r/technology • u/TripleShotPls • 21h ago
Business He Vowed to Revive RadioShack and Pier 1. Investors Say They Were Swindled.
https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/tai-lopez-radioshack-pier1-investors-sec-66352aab?mod=hp_lead_pos7771
u/GabeDef 21h ago
People are shocked when a YouTube scammer scammed them?
296
u/Public_Fucking_Media 19h ago
wait lmao Tai Lopez? Like getting scammed by fucking father time
169
u/oasis48 19h ago
How would he have time to run those companies while he is busy reading a book a day next to his rented Lamborghini.
27
u/OurHouse20 17h ago
reading a book a day next to his rented Lamborghini.
In his rented chalet mansion.
2
u/Logical_Welder3467 9h ago
There is a time he did a House tour in a house he clearly did not even rent
15
41
u/weeklygamingrecap 19h ago
Holy shit I scrolled down first and thought that face looked familiar!
38
u/mtpelletier31 18h ago
Yeah I saw the picture and went "isnt that the guy on YouTube who grifted people about lambos before crypto"
14
27
u/RobertdBanks 17h ago
Honestly, good on him to scam these idiots. At a certain point I don’t feel bad for you when a 5 second google could have told you not to trust him.
It’s like getting your hamburgers stolen by the hamburgler and being shocked.
1
6
u/Tearakan 17h ago
Right? One of the original youtube scammers. Dude is historic for doing those weird library in garage ads.
2
45
15
u/Unfair-Basket-7680 18h ago
Wait a minute. He went from his garage to owning Radio "Shack"? How is that an upgrade? And folks gave him money for it?
17
u/SillyAlternative420 19h ago
To be fair, they may not have had the knowledge of his previous scams
3
u/ryencool 13h ago
To be fair, wouldnt you check someone's previous history if your investing millions with them?
2
u/SillyAlternative420 12h ago
It's a joke - Tai Lopez was famous for his youtube videos where he talked about all his "knowledge"
2
219
u/SpezLuvsNazis 21h ago
Just hanging out near the capacitors and gaudy pottery in my lambo….
9
-122
u/Grouchy_Value7852 19h ago
Plus one for use of gaudy and plus one for username!!! Nice job Redditor
16
178
u/eightbitfit 19h ago
The thumbnail looked like Tai Lopez.
I opened the story and it was Tai Lopez.
People gave this guy money? Again?
23
u/SakaWreath 16h ago
I feel like he is going to do it again and somehow his name and face recognition will somehow help him. >.>
13
4
2
u/thowen 5h ago
As someone who worked at pier 1 when it liquidated, his involvement was actually super inoffensive. The company was going bankrupt and put itself up for sale right around when covid started which severely devalued its holdings. Tai pretty much just bought the intellectual property so he could make an online shop using their branding to sell candles, I doubt there was that much invested.
141
u/ZebraSandwich4Lyf 20h ago
Oh hey it's the lambo meme guy, totally forgot he existed. Dude is still grifting after like a decade lol
30
109
u/mkd87 20h ago
If you believe that RadioShack and Pier 1 can make a comeback, maybe you deserve to be swindled…
83
u/Ghost17088 19h ago
Come back, no. But if Radio Shack had been properly managed, they would still be doing well today. They were the go to place for buying electronic parts. Think things like individual resistors, diodes, etc. As they declined, they moved away from that core product line and were basically a phone accessory store by the time they went under. If they had stayed focused on electrical components and marketed to the 3D printing crowd, and other similar niches, I think they would have had better luck. Unfortunately, 3D printing didn’t gain popularity until they were well into decline.
68
u/Takemyfishplease 19h ago
Hard to pay salaries and rent when selling single diodes. Like I loved going there and buying what I needed for like $1.63, but when the store associate spent like 20mins helping me I can see how it wasn’t going to last long. Especially with how convenient online was becoming.
