

Radio Shack to start stocking Arduino, Other Goodies - vineel
http://blog.radioshack.com/2011/07/21/top-ten-diy-suggestions-from-you/

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SwellJoe
I remember watching my local Radio Shack turn into just another commodity
electronics shop, and not a very good one, at that. By the end, it was just a
place I would go if I wanted to be harassed about buying a cell phone (i.e.
never).

If Radio Shack has gotten rid of the high pressure cell phone sales people,
started hiring nerds again, and started stocking the kind of things I need
when I want to finish a project but don't want to schlep out to Fry's or wait
for an order from Amazon for, I might return. But, it's been a long time since
I've been to a Radio Shack, and I rarely think of them as the place I should
go for anything, since they trained me out of that habit.

I have to admit that carrying Arduino and other assorted tinkerers toys does
make me think maybe the company at least has some of its old spirit. I guess
we'll have to see what comes of it. Next time I pass one, I'll probably take a
stroll around...I'll know whether they've gotten good again by whether I walk
out empty handed or not.

~~~
biot
The best Radio Shack satirical slogan I've heard which sums up their decline:

    
    
      "Radio Shack: You've got questions, we've got more!"

~~~
kijiki
"Radio Shack: You've got questions, we've got batteries."

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mmaunder
This is exactly what RS needs to do. Go back to their roots. I was bitterly
disappointed a few months ago when I needed a breadboard and a few basic
components and RS didn't have half of them. I ended up going to a store in
Denver that strips old electronics and sells the components.

There are tons of electronics geeks still around from Arduino builders to car
audiophiles building custom circuits to the RC crowd - and no one serves them.
Right now half RS's inventory is available at Best Buy, Walmart and every
other store with an electronics department. There's a very profitable niche
waiting for them if they're willing to do what they do best.

Employing a few guys who know what they're doing would help too. The local ham
radio club and computer and electronics engineering faculties would be a good
place to start recruiting.

~~~
sfennell
What is the store in Denver? I would love to know another place I could go
locally for parts. (other than RS obviously)

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sp332
They're really looking to make stronger ties with the "maker" community, and
are ramping up their DIY cred by hiring Meredith Scheff
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpZ7FyjGkGk> (of NorthSkirt fame
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UktOOIK_6nU>) at Noisebridge, and Ed Lewis at
Instructables <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxRqGOSHbUg> to do ads.

~~~
adolph
At first I was like "whoah," and then I got to the last part of the sentence "
_to do ads._ " That's still cool I guess.

~~~
sp332
Yeah, I had a really hard time trying to fit all that into one sentence :)

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jff
I had heard something like this a few weeks back--that Radio Shack is going to
start stocking more components again. Discussing it with my co-workers, we
decided they probably can't make as much on the old business model any more.
Every time I've been, they try to sell me a cell phone, but there are cell
phone stores in every town already. Everything they sell is available at Best
Buy for comparable prices (with better selection), or on Amazon for far
cheaper.

I look forward to a day when perhaps Radio Shack will sell kits and electronic
components... even if it's more expensive than Digikey. There aren't really
any nationwide brick-and-mortar electronics stores, but there are plenty of
consumer electronics + cell phone stores... I'd love to see Radio Shack making
money with a new business model.

~~~
starwed
>Everything they sell is available at Best Buy

Well, I've found radioshack sells cables _far_ cheaper than the equivalent at
best buy.

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lukejduncan
really? aren't they the single most expensive place to buy cables or has the
internet spoiled me?

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protomyth
If you have to buy local, Radio Shack does have some cheaper cables. I notice
Best Buy is the worst, but Apple has ok priced cables. This is mainly in
locales without Fry's or other non-mainstream box stores. Heck, Apple has been
cheaper than Wal-Mart in cables.

Obviously, online is cheaper than any retail.

~~~
starwed
Yeah, no Frys where I live. :(

We recently got an apple store though, I would never have thought to look
there for cables. For some reason assumed they'd be overpriced... :)

~~~
CamperBob
Likely because Apple has other stuff they can make money on, while Best Buy,
having won the race to the bottom, really doesn't.

