According to Bloomberg Amazon is in talks to buy some of RadioShack's stores:
Amazon has considered using the RadioShack stores as showcases for the Seattle-based company’s hardware, as well as potential pickup and drop-off centers for online customers, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the deliberations are private.
RadioShack is on the verge of declaring bankruptcy, and according to other reports, it has also been in talks with wireless carrier Sprint about selling some of its stores. The deal with Amazon may not happen, but nonetheless, it shows where Amazon is headed.
To head off competition from Wal-Mart—one of the few retailers that could pose a legitimate threat to Amazon—and to expand its operation, the company has adopted a new hybrid business model, combining e-commerce with offline services.
Originally spotted at Wired, and also linked at HackerNews.
Related Stories
RadioShack filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection on Thursday, and said in a statement that an affiliate of Standard General, its lender and largest shareholder, would acquire between 1,500 and 2,400 of its 4,100 stores. Wireless company Sprint Corp said it would operate as many as 1,750 of those stores, occupying about one-third of each selling "mobile devices across Sprint's brand portfolio as well as RadioShack products, services and accessories".
RadioShack over the past year tried to avoid bankruptcy by closing 400 stores and reducing workforce by 19 percent, court documents show. It changed its logo, reduced store clutter and tried to connect with tech-savvy shoppers through brighter "concept stores" featuring interactive displays.
See also our story here from 2 days ago.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday February 04 2015, @02:54PM
Is there a fuckedcompany.com for this business cycle? Two bubbles ago, that site was awesome. Radio shack is just the start, jc penny is almost done as is sears. Gonna be a lot of empty CRE on the market pretty soon.
Most of the mall stores that I shopped at as a kid in the 80s are now dead/dying. Probably because I got sick of the security guards harassing me as a teen in the 90s and said F that place, never again, not just me but every freaking gen-Xer in the country. We've got dead kmarts in strip malls that still are empty and not torn down yet. One of the dead kmarts has a giant hole in its roof and is a total loss and they've been promising to bulldoze it for years, but no one wants to move into the land.
The good news about the death of corporate screwed up radio shack is it'll open opportunity for something kinda like your local gaming store but for electronics. No, some air head CEO in texas won't be able to siphon off $50M/yr salary, and it won't be your only brick and mortar source of VCR cleaning tapes, but it might have a maker space in the back and some cool components for sale.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04 2015, @03:11PM
I got sick of the security guards harassing me as a teen in the 90s
This is what I dont get... Malls should be begging for kids to come in. They are your next source of 'where do I buy something' people.
My local mall did the 'if you are 16 and under and no adult get out' recently.
That place is now *dead* most of the time. A year or two before it was usually semi busy. The appearance of dead will kill your business too... 'no one shops there'. Most of what people buy is fad junk. The perception of 'not with it' will kill your store. Sort of like radio shack did.
The local kmart to me is usually semi busy. But put a target or a walmart near it and it will be GONE. I only go into it because it is 2-3 bucks cheaper for some things I buy regularly.
Radio shack 'going away' will not be much of a problem for most of these malls. The floor space they had in each mall was fairly small anyway (kb toys was usually bigger and they are long gone). They will slot in some clothing boutique store. Something like a sears or jcpenny on the other hand...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04 2015, @03:42PM
> This is what I dont get... Malls should be begging for kids to come in.
Same reason people are bigots about any other superficial characteristic. Some kids are trouble-makers and it is deceptively easy to blame their trouble-making on the fact that they are kids. Never mind that the over-whelming majority of kids that didn't cause trouble being even stronger counter-evidence. The idea that root causes are rarely obvious to the naked (and ignorant) eye is just too complex for many people to ever even consider.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Immerman on Wednesday February 04 2015, @06:40PM
The root causes... so you're saying the actual problem with troublemakers is roots? Excellent! From here on out all eaters of potatoes, carrots, peanuts, and other root crops shall be banned from our stores. I predict that we'll have completely eliminated shoplifting, loitering, and harassment within the year. Thank you for your gracious explanation of the real problem, I owe the future of my business to you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 05 2015, @02:33AM
Maybe most kids just want to have fun, but until they recognize and destroy their growing troublemaker cancer they must be held responsible.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by tftp on Thursday February 05 2015, @05:10AM
Some kids are trouble-makers and it is deceptively easy to blame their trouble-making on the fact that they are kids. Never mind that the over-whelming majority of kids that didn't cause trouble being even stronger counter-evidence.