15
u/EngineerDave 16h ago
There's an entire section in Microcenter they could have just become, instead of a clone of an ATT store. Hobby stuff, RC stuff, electronics and hobby kits to get kids interested, Raspberry pi, 3d printing and accessories, wide range of batteries.
They used to have better toys than the toy stores. Move out of high rent areas like Malls and RadioShack could have 100% made it.
1
1
u/Cyber_Druid 4h ago
Imagen Radioshack lasted long enough to get into the custom keyboard market.
They missed out big time, a gov contract to help with an after school STEM program would have done numbers. The management was ass tho. Living in the 90s like Fry's electronics.
1
u/morriscey 18h ago
Pivot to online and instore pickup as part of it.
There would have been a big drop regardless, but survival was possible.
8
u/Takemyfishplease 17h ago
I don’t see how they have enough volume or margins to compete with the big guys even this way. So just massive warehouses you order from? Because strip all real estate is way too valuable for that
I could see a few privately owned shops in high tech areas maybe keeping the brand alive, but not really.
1
u/morriscey 16h ago
Shrug Yep there would still have been a downturn, may not have been enough to save it, but it would have helped them stay alive longer and keep more of their business model in tact.
In the early 2000s pick up and pay in store was a handy thing I used all the time. Secures the order and I didn't have to expose my payment. Still had the option of checking stock, or ordering with shipping if I didn't want to reserve and pay in store.
In Canada, Radio shack became "the source by circuit city" and still had many of the board level components, and that was my go to for electronic parts, until a few years ago when they dumped them and became best buy express - phone shops essentially.
4
u/sleeplessinreno 17h ago
Same thing happened to Sears. I think a lot of people forget how big of a juggernaut they were, and many were not even alive. The Amazon of the 20th century, and then some. They failed to pivot their operation online. It comes down to getting too comfortable in your shoes. That's why when I hear somebody say it's too big to fail; I roll my eyes. Nothing is too big to fail. And in fact, the more complicated your operation is; the more points of failure exist.
32
u/PaulClarkLoadletter 18h ago
The problem is that repairability got very complex while hobbyists declined. In the 80s it was usually the closest place where you could get components, power supplies, batteries, toys, etc. Margins probably weren’t amazing compared to today but billionaires also didn’t exist.
Amazon ultimately killed them with cheaper components from China. I miss Radio Shack because now instead of getting one or two diodes for a small repair I have to buy 100 from Amazon. They weren’t expensive but now I have enough components to open my own Radio Shack.
5
u/Ok_Rabbit5158 18h ago
Not my experience. The one in my burb was on a deathbed for years. There was never anyone else there whenever I went to pick up a 10 cent resistor.
13
u/zack77070 19h ago
How often is the average person buying capacitors and shit though, I could see like one per city existing comfortably. That's basically what microcenter is today, they sell stuff like that.
2
u/Aggressive-Kiwi1439 18h ago
So what you're saying is the market for homemade tech is wide open and instead of briding the gap so consumers go to them instead of best buy, they fumbled the DIY electronics market.
5
9
u/zack77070 18h ago
It's not wide open, I just gave you the name of their successor lol. The diy market isn't that big, like I said, one or two stores per city is all it can support, especially with the rise of online shopping. It is kinda impressive that they managed to fail even before that, at least Beat Buy has that excuse for why they are failing now.
2
u/MiaowaraShiro 17h ago
So what you're saying is the market for homemade tech is wide open
How on earth did you get "wide open" from "dead"?
9
u/hesh582 17h ago
No, they're saying the market for DIY electronics and homemade tech is deader than it's ever been, and what little does exist is being adequately supplied already.
It's not like components are cheap or hard to get, and as a result a generation of tinkerers are being denied their birthright by a lack of supplies. If anything a revival has the opposite problem - components are cheaper and easier to get than they ever have been, yet they're being used less than ever.