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walexander
It's great that Radio Shack is reaching out to the community and trying to
stock more DIY items, however I'm not sure if it's going to work out for them.

DIY is a small subset of the population and a smart one. They're going to buy
this stuff online, whether Radio Shack stocks it or not.

I read a AMA from a McD exec who said people are always complaining about them
needing more healthy choices. Well, whenever they add them, no one buys them.
The people who want that stuff aren't going to eat at McDonalds anyway, so why
waste inventory space.

So, sure, i'd love to be able to be able to get in my car and get an arduino
board and some servos, but I'm not sure if that one one trip a year or two
from me is worth it.

~~~
stonemetal
I don't know if it were cheap enough. I could see using them as a rush order
place, a little more markup over mail order but much faster.

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9999
Good first step for them. Next:

\- Price cables and connectors at only a slight markup from monoprice levels
(cover the overhead costs, but basically sell without any profit margin)

\- Stock every single high traffic component possible at just slightly higher
markup than digitech

\- Sell components for custom PC builds (a la Fry's, CPUs, RAM etc.), charge
slightly less than Fry's, slightly more than newegg, etc., but only stock
components that are highly recommended by Tom's Hardware and other respected
build guides. Have employees build machines with these parts and know what
will go wrong, advise customers accordingly.

So where do the big profits come from?

Service contracts.

Give free support to walk-ins, one time only, charge on subsequent support
requests. Become a non-ripoff/know-nothing version of geek squad.

~~~
chalst
> _basically sell without any profit margin_

Free one-time support is not going to make this strategy profitable.

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simonsarris
The only knowledge I have of Radio Shack is when I went in and found the
tinest of commodities - things like single LEDs and audio connectors and
flashlights - to be priced so high it was almost unreal.

Is this still true of the place? Or did I go during a bad period in their
history?

~~~
nolite
are they even still called "Radio Shack"? or is it "The Shack" now? They use
to be the most amazing place ever, and would supply components and things to
keep you busy beyond your wildest imagination. and at cheap prices too! Some
kids went to the mall for the arcade. Radio Shack was my arcade. But that was
decades ago..

~~~
Vivtek
No, they're still called Radio Shack. Not that they bear much resemblance
nowadays. I saw (and programmed) my first TRS-80 there. Ah, halcyon days - now
they're a phone store and the bookstore in the same mall - the bookstore where
I bought _Gödel, Escher, Bach_ and _I Will Fear No Evil_ on the same day - is
dead.

We need new cool stuff. The old stuff's all sad.

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markbao
Totally serious question: how is Radio Shack still in business?

I would love to see them go back to basics, with drawers upon drawers of
components and wires and stuff. Seems like nobody likes doing that stuff on
their own nowadays.

~~~
yellowbkpk
When I worked at RadioShack (several years ago) there was a near-constant
stream of people coming in to purchase cellphones. As an employee I got a
fairly good cash bonus every time I sold one, so I imagine RadioShack made a
LOT of money off cellphones and accessories. For example: The cellphone sale
itself was $X cash to me but accessories were $2X, $3X, or $4X as more were
purchased. A brand new featurephone with 3 accessories and a warranty netted
me roughly $75-100 cash for the sale. The warranty was actually good, too. We
sent lots of different kinds of phones back in a re-usable plastic box to a
repair facility somewhere. People seemed to trust Radio Shack more for
cellphone purchases than the brand stores across the road.

However, that was back when Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T stores weren't as easy
to find as they are now. I imagine they're not able to attract nearly as much
cellphone traffic as they did before.

~~~
kabdib
The last time I was in an RS it was for a capacitor. I found the bin (in the
back of the store), dug out what I needed, and went to pay for it.

The salesman just sneered at me and didn't even trouble to ring it up; he just
gave it to me and waved me out the door.

I haven't been back.

