RadioShack Needs To Bring It Back Old School

You can clearly see from the above stock chart that Radio Shack has not enjoyed immense success in a long time. (I'm not going to count the 99 to 01 years where everyone's stock went up) But what happened? How did RadioShack fail to jump onto the whole do-it-yourself/PC moddding/hardware-hacking-O'Reilly Make band wagon?

Back in the day, in my neck of the woods, meaning outside of California, RadioShack was the only place to go to get your hardware fix on. You needed a 10K resistor? They got it. You need some soldering wire? They got it. A PS/2 keyboard converter for your old motherboard? They got it. RadioShack helped me finish many of my DIY projects with their unique product focus on the hobbyist.

RadioShack failed to see the long tail. They lost their focus on their core products for their core customer - the hobbyist. Yes, there was definitely a downturn of consumer DIY activity pre-web but the long tail predicted it was still there and would come back strong.

For the last few years going into RadioShack was a disheartening experience. Every visit to a local store was like watching the corner bakery decline into a graffiti ridden crumbled existence. For a while I thought they were going to turn into a solely cell phone distributor. You can read about the troubled years of RadioShack on the always accurate Wikipedia.

Today I went into a local RadioShack looking for a wired USB mouse. (You would be surprised at how many stores don't carry these in stock, cough, cough, Best Buy) And they had one. The store had a new layout since I had been in last. There was a huge wall with all sorts of components for over clocking your PC. The electric component draw was well laid out between resistors and LED's. And then I noticed the flyer that pointed me to this link: Do Stuff. RadioShack shows you how one of their customers made a stationary digital camera stand to take pictures of a deer in the woods without disturbing the deer.

Hopefully this is an upswing for RadioShack. Hopefully RadioShack is getting back to its roots, getting back to its core customers that fled to the Best Buys and Circuit City's - the hobbyists. I would love to see RadioShack embrace the DIY community and provide rich content for the community - blogs, special newsletters - gasp - maybe even local clubs. They could really do some interesting things with social networking but with real people in real places.

So I'm pulling for you RadioShack and I'm hoping you're coming back to your roots.

It's like they always say, 'There's no school like the old school.'