SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(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.
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(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.