In the modern politically correct world you cannot ban a few kids - you have to either ban none or to ban all of them.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by sjames on Wednesday February 04 2015, @07:58PM
Part of the problem for all of the stores is the way they DON'T handle warranty issues anymore. At one time, if your new-ish TV broke, you take it back to the store you gought it from, talk to the manager for a minute or two and walk out with a new one of the same or similar model.
Now they want nothing to do with it. At most they'll ship it off to Asia for you where you'll never see it again. Given that, why not buy it for less online? If they would actually stand behind the product, they might remain relevant.
The simple fact is that they have cut so many corners trying to wring out more profits for less work that there's little to no point in them anymore.
(Score: 1) by takyon on Wednesday February 04 2015, @04:05PM
It could be a good opportunity for urban farming. Cheap, large, flat buildings.
Some malls are being converted to open air shopping spaces which are more successful and require less maintenance.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 04 2015, @04:32PM
which are more successful
I think thats a coastie thing because we got a foot of snow on Sunday and it'll be -10 tonight. Given the choice of an outdoor strip mall or walmart, I'd shop online, but if I had to go to one or the other tonight, it would have to be the walmart (or the still enclosed mall, if its something they still sell).
If it works for the coasties thats great for them, but I'm not seeing it happening nationwide.
I have a suggestion which is dorms / condos. You got plenty of parking so tear half of it up and put in parkland. Generally located on major roads, convenient to everything else still open, plenty of utility service (water, electricity already in place).
Something I've seen repeatedly locally is an explosion of gyms in strip malls.
I bet you could make a heck of a convention center out of a dead enclosed mall. Plenty of parking, already on mass transit lines, bathrooms, utilities, roadways are usually tolerable...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday February 04 2015, @05:53PM
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2005/04/the_mall_goes_undercover.html [slate.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by brocksampson on Thursday February 05 2015, @01:13PM
When I read your post I started thinking about the stores I was familiar with as a kid (also in the 80's), and so many of them are indeed either bankrupt, nearly-bankrupt, or have merged or been bought out. I only see the inside of a mall once a year or so these days, and I don't recognize the majority of the stores. My kids have never seen a JC Penny, K-Mart, or Sears. I wonder how that worked for my parents' generation? Did the Internet alone devastate the brick-and-mortar retail business model or is it part of the natural ebb and flow of businesses? It seems like there were two waves, first the big-box stores killed off the local businesses and then the Internet went after chain retail stores and department stores and both of those things are specific to the late 20th Century. Off the top of my head, most of the places I can really remember from my childhood that still exist are restaurants, diners, and bakeries and most of those were around when my parents were kids. The few local grocers that still exist converted to high-end places for people who think Whole Foods is too cheap. Even the amusement parks are gone--video games? And now it is coming full circle, with Amazon buying up old Radio Shacks. Will my grandchildren be pondering the demise of Google and Apple when the next disruption comes down the pike, or will they become the General Electric of the future?
(Score: 5, Funny) by urza9814 on Wednesday February 04 2015, @02:59PM
Man, I dunno what I'm gonna do without RadioShack. Sure, the components were massively overpriced, but that's what happens when you have literally one option if you don't want to wait five days and pay $10 in shipping fees...
Sure I probably should just start ordering this stuff in bulk online from Mouser and paying far less for it, but that's a completely different workflow. I'm used to having a smoke and walking down to RS and digging through the various bins, pulling out all sorts of components while I sit there in the store holding them all together and figuring out how I'm gonna assemble them. And then walking back an hour or a day later when I realize I need *one more* relay or connector or cable or whatever. I don't do CAD, I don't make schematics, I barely even know what I'm looking for, I just know how to plop RS parts together. A lot of the time I frankly don't know what I'm buying. I don't know why this 5V relay works in my design and this other one doesn't. I don't know why these diodes work and most of the others won't. I just know I always buy this one and it always works. I'm a software guy, not an EE, but thanks to RS I can at least manage to cobble together some basic circuits. Most of the electronics I buy online, on the other hand, never actually get used. They arrive and I discover I didn't buy what I thought I was buying.
