RadioShack, long derided as the “cockroach of retail,” has evaded another stomp.
The dusty electronics chain, looking every bit of its 94 years, has emerged from its steady walk toward the light with a big new rebirthing plan: Act more like a convenience store.
After the increasingly irrelevant gadget mart waved the white flag of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February, its biggest creditor, Salus Capital Partners, fought to liquidate the Shack and squeeze out whatever value the brand had left. But Standard General, a hedge fund, pushed to keep open 1,740 of RadioShack’s 4,000 stores, and a Delaware court last week approved the fund’s takeover proposal.
In its new life, the surviving Shacks plan to drop the unprofitable big-name gadgets — like cameras, laptops and tablets, which shoppers increasingly scooped up online — and rebrand itself as “the premier community destination for consumer electronics,” a national bodega of batteries and earbuds.
Think of the new Shack like the modern equivalent of a small-town corner store: Instead of milk and medicine, it will have cell-phone chargers, headphones and all the other little easily forgotten doodads that keep our Web-connected lives running. (One of the Shack’s biggest best sellers: Hearing-aid batteries.)
The company expects these little tech outposts to take off in small-town America, where online shopping and quick deliveries are not pervasive, but where gadgets remain just as much a part of life. The best-performing Shack outlets, leaders said, weren’t often in busy cities or high-rent shopping centers, but in slower areas and strip malls, where competition was low and RadioShack was perhaps the only gadget game in town.
But not all market-watchers are holding their breath for the Shack’s revival to health. The cannibalization of RadioShack’s main business model by online shopping — and the rise of smartphones as a replacement for GPS units, music players and the other gizmos that once filled the Shack’s shelves — has not changed, they argue, and won’t be diverted by the new unveiling of a convenience mart.
Only 7,500 of RadioShack’s 27,000 jobs will survive in the thinned-down chain’s surviving stores, most of which will share space with cell-phone carrier Sprint.
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