« Sheffield Saturday | Main | Papa Bob's Really Big Show »

June 19, 2005

Who's going to tech-support my Tandy 3000?

An inexplicably successful brand name has been erased from the Canadian mallscape forever, and without so much as a peep. (Well, it's news to me, anyway.) Ladies and gentlemen, Radio Shack is no more.

Had it gone out of business completely, I would have understood. The Shack's business model was pretty much the polar opposite of the prevailing big-box mentality: flood the store with greasy salespeople, sell only two kinds of everything, charge a fortune for it, and take the customer's phone number when they check out. There isn't a single goddamn thing you could get at Radio Shack that you can't get at WalMart for half the price (correction: there is one goddamn thing), and yet locations flourished — there are more than 37 in the Toronto yellow pages alone — luring in the easily impressed with cheap electronic keyboards, flashing red police lights and karaoke machines. "Looking for a computer, sir?" a high-pressure sales pitch might have gone. "You've come to the right place. We've got three of 'em!"

Radio Shack hasn't really disappeared, in fact. It has simply been rebranded as The Source by Circuit City. Logically, however, this should spell disaster. The only things the Shack had going for it were name recognition and the fact that you knew certain things would be available there: batteries; speaker wire; that little adapter thingy to hook up your computer's headphone jack to your stereo. Without name recognition, people are quickly going to realize that the same essentials are available for far less at the big boxes, and entirely anonymously to boot.

Posted by Chris Selley at June 19, 2005 06:19 PM