I hear there are some great stores out west that still sell this stuff, but up here in the northeast, RadioShack is it. Soon I won't even be able to buy a soldering iron or a breadboard without buying it online. This really, really sucks.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday February 04 2015, @04:02PM
That is exactly what they should have been aiming for, and adding in the single board computers, shields, servos, etc that modern tinkerers want rather than focusing on phones and tablets that you can get a dozen other places for a better price and selection.
Microcenter is picking up that slack around here.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MrGuy on Wednesday February 04 2015, @06:05PM
Yes, absolutely.
They should have avoided high-margin, well-advertised, low-diversity (relatively few options to keep in stock) items that have a large customer demand and turn over frequently.
Instead, they should have stayed focused on low-margin, high-diversity (you have to stock an awful lot of resistors to be sure you have the one I need in stock...), low-turnover items that catered to a small community of hobbyists who tend to shop infrequently and make low-dollar purchases.
That's a winning business model if I've ever heard of one.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday February 04 2015, @07:00PM
Sounds great in theory. The problem is that Walmart, OfficeDepot, etc are all operating on the same theory, keep pretty much all the high-margin same stuff in stock, sells it for substantially cheaper, and have loads of other stuff you can buy as long as you're there. So why would anyone walk in the doors at RadioShack in the first place? And then of course there's the internet. That leaves Radioshack with a market consisting of those people who want it today, and would rather pay a substantial premium than shop at one of the megastores. Might still be viable if they actually did something to embrace that demographic, but these days they're just the smaller, more expensive version of the megastores and, oh yeah, we've might have some resistors and LEDs in that cabinet in the back.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by urza9814 on Wednesday February 04 2015, @07:34PM
Yup, most of the purchases at my local RS seem to be cellphones...but there's two dedicated cellphone stores right in the same plaza! Those stores are bigger and 100% devoted to phones; RS is tiny and only a small portion of that is phones. How did they hope to compete in that market? They'd probably need to close some of their stores either way, but at least if they had focused on the hobbyist electronics they could have *completely* owned that market across most of the country. And they charge $2+ for a cardboard sleeve of 5 resistors -- resistors worth less than a cent each, probably less than a cent for all five -- so I'm sure they make damn good margins on those components too.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Wednesday February 04 2015, @08:12PM
Well, let's see. They used to specialize in those lower volume products you can't get just anywhere and were a growing business. Then they focused on the stuff you can get at Best Buy, Target, and Walmart for less money AND got rid of any sales staff that knew any more than a random stock person at any of those stores and now they're dead.
Sure, they have to stock a lot of resistors to be sure to have the one you need (or close enough), but resistors are small and easy to move around.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Fauxlosopher on Thursday February 05 2015, @12:57AM
The way I heard the story told was that the police told RadioShack to stop resisting...
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday February 05 2015, @10:59PM
Sure, they have to stock a lot of resistors to be sure to have the one you need (or close enough), but resistors are small and easy to move around.
As someone who works with hardware every single day, I'd say that today we have such a variety of parts that RS has no chance in hell to even come close to the likes of Digikey and Mouser. Digikey runs one highly automated warehouse that has everything. Shipping from Thief River Falls, MN is simple and not too expensive. RS's business model would require having such a warehouse in every store... that is insane, of course. It's the business model that failed, not just the RS itself. In the olden days of tube- and transistor-based analog TVs you could get away with having an assortment of 5% resistors and 20% capacitors, and they would work in most devices. Today you need 1% resistors and precise capacitors with a specific thermal coefficient. Back then you could use 2N2222 for most tasks; today, even if the same silicon works for you, there are 33 package types, from chip-scale QFN and BGA to chassis mount :-) (well, not for this silicon, but you get the drift.)
Note that Fry's still sells discrete passives and a few semiconductors. I haven't seen anyone buying, though. They are awfully expensive - not because the parts themselves cost a lot, but because the selling process itself (the packaging, the shelf space, the labor to hang it and to count them) is very costly. Most of what they still have is old through-hole, axial parts that hardly anyone can use these days.