I'll stop by one this morning, I'm curious if they've changed at all.

~~~
oconnore
Since when is free stuff an insult?

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cpenner461
I hope this works for them, I've been getting into Arduino and other
electronics lately and would be nice to have a local place to pick stuff at
the last minute. I went into our local shack a few months ago to pick up a
piezo transducer to use as a pickup in a cigar box guitar I was making with
the kids. It was dead when we got there, so all of the salesmen descended on
me asking if I needed help. So I said I needed a piezo transducer, and they
all looked at me like I had 3 heads. "Do you mean a transistor?" :) I asked
them to just show me where the transistors were and I'd take a look around.
Sure enough down in one of the bottom drawers of components was a label "Piezo
Transducer" - bingo! As I checked out a few minutes later the manager was in
awe that he had such a thing in his store. Surprisingly the same store
actually had a decent (though small) selection of other supplies (hookup wire,
breadboards, blank circuit boards, etc).

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hrabago
I arrived in the US in 1998. Prior to that, I remember reading good things
about Radio Shack. When I finally found a branch, I browsed inside to see what
the big deal was. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I remember leaving
very disappointed. It seemed to be all custom gadgets (PDAs, RCs, etc),
cellphones, and expensive batteries. Reading comments here of what Radio Shack
_used to be_ at least clarifies why it got good buzz in the past.

~~~
ghaff
I think Radio Shack gets the benefit of a lot of at least somewhat rose-tinted
memories. Yes, they were a source for various electronics components at a time
when there weren't a lot of sources for such things. And you had a decent shot
at finding a knowledgable employee. However, for as long as I remember Radio
Shack--which takes us back to the mid-1970s--their shelves were also filled
with all manner of mostly overpriced and poor quality audio gear and the like.
So they've been something of a mixed bag for a very long time.

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rmason
I am a ham and as a kid I used to visit the local Radio Shack weekly. For a
while they even stocked ham radios. I haven't been in one for over ten years.

I just attended an all day Arduino workshop a few weeks back and it was a
blast. Talking afterwards it seemed everyones number one request was to get a
local vendor to stock some of the more common Arduino parts. I sure hope Radio
Shack is listening.

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brianbreslin
That's awesome! I remember 20 years ago radio shack was amazing for me as a
child hobbyist. Now I only go there for obscure sized batteries (so once every
2 years). Let's hope they can revive the original spirit.

~~~
xinsight
As a kid in Canada, I had this radio shack battery club card, where I could
get a free battery every month. I always got the 9V size, which was perfect
for little projects, handheld games or just sticking on your tongue. Sad to
see what the shack became, but that little promo bought them a ton of
goodwill.

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krashidov
I wonder if Radio Shack is going to implement a DIY education system or
something. I don't know how to build stuff with Arduino but if they had a
little kiosk that showed how you could set up and program a hello world (led
blinking) in Arduino I'm sure it could interest some people who had no idea
what Arduino is.

~~~
jfischer
Back in the day, I learned a lot about basic electronics and computer design
from their old "Engineer's Notebooks" (e.g.
[http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=108524...](http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=10852491&clickid=prod_cs))
and some books they sold about TI's line of microprocessors. If they wrote new
books for Arduino, that would be a great start. I might even play around with
hardware again (haven't touched it since I got my EE degree).

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chalst
Just to quibble: Radio Shack have only acted on two of those points, and not
the top Arduino point. They say _we’re actively working on every single one of
these_ , but that might not actually mean they will stock Arduinos in their
regular stores.

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apalmblad
While great news for those who can go to RadioShack, I'm somewhat disappointed
that where I live, Vancouver, Canada, Radio Shack's have been replaced by "The
Source". NOt that I was really a fan of what Radio Shack had become, but I've
got good memories of Radio Shack from it being the only electronics store as I
grew up in a smaller town. If Radio Shack is really trying to offer hobbyists
more, than it's too bad that their retails stores are no longer open up here.
[Checked Wikipedia, CircuitCity owned RadioShack, changed the name to "The
Source", then sold off the Canadian operations as part of bankruptcy
proceedings.]