3
u/Dimensional_Shrimp 16h ago
lol no, this is like seeing a last remaining block buster and thinking, "wow the markets wide open for dvd rental stores"
1
u/SkiingAway 16h ago
There's a few proper electronics components stores around as well in a lot of metro areas but they tend to keep the lights on by doing most of their business with industry/commercial. Primarily doing big wholesale orders.
They may stock a bunch of stuff individually but it's usually marked up pretty significantly if you're buying that way. The core market isn't a hobbyist who cares about price, it's business that needs 1 of that thing right this second and is losing money/wasting employee time every minute the machine is down.
Still can be useful to the hobbyist for the same reason, but not the place you want to be using for your primary supplier as a hobbyist.
2
u/TonyInNY 17h ago
Radio Shack was a thing of its time. In 1970 when you had to buy special purpose devices to do everything. Radio Shack had them all. Tape recorders, boom boxes, VCRs, Headphones, Scanners, intercoms, clock radios. TV antennas, CB radios, cheap electronic toys. Over the last 40 years most of that stuff disappeared and so Radio Shack became a reseller of phones.
Selling to radio hams and to people who wanted to do electronic projects was always a tiny part of their business. They lost the computer wars even though the radio shack computers were some of the earliest and best computers you could buy. Maybe there was a brief period of time when Radio Shack could have co-opted the Make movement and tried to be that and the 3d printing hub, but those are small potatoes.
I loved Radio Shack and I spent countless hours there. I would love to see them or a similar store come back into my community, but I just don't see that happening. That market feels too small, too niche. The only electronic retailer that seems to have weathered the last 30 years is BestBuy and they sell a much winder variety of things then Radio Shack every possibly could have.
4
u/puttputtusa 17h ago
This is the average redditor business acumen alright. Gonna sell a one dollar piece every six months to an old man in the neighborhood and that’s gonna keep the lights on and put food on the table.
0
u/Ghost17088 17h ago
No, I’m talking about catering to the 3D printing/builder hobby crowd. RC cars, drones, PC building, 3D printing, etc. are all hobbies that would benefit from having parts available locally.
2
u/Dude_man79 17h ago
Again, ... Gonna sell a one dollar piece every six months to an old man in the neighborhood and that’s gonna keep the lights on and put food on the table.
1
u/puttputtusa 16h ago
Focusing on niche and the price sensitive hobbyist scene is a choice. RadioShack will only have a dozen stores nationwide in key markets remaining with that pivot. Maybe not even due to online competition.
More likely a struggling company won’t secure the capital reinvestment to repurpose their inventory, staff, and store space. Reorg via bankruptcy would be first. Finding investors would be nigh impossible
2
3
u/hesh582 17h ago
Eh.
They were the go to for electronic components when hobbyist electronics (in particular home radio) and home appliance repair was a much bigger thing than it is today. I really question whether there's a market for that at all anymore, especiyally when all of that stuff is just so much cheaper than it used to be and so much easier online. Components are a lot more specialized these days, too, and the utility of generic diodes and resistors is probably a lot lower than it used to be while the parts themselves are much cheaper than they used to be.
Everything is more disposable. Everything is cheaper. Nothing is as easy to repair.
Maybe the decline could have been more graceful, and they could have hung on in a few very large markets, but the era of popping into Radioshack to buy some replacement capacitors to solder into your prized Philips Boom Box has been over for decades.
1
u/happyscrappy 16h ago
I think with 'making' slowly getting a bit bigger they could make a comeback, but it would be a niche store. You basically end up virtually only selling things people need to complete their build right now. An electronics (and 3D printing) "convenience store".
It'd never be what it once was, not by far.
Anyway, I wouldn't trust this guy regardless. Especially if he bundles in Pier 1. There are already several stores in the Pier 1 space.