To add to the problem, modern electronics is hard to repair, and often is not worth of repair. There are no schematics provided with equipment anymore. Everything is company secret, IP and all. There are programmed parts (CPLDs, FPGAs, MCUs) with proprietary firmware. There are unmarked parts (most of small parts are non-uniquely marked; 0402 and smaller are not marked at all.) Compare to an old tube TV - a defect there often could be seen with unaided eye (a burned resistor, or a dark vacuum tube) and there were service manuals.
Today some people still build stuff. But if you build something, you might just as well do it right. Do not use an obsolete part that RS just happens to have (today - but perhaps not tomorrow) for $5. Order one that you need - the latest silicon - from Digikey for $0.50 per piece. Do not build your project on a perf board - order a cheap 2-sided PCB for mere $33 each at Advanced Circuits. Do not buy through-hole parts that are hard to get and hard to use - switch to surface mount technology, make your project smaller and lighter. Sure, some of that costs you some money - but in the end you cannot expect to build something out of nothing; often it is a great effort-saving measure. And it is also future-proofs your design, as old junk that is still sold at a few places is being quickly washed out of distribution channels. You do not want to build something that you won't be able to repair or improve tomorrow.
RS rode a wave of building stuff at home; that wave has ended. Another wave is moving in, but RS cannot be a part of it. They simply acknowledged that and accepted. At best RS could act as a front end of Digikey - but who'd need them, as Digikey can be accessed from anywhere? There would be only a limited consulting function... but RS has no consultants anymore, and it's a demanding position to be in anyway.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday February 06 2015, @04:19AM
A lot of people do like to prototype a circuit on a breadboard. That calls for axial components.
Digikey has more stuff, but they have nothing at all I can place my hands on in the next hour.
Agreed that RS long ago got rid of any salesperson who had any advice on electronics to offer even to children just learning it. They used to do fairly well with a combination of students and retired engineers but working conditions got bad enough that either can do much better.
It's the olf story again. First they downsized, then they "rightsized". Finally, they have capsized.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Friday February 06 2015, @04:42AM
A lot of people do like to prototype a circuit on a breadboard. That calls for axial components. Digikey has more stuff, but they have nothing at all I can place my hands on in the next hour.
Those people can buy a resistor kit [digikey.com] at Digikey for $15. The kit contains 72 values, total 360 pieces. How many resistors of the same kind can you buy at RS for that money, packaged two or three per box? Digikey has RS not just defeated, but hammered a mile down into the ground, as each part in this kit costs only 4 cents to you - and Digikey still makes profit on it. I don't think that $15 is a significant expense today. I have several kits of passives that I need for alignment of circuits. They work great, and they are available to me not within one hour but within one minute. A reasonably stocked lab is a necessary condition for efficient hardware work, and anyone can buy enough kits for that for the cost of a few pizzas. The absolutely worst disservice that you can do to yourself is to buy parts one by one as you need them. R and C kits, plus a couple of BJTs and MOSFETs will be sufficient to build pretty much any analog circuit of shortwave and lower frequency range. If you need ICs, it's extremely unlikely that RS has what you need anyhow.
(Score: 4, Informative) by captainClassLoader on Wednesday February 04 2015, @04:04PM
Well if you have to go the order and ship route, you might like You Do It Electronics [youdoitelectronics.com] in Needham, MA. Two floors of geek component heaven. They've been around forever (where forever = 1949). When I was an undergrad nearby and needed to roll my own I used to get all my stuff from them.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday February 04 2015, @04:27PM
Oh hell I'm less than an hour's drive away from there (I'm down in RI); I might just have to head up sometime and check it out in person! Thanks! :)
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Thursday February 05 2015, @04:35AM
Meanwhile on the other side of the country, there is Pacific Radio [yelp.com] in Burbank, CA. Back in the 70's my dad use to take me there to get new vacuum tubes for the TV. It wasn't called Pacific Radio back then, and was on Buena Vista Street instead of Thorton Ave, but looking at the Yelp photos, I am convinced it is the same place.
For the more mechanically inclined, you know induction motors and shit, there is Apex Electronics [yelp.com]. Recognised it immediately. It is still in the exact same location as 30 years ago. If you are the type that reads Make magazine and are in LA, head over there. You won't be disappointed.
I have been living in DC the last 25 years and haven't found anything even close to these stores here.
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday February 04 2015, @04:25PM
They arrive and I discover I didn't buy what I thought I was buying.