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inportb
Oh man... it would make Radio Shack awesome again. I might actually visit one
of those stores on the way home. The parts might be more expensive, but if it
saves me a trip to China, I'd do it.

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daimyoyo
Does this mean that Radio Shack will stock the Android Open Accessory Kit?
Because I've been looking all around the net and I can't find a site I trust
that carries all the boards.

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breckinloggins
They don't seem to have the store space for all these things unless other
things are going to go. Is this just in the catalog?

~~~
marshray
Resistors and capacitors don't need to take up that much space. Heck, I
remember when they used to hang them on the walls in blister packs. Drawers
seem a lot more sensible.

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rbanffy
Now, they could bring back the TRS-80 name with a line of non-PC-compatible
computers ;-)

~~~
marshray
Heck yeah. I bet an Arduino would be fast enough to emulate them. They should
make a miniature 3" high TRS-80 Model I kit with all the old software library
included.

~~~
rbanffy
That would be cool, but I guess there would be cheaper ways to do it - a
TRS-80 CoCo is more or less as complex as a C64 and that requires just an
FPGA. You could build the whole TRS-80 line inside one chip.

~~~
marshray
The point is not to do it the cheapest possible way, the point is to do it in
a way that appeals to hackers, makers, and other tinkerers.

Still, an FPGA could be even cooler than an Arduino if it were reprogrammable.

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jc4p
Will they continue trying to sell me batteries and cell phones with simple
overpriced electronics components?

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haydenevans
Finally, a reason to go to Radio Shack

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sliverstorm
I wonder if there exists a chance they will notice their current downward
trend, look back at their heyday, and do an about-face?

~~~
ddw
That's what I'm wondering, but they are still heavily promoting cell phones
like the recent HTC Evo for Evo 3D trade-in. I don't think they can be a
relevant DIY shop and standard electronic store at the same time. All of the
stores I've been don't have the room, not to mention the staff.

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georgieporgie
I go to Radio Shack several times per year. I would be absolutely thrilled if
they would just pay attention to what's in their parts bins and actually keep
them stocked.

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logjam
The last time I bought something at Radio Shack (probably a battery), they
asked me for my phone number, then made an issue out of it when I would not
give it.

I haven't been back.

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Bud
Here's my anecdote about the decline of Radio Shack:

I went there to get a USB cable the other day. The only normal male-male USB
cable they were stocking had gold-plated ends (for reasons unknown), a big
non-standard bulge in the connector at one end, and a ludicrously grandiose
package, festooned with details about how this was a USB "transfer" cable,
specially designed to transfer data between Windows computers.

For this reason, apparently, it was necessary to price it at $40. That's forty
dollars. For a USB cable.

I laughed in the clerk's face while he was explaining to me about the
"transfer cable" nonsense, told him he just lost a customer forever, and left.

~~~
davidjade
Could it be that you picked up one of these?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_Transfer_Cable>

Maybe overpriced but it was likely not just a USB cable if it was called a
"transfer" cable.

~~~
Bud
To me, that's no excuse. I have a better idea: sell a regular USB cable for
$2, which is what they should cost, and design your OS so computers can talk
to each other without having to build gold-plated $40 SuperWindowsTransfer
versions of commodity cables. It's outrageous to me that such a product even
exists, outrageous that it was $40, and outrageous that Radio Shack, of all
places, could not carry a reasonably-priced USB cable. I would have even been
ok with a certain price premium; I don't expect a retailer to match Monoprice.
But $40 for the only USB cable in the shop? Please.

~~~
georgieporgie
Uh. That weird USB cable makes possible things which aren't designed into the
USB hardware spec. It's the USB equivalent of a null-modem cable on RS232,
something which cost quite a lot when purchased over the counter.

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marshray
It may be not even be correct to call it a cable. Doesn't it need a CPU in it?

~~~
CamperBob
Correct. It makes for an interesting product-design case study -- the
manufacturer probably thought they were being clever by making an intelligent
peripheral look and behave like a 'cable', but the work went unappreciated
("This is just a stupid USB cable. Why are they charging $40 for it?")