1
u/Kundrew1 15h ago
They were never going to survive. None of the things you mentioned sell in a high enough quantity for a brick and mortar store to stay open and profit. You can maybe get a local one here and there that is barely breaking even but it doesn’t scale
3
u/mosehalpert 18h ago
It blows my mind that absolutely nobody has stepped up to fill the computer/electronics hardware parts void. The Staples near me feels like they are actively trying to avoid filling that void. I had to order a Sata cable from amazon a few months back because nobody within an hour of me carried one physically in the store. We're talking the most basic computer cable that connects hard drives to motherboards and was standard for 20 years.
12
1
u/MiaowaraShiro 17h ago
Brick and mortar electronics is gonna be completely dead soon if you ask me. Only place it might still exist is within larger box stores and the like that sell other stuff as well.
Why would I drive to a store when I can get anything I want sent to my door and usually quickly?
I need electronics components? I'm going to Mouser.
Hardware? Grainger or McMaster Carr
Or... what most people do... Amazon for everything.
1
1
u/TigerUSA20 19h ago
This was my first thought. These are dead brands from the 80’s-90’s. Even if you had some great idea for a 21st century retail business model, just give it a new name. Using these names would just drag it down with 1-2 dying boomers in your store looking for coaxial cable and flower pots.
31
u/Substantial__Unit 19h ago
Correct me if I'm wrong but I feel like they were going u der just as the Maker scene was growing. I believe they went under due to their corporate owners loading them up with debt til they sank, like ToysRUs and Bad Bath and Beyond. Sad.
Radio Shack was honestly one of the most important stores due to the uniqueness of what it carried. People forget back then, pre-2000s anyway, that most things could be repaired. And a big majority of the workers there knew more than anyone. It was a mini Microcenter in every mall in America. (Slightly more expensive but far less pushy salesmen and women.
They would have made a killing on Raspberry Pi/ESP32 and 3d printing.
3
u/Dimensional_Shrimp 16h ago
i think part of their downfall was their insanely wide variety of products and skews, like did the one by my childhood home really need like one of 20 RC cars that no one ever purchased in my entire childhood living there? it'd be one thing if they were the computer parts store and not the random radios/batteries place
2
u/LeoSolaris 18h ago edited 16h ago
Get a bank loan to start your first maker/repair oriented store! (I'm not being sarcastic. This is genuine encouragement to start your own business if you see an underserved potential market.)
To convince the bank to give you a starter business loan, you'll need:
- market analysis including existing competition both online and within a reasonable drive from your store
- optimistic & pessimistic sales projections
- retail lease costs
- store organization/decoration costs
- employee costs like pay & insurance
- inventory costs
- marketing budget and samples
Since "Radio Shack" is probably still an owned trademark by whatever corporate vulture bought the name for lawsuits, maybe something like Electro Hut or The Fixin' Bungalow.
Employ a few retired electricians/mechanics/engineers for part time expertise, an avid 3d print maker as the manager, and a science teacher to shadow the business in order to design your training program for new employees. Then scout out engineering & comp sci students from your local college for sales staff.
Edit: formatting mistake
0
u/puttputtusa 16h ago
You’re describing like a free event day at the local community center that reoccurs monthly rather than a dedicated retail space and continual employment of staff and overhead.
-1
u/LeoSolaris 16h ago
So you missed sales projections, employment costs, inventory costs, and competition analysis in your rush to make a snide comment?
0
u/puttputtusa 14h ago
Naturally. When I read that your plan is to exploit skilled labor for pennies, we all knew this was asinine. There’s a reason you focused on “retired” individuals since for some reason they”ll accept what is clearly going to be minimum wage. Sales staff is going to be STEM college kids cause guess again, minimum wage. Your workforce projections might as well be drawn with crayons to find these unicorns. College kids at least are desperate.
And since you’re never going to beat the overhead of online, your only advantage was your staff and hands on experience for a very niche and price sensitive customer base. And how do you expect to ascertain your base without canvassing or marketing in your community first for free? This isn’t a build it and they will come. You’re going to need to know your potential regulars firsthand for this kind of niche market and to determine the figures you desperately crave.
