Your 
grandfather’s electronics store is about to go through a drastic downsizing.
Radio Shack released their latest quarterly report today, and the news is not good. Sales were down nearly 20%, and as a result they lost about $191 million dollars in the last 3 months of 2013.
This is but the latest quarter with a poor financial report, and Radio Shack has decided to take drastic action. They’re going to be shutting down around 1,100 under-performing stores, leaving them with around 4,000 locations in the US.
According to Radio Shack CEO Joseph C. Magnacca, this comes as a result of a months-long study: “Over the past few months, we have undertaken a comprehensive review of our portfolio from many angles – location, area demographics, lease life and financial performance – in order to consolidate our store base into fewer locations while maintaining a strong presence in each market.”
This is sad news. Radio Shack was a great company once; they were at the forefront of a number of breaking developments, including personal computers. RadioShack had one of the early commercially successful PCs, and for the longest time was a great source of electronics components. Unfortunately, they never really adapted to the big-box era, so when consumer electronics exploded Radio Shack was never really capable of competing against Best Buy and other chains that could offer a larger selection and cheaper prices.
They relied too much recently on mobile phone contracts to make money. That was a risky thing to do.
FYI, the headline has a bonus zero. I believe it is 1100 stores closing.
Fixed it, thanks!
side effect of staffing their stores with people ignorant about electronics plus online competition.
I’m really surprised that they’ve been as successful as they have been. I expected them to collapse when the electronics hobbyist market did. As it stands, they’re pretty much a Walmart electronics department in a separate building.
Yes, it is puzzling that Radio Shack outlasted Circuit City and CompUSA.
Whatever their failings, they had/have(?) a better inventory management system.
CompUSA (classic) had an inventory system that reported products as out of stock (with no pricing info) that were sitting on shelves by the dozen and insisted they had stock of products nobody could find after 20 minute searches.