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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: 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.