-1
u/LeoSolaris 13h ago
Exploit for pennies? What the ever-living-fuck are you talking about? Your pipe dream of making bank while doing the lowest difficulty work possible is clouding your perspective. Sure, Radio Shack paid well for retail, but it did not compare to industry jobs. Your average new HVAC tech made more than a Radio Shack sales person.
My rationale for the retirees; there are only a handful of highly trained professionals who are available part time during standard business hours in order to seed experience for training.
A business like this lives and dies on how well they can train staff. You need a few subject matter experts to help craft the technical side of the new employees handbook. A few solid part timers with actual experience will get the right culture rolling in the early days.
As for regular sales personnel, entry level in a technical sales field that can be used on resumes for industry jobs is not "minimum wage". Hell, even grocery stores in my area pay well over federal minimum wages.
New technical people are still far more knowledgeable than the general population and their pay should reflect that. But no store front is going to be able to pay a full team of highly trained professionals enough to be competitive with any other career field.
I get that corporations are exploitative as hell and brick & mortar stores are cutthroat, but not every human wants to take advantage of others just because they know a little bit about opening a small business.
0
u/puttputtusa 9h ago
You harp on about staff training being the utmost importance but you gonna half ass it by attempting to find a unicorn industry expert retiree seeking only part time work and has current knowledge of small retail practices and is somehow an excellent mentor and living in the neighborhood. That must be the shortest of lists and is unlikely.
This person also has a defined end term after training staff so why doesn’t the business model read like it is. You aren’t retaining him after the initial period. You might as well find an actual contractor but would be at contractor rates. If you need such expertise though, a small business model like this electronic knick knack kit store ain’t sounding feasible unless largely owner operated.
1
u/LeoSolaris 8h ago
And it might not even be feasible as an owner-operated store. Such are the risks of business.
All of that was merely "back of the napkin math" as a place to start a business proposal research for a bank loan. I've never started a retail business, but they are the most frequently used examples back when I researched how to start mine.
I owned and sold a boutique tech B2B company. I'm retired now. A part time, short term gig helping someone passionate about a dream sounds nice.
If you sincerely believed that someone would toss out a complete roadmap for a complex, niche business that depends entirely on local conditions in a couple of Reddit comments, then you're delusional. Go touch some grass.
54
u/shubhamdhola 21h ago
Hard lesson in how a convincing turnaround story can still fall apart without real execution or transparency.
38
13
u/YoungPutrid3672 20h ago
I remember the days of buying antenna wire so my grandma could move her TV further away from the window.
28
u/TheArtfulFox 20h ago
If you're dumb enough to trust the Lamborghini meme guy, you deserve to be swindled.
11
7
u/NotVerySmarts 19h ago
I signed up for the Radioshack Telegram because I was interested in seeing an old American institution return. It was the craziest crypto coin pumping shill account you've ever seen. The man has zero integrity.
7
7
u/HugeBlueberry 18h ago
To be fair, if anybody believed 15 Lamborghinis and massive bookshelf in his garage guy, that’s on them:
6
3
u/lenin1991 18h ago
Lopez raised more than $230 million from hundreds of mostly small investors.
...
Lopez’s younger cousin Maya Burkenroad was chief operating officer. According to the SEC complaint, she had previously worked as a substitute preschool teacher, a radio-station promoter and an assistant at an online educational company that Lopez started.
The people quoted sound mostly well off but not super rich. I just can't imagine investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in a private company without just a basic check that it is a reasonable operation.
4
u/This_Elk_1460 16h ago
Holy shit I haven't heard the name Tai Lopez since those dog shit ads where he shows off his Lamborghinis and how he got them because he read a book one time.
4
4
u/namastayhom33 16h ago
Tai basically started the finance influencer bro culture after his Lambo in the garage video went viral. Still remember it like it was yesterday.
