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The company that arose from RadioShack's 2015 bankruptcy saga could soon itself be filing for bankruptcy.
General Wireless is reportedly on the brink of seeking protection from creditors and entering the liquidation process. The biz could not be reached for comment. The formal paperwork for the bankruptcy could be posted within a matter of days, it is claimed.
A liquidation of General Wireless will effectively mark the end of RadioShack, which opened its first store in 1921 and became a mainstay of electronics hobbyists through the rise of the home computing era.
The retailer was nearly liquidated outright in 2015 after years of struggling to keep up with competition from online stores and a financial plummet that saw the value of its stock fall so sharply it was removed from the New York Stock Exchange.
Micro Center remains, but in the era of Adafruit, Seeed Studio, Sparkfun, and others are big-box retailers still relevant?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 07 2017, @07:20PM
b) be knowledgeable about the "not printed on the box" differences between the products.
Even a quarter century ago people gave up on that at supermarkets. People laugh at stories about customers asking some stock clerk how to cook some weird thing. Its not limited to electronics. I remember stocking shelves and I was too young and dumb to understand she was a cougar on the prowl but I was getting bugged by this nice looking middle aged single lady how to cook the angelfood cake I was shelving box mixes of and being a young idiot rather than getting laid I politely got rid of her with "idonno" and so on.
The problem with personalized service is if they're honest about it, its skilled professional level charges like accountant or lawyer or dentist, and if they're not honest about the upfront expense then they're going to squeeze it out of me in ridiculous high prices.
There is a market bifurcation which is rarely recognized for what it is, where some people WANT the engineer experience and I love nothing more than digikey parametric search and looking at 750000 data sheets for the perfect microwave bypass capacitor, whereas the more casual or normie supposedly wants someone else to do most of the work of making an arduino make LEDs sewn into the hem of their new sundress flicker like flames and they don't want engineer cooties and can't they just pay someone to do their thinking for them?
And its all in a patina of people grew up playing DnD / Pathfinder and they just want to walk into the blacksmiths shop and get advice about swords or the commodity microcontroller or something. The real world hasn't worked like a DnD scenario in 100, 200 years maybe.
Another problem is I just came from a business meeting at a low to mid level restaurant and the waitress was visibly high. She was actually very nice and productive while she was high as hell. But you have to realize that if you mix an economic system where being retail and customer facing is utterly miserable poverty grind while demanding personal service you're just going to end up with ... suboptimal customer-employee interactions most of the time. A hot chick who's high as a kite can serve you a nice cheezeburger because thats not terribly cognitively demanding, but in the electronics realm, "hey baby I need a NPN general purpose switching transistor with a Vce rating higher than the 40 volts of a 2n3904 I don't need a extreme Hfe anything over 20 will do and Ft doesn't matter at all, now whatcha got on tap at this dive bar of a transistor supply shop?" and meanwhile her eyes are all wild and her speech is a little weird because shes high as hell and I hope she didn't drive to work like that (but she probably did). I mean that worked on the 60 year old retired navy guy at the supply room at uni but he was salaried probably three times what this waitress got. I mean we were nice to her and she was nice to us and she was hot so if she spit on my food thats kinda hot but what works for selling cheezeburgers doesn't work for technical hobbyist specialty shops.
The whole scene is just weird and obsolete.