RadioShack Is Now Selling in Unexpected Places. Will Anyone Buy?
A brown delivery box on wheels stops outside a HobbyTown in Fairfield, Conn. A muscular, bald-headed UPS driver hops down from the seat, marches into the low-slung building, and plunks a 17-pound box next to the register. With a nod, he’s gone, and Marc Rosenblum, the store’s owner, darts over to inspect the package.
“This is it!” he said. “It’s my first RadioShack reorder.”
He pulls back the cardboard flaps to reveal a nest of curios wrapped in plastic: resistors, circuit boards, radial-lead electrolytic capacitors. The box’s 86 items could pass as robot guts. “I don’t know what this is,” Rosenblum said, holding up a ceramic bead wrapped in copper wire. “But I don’t need to know what it is to sell it.”
Rosenblum opened his HobbyTown 11 years ago. For nearly a decade, a RadioShack sat a few doors down. “I used to send people there when they came in looking for stuff like this,” he said, nodding at the box. But two years ago, that store shut down, and he started directing customers to another RadioShack across town.
Then that store closed, too, and Rosenblum did what every brick-and-mortar retailer hates to do: He told shoppers to look online.
At its peak in 2001, RadioShack had nearly 7,400 stores.But by 2017, after barely surviving its second Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the last of the company’s corporate shops shut down, and what remained were 400 independent RadioShack dealers, some located in computer repair stores and hardware stores,