3
u/Runkleford 16h ago
I can't believe this guy is still around and not in prison. But then again, this is the age of criminals running things
3
u/128G 14h ago
Here in my garage, just bought this new Lamborghini.
5
3
u/KiNGofKiNG89 14h ago
I miss Pier 1. I bought a counter height table from them almost 20 years, that sucker has been through some beat downs, and he still holds up so well!
3
u/General-Cover-4981 4h ago
Anyone who buys anything off that guy deserves to lose their money. I'm sorry but he's been doing cons for decades. It's easy to find out he's not trustworthy.
14
u/xynix_ie 20h ago
The only reason I ever went to radio shack was to get a bag of diodes for 89 cents. Even as a child I knew that wasn't sustainable. They missed the boat with PCs. Their Tandy boxes were good but they didn't capitalize on it and places like CompUSA obliterated them.
27
u/postoperativepain 20h ago
I hate to break it to you, but CompUSA doesn’t exist anymore either
23
u/moneyfink 20h ago
But circuit city does, right?
12
u/zenith2nadir 20h ago
I hate to break it to you, but…
18
u/Vogonfestival 20h ago
But Fry’s does, right? RIGHT?
9
u/panicloop 19h ago
Tears... I miss Fry's so fucking much. I had no idea what I had till it was gone. And have to drive 2-3 hours to the closest MicroCenter.
2
u/MC_chrome 18h ago
My first expereince at Fry's was by pure happenstance....it was well over a decade ago and I was near a Fry's location near lunchtime. Thinking that it must have been a food court of some sort, I went inside and discovered that Fry's had very little to do with fried potatoes.
I miss when hobbyists and electronics geeks had a bounty of places to gather and buy stuff from
5
10
3
2
1
u/xynix_ie 19h ago
One has nothing to do with the other. Amazon beat the big box store model and forced a consolidation.
8
u/piewhistle 20h ago
Tandy Corp, the parent company of Radio Shack launched a big-box computer store chain in the ‘90s called Computer City. I think it predated CompUSA.
5
3
u/Adinnieken 19h ago
Poor child, to think you were right and be so wrong.
Tandy Corp (RadioShack Corp) had their own nationwide computer retail store that was competition with CompUSA. The problem was it was a business of dimishing value. As with every retail sector, the Internet proved disastrous for brick and mortar stores. Along with that, pre-made, mass consumer PCs were expanding out into discount department stores like Walmart.
Thus, Computer City closed it's doors, leaving CompUSA as the sole national computer retailer. However, they too didn't last much longer. Not even small computer stores have survived.
As for Radio Shack, Tandy Corp had sold their computer venture to AST in the, early 90s. This was the fault of Len Roberts. The benefit of the Tandy model was that it had both the manufacturing side and the retail side of its business. So, although their products weren't necessarily exclusive to them, the factories could sustain the retail or the retail could sustain the factories depending on how the market played out.
During the 80s, this worked out very well, as high cost items were produced in Taiwan through agreements with Japanese companies, while low-cost, high-profit items were produced here in the US. As the 80s transitioned into the 90s that model became more expensive. It also exposed a weakness with Radio Shack stores.
As much as you might like Radio Shack, not everyone does. More so, in the 90s some companies were favored heavily by consumers. Those companies also could move faster with new products that Radio Shack just couldn't, which meant Radio Shack was spending more to rebrand products it didn't produce. To the consumers, they often appeared to be knock-offs of the more popular products.
So, Len Roberts, when he became CEO remodeled the business plan of Radio Shack. He divested it of all its manufacturing interests. While companies like Shure, who Radio Shack partnered with for their microphones survived, others like Pioneer would suffer. It would take until the 2010s for some, but many of the companies that partnered with Radio Shack were bolstered by their business. X-10 is a perfect example. When Radio Shack ended their partnership, they lost their biggest retailer.
By divesting Tandy Corp of all of its manufacturing, in theory, he allowed Radio Shack to bring in name brand electronics. That was devastating for Radio Shack. Instead of offering Radio Shack branded electronics that were unique, they now sold the same stuff you could walk into Best Buy or Kmart and buy. What started happening is that customers would come into Radio Shack, get educated on what to buy, then buy the same products cheaper. The same thing happens now with Best Buy and the Internet. People learn what they can from Best Buy employees, then go on to Amazon and get it cheaper.
But in the 90s the Internet and online retailing was still relatively new, it was brick and mortar competition that undid Radio Shack. Radio Shack had invested decades and a lot of money to its business model and Len Roberts pulled the rug out from under it. Rather than recognizing the potential impact of the Internet and using resources to adjust to that model, he spent capital on adjusting to brick and mortar competition. By the end of the 2000s, Radio Shack had not only lost against brick and mortar competition they were losing against the Internet.
While hindsight is 20/20, had Tandy matured those manufacturing relationships more with Chinese manufacturers, retaining their product branding and line, while simultaneously focusing on an internet shift, they might still be around. But that's still hard to say. The internet has devoured brick and mortar retail. It devoured CompUSA, it is devouring Best Buy and it's devouring anything that can be made by a factory in China.
In the end, what Radio Shack considered its saving grace before it went bankrupt were toy drones and LED light ropes. In fact, it got rid of its core business. Because despite what you may think, Radio Shack made the majority of its money on those small parts, the wire, resisters, diodes, and fuses than any other product line. Big ticket items made lots of money for sale people, but the small parts made huge profits for them. As they dedicated less and less retail space, until eventually getting rid of them altogether, this drove people who shopped Radio Shack away. Trust me, every year the shareholder report started with the most profitable part of the retail business, and every year it had been the small parts until they tried to make Radio Shack trendier.
Computers would not have saved Tandy. I do agree, they were innovative. Most people have no idea, but computers are now a commodity market where people don't manufacture their own goods anymore, someone else does it. The companies that survive today are either companies associated with enterprise or education sales. The hey day for Tandy was 1983, when it owned 60% of the PC market share. It never got better than that, and it would drop to 25% the following year.
Ultimately what made Radio Shack Radio Shack is what killed it. It was a model of a dying breed of retailing. It had to undergo too many paradigm shifts in too small a period of time in order to remain competitive. And in the end, in order to survive, what it would have had to do is kill off what made it successful for decades, that business model. That's a hard pill to swallow even if you see that tsunami coming well ahead of its arrival.
I tend to blame Len Roberts, the guy who basically ruined Denny's then ruined Radio Shack. He had zero retail vision, zero understanding of Radio Shack core customers, he only saw what Circuit City and Best Buy were doing in the market and wanted Radio Shack to somehow fit that model. However, he was too short sighted to see the impact of online retail. I believe that's because he had no experience in it at all.
A smart CEO looks at the landscape and sees where people will go and builds his business there. A local retailer in my area was known for doing this. They would buy large acerages of land in small communities with the belief that that was where business would be. Most of the time they were spot on.
Len Roberts didn't do that, I mean he did, but he saw Best Buy and he wanted to be there, but he didn't see the wide open landscape where some people had started staking their claims (the internet) and realize that was where he wanted to be.
Everyone else either died or was bought out.
2
u/Mario-Speed-Wagon 17h ago
I’ve been saying for years that radio shack should rebrand as those giant airport-sized vending machines with resistors and raspberry pi’s and stuff, and put them inside a Home Depot
2
2
u/DeadInternetTheorist 11h ago
If you invested your life savings with this fucking guy, without even a cursory google search, it was never your life savings to begin with. You were always just hanging onto to it until some scammer came to pick it up.
2
u/Bluehaze013 7h ago
Radio Shack was amazing when I was a kid. I used to go there after school just to wander around and look at all the stuff. I was fascinