the same part in a brick & mortar store (assuming it's there at all), and if I'm all grown up about it and plan ahead I can get more than one thing at once.

So go ahead and don't buy -- but be honest about just not wanting to be productive, and don't bitch.

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Reply to
Tim Wescott

That's not the case with the vendors I use. You can easily order one

0603 resistor from Digikey, if you're nuts enough. See e.g.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

I usually use Priority Mail, which costs about $4, and reliably gets me parts in two days if I order in the morning. Newark has warehouses near me, so I just use ground shipping and get it in about the same time.

In January I got a call from a very nice customer rep at Digikey about whether I really wanted to send solder paste by 2-day shipping, because of the danger of heat damage on the road between Minnesota and New York. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Oooh, fancy. I get the 1% resistors that cost 60 cents for 100. But then, I'm doing less-fancy stuff.

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Reply to
Tim Wescott

I just did a search on 0603 resistors that were in stock, quantity 1, and searched on price (ascending order). That one came out cheapest.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

With DigiKey, you need to do the search on whatever quantity you expect to use. Prices in onsies reflect the cost of paying a zit-faced kid to clip it off and put it in a bag (and maybe a some deep strategy aimed at suckering you into the expensive parts). The prices in 100ea quantities (of resistors at least) seem to reflect the reel pricing far more accurately.

I generally order little resistors and bypass caps by the 100 or even

500. More expensive stuff (10u ceramics, tantalums, current-sense resistors, etc.) I'll order in smaller quantities.
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Reply to
Tim Wescott

I've bought boxes of 100 reels of surface mount components on Ebay. A nice mix of the common resistors, capacitors and some inductors. The last box had a full reel of MMBT2222ALT1 and some microwave power transistors. Most of the reels were full reels.

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Michael A. Terrell

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