So I'm repairing this vacuum tube radio with a 300 or so volt B+ line and I need new full wave rectifier (this was awhile ago, don't remember why) so I know the shitty 1N4004 rectifiers at RS are only rated to like 100 volts PIV and cost a couple bucks each, so I go online and order two genuine name brand 1n4007 (rated to 1000 V PIV) and I'm tired and sleepy and RS shit would be like $5 to $10 for two diodes so when the bill comes up for $15 I'm like whatever F me I just wanna get to sleep and fix this thing tomorrow when the parts arrive so I click OK and the rest of the night is a blur, I think I made it into bed before falling asleep...
Next day the package arrives (I live about one shipping day away from thief river falls) and I'm like WTF this is a big box for two diodes, I was expecting two dinky little diodes taped to a piece of cardboard and tossed in a 1st class envelope in the mail, but you could fit a bowling ball in this mother Fer of a crate, this is like HP legendary style of shipping and packaging. Uh oh, this is kind of heavy, theres more than 2 diodes in this crate. I'm starting to sweat, you know that story about the soldier who tried to order a spark plug for his jeep and got one digit off on the order so a truck dumps a battleship anchor on the barracks lawn, OMG what did I just buy... I open it up and instead of two diodes I got two bags, qty one hundred, of 1n4007 diodes. Well, I guess I'll never run out of medium voltage rectifiers. Still have some left many years later.
And that's why RS sucks for parts, for just a little more than their onesie-twosie prices I can buy a near lifetime supply online.
I checked before writing this post and the standard baggie is now 5000 diodes on a tape reel for about $80, but apparently they shipped qty 100 in anti-static bags a decade or so ago. And WTF about digikey shipping mechanical toggle switches in anti-static bags with anti-static warning stickers on them, they're not completely without RS style WTF, just less. I can do even better, I ordered some T-13/4 or WTF they're called LED panel mounts, clip the LED into the mount and thread the mount into a panel, chrome plated pot metal... you guessed it, anti-static packaging, WTF? I'm told they ship nuts n bolts and solder rolls the same way...
There's a bunch of people selling binders full of women, err, I mean binders full of SMD components on ebay/amazon, pretty good deal, I can get qty 100 of a SMD capacitor assortment in a nifty binder for not too much money, all neatly labeled takes up no space. And for legacy thru hole you can get similar deals, too. I checked my caps on my LCR bridge and they're legit, maybe a little fuzzy about peak voltage or Q or resonance freq but at least the capacitance is properly labeled.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Wednesday February 04 2015, @07:09PM
Yeah, you're on a completely different level from me. I'm the kind of guy who will look up a schematic online, build it exactly as specified (as far as I can tell, anyway)...and nine times out of ten, the damn thing still doesn't work. Even the classic, ubiquitous circuit to toggle a relay from a microcontroller -- one transistor, one diode, one relay. Sometimes I can't even get that to work right on the first or fifth try (although these days the most common failure is that I've fried the relay already). And basic schematics like that don't give part numbers. I've tried building stuff from components from Mouser -- didn't work, I never figured out why, and I still have those components about six years later because I've never found anything useful to do with them. But I can take one of those simple schematics, walk down to RS and if it calls for an NPN transistor for example, I grab any NPN from those bins and there's about a 90% chance it will work. If not, I go back and buy the other variant and that does it.
Radioshack parts basically let you do electronics Lego instead of electrical engineering. I've been quite happy paying their massively inflated prices for that convenience. I'm not trying to build some big complicated circuit, I'm not buying hundreds of dollars of parts every month. I'm just trying to get my Raspberry Pi to hit the power button on the projector. By drilling a hole through the projector and wiring a relay across the button contacts, because IR schematics are intimidating, lol
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 04 2015, @09:43PM
There used to be an old ARRL project book about designing transistor RF circuits that said something along the lines of the only way to learn RF design was blowing up a bunch of (expensive) transistors and we're both pretty much on that path, although I've blown more stuff up. Electronics work is very much like a first person shooter, that way.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday February 04 2015, @04:57PM
Whoa, Amazon is probably offering pennies on the dollar if they're trying to snap up real estate space on the cheap like they do everything else on the cheap. Let's wait and see if Radio Shack is willing to sell at the prices Amazon is looking for.
What I see going on is Amazon becoming Wal-Mart and Wal-Mart becoming Amazon. The two will be virtually the same thing, a logistics company with some in-city real estate and a huge warehouse and distribution chain. They've completely cornered the low end of retailing zero-margin commodities.
Interesting to watch Radio Shack, Staples, Office Max, Office Depot, Sears, K-Mart, Best Buy, Circuit City, B Daltons, Waldenbooks, Books-A-Million, and a bazillion other retail stores either disappear or be on life support for years.
I've also noticed consumer brands disappearing. Right now, there's usually one or two name brands and one store brand of every commodity. Because brands are disappearing, retailers can't differentiate themselves or offer any advantage over any other retailer. Whoever has the best logistics is winning, because they are able to distribute zero-margin commodities more efficiently.
The old-line retailers are struggling because they literally (and I mean literally - in the literal sense of the word - if any pedants are reading this) can't answer the question: "What sets us apart from our competition?" Why should anyone shop at, say, Sears, or JC Penny, or Books-A-Million, or any of the other second-rate retailers? They can't distinguish themselves in any way. These are the retailers who are failing. As this question of any retailer, and if you can't answer it, they're either gone, going, or will be gone soon.
We can't forget that this has always happened. Small regional department stores (Kings, Roses, and others) disappeared in the 1990s, for example. It just seems worse because so many commodity-selling retailers seem to have all come to the end at once.
Anyhow, I always ask myself - what is growing and expanding and creating jobs? I look for those sectors. I am at a loss to find any sector really expanding now, other than healthcare. Help me figure out where future jobs will come from. We can't all sell extended warranties to each other.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Wednesday February 04 2015, @06:56PM
alternatively, since Amazon allows you to sell your stuff, and Walmart doesn't (yet), it could be we are witnessing the next phase of industrial revolution for logistics.
The lockboxes and combined with UPS/Fedex is already pretty optimal. Add some robots in there, and if you are a small producer of something unique, you will be able to scale massively for almost no cost.
Or am I perhaps too optimistic in how I think this will turn out?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mendax on Wednesday February 04 2015, @07:47PM
I have long thought that Amazon should buy Best Buy since people have been using them as their "showrooms" for years, previewing the merchandise before buying it online. It seems Radio Shack could be used for the same purpose for smaller electronic items. Such an approach would make Amazon appear less evil than it is. Not that it would help much. Amazon as a company is nearly the epitome of corporate evil, one hair shy of oil companies of child pornography producers.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Wednesday February 04 2015, @10:43PM
If Amazon buys Best Buy, then Amazon will feel my hatred when, after purchasing something from a register that is 10 feet from the exit door, and all I did was take said bagged purchase and immediately walk the 10 feet to the exit, I now have to have my bag searched and produce my proof of purchase to some "security" person. Fortunately it is easy to produce my receipt because I didn't even have time to put it in my pocket yet.
That, and like when I'm in a bind and I need that one stupid 6-ft USB extension cable, I can go there to get my choice of the $25 Belkin brand, or the $45 Monster brand.
I hate that store. Don't even get me started about the extended warranties because that was the last straw for me. I should say that I haven't set foot in there in over 10 years (except for the time I was out of town and I needed that fucking USB extension cable), so I hope they still don't treat people like shit (but I bet they still do).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Thursday February 05 2015, @03:10AM
after purchasing something from a register that is 10 feet from the exit door, and all I did was take said bagged purchase and immediately walk the 10 feet to the exit, I now have to have my bag searched and produce my proof of purchase to some "security" person. Fortunately it is easy to produce my receipt because I didn't even have time to put it in my pocket yet.
That crap is what makes me hate shopping. Shopping in physical stores is already a pain in the ass; whatever I get usually costs more than buying online, the employees are often obnoxious and make the experience worse, and then I have to wait in line for a ridiculously long time because only one or two of the 20+ registers are open. All that, and it gets topped off with being treated like a criminal for leaving the store with a bag of merchandise? No, fuck you, I'll shop elsewhere next time.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mendax on Thursday February 05 2015, @05:49AM
They do.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 05 2015, @04:45AM
They should've embraced their niche as a destination store that hobbyists were willing to travel to, not a store that had to be in every mall. Of course they were unable to support so many expensive leases unless they were selling phones like crazy, and they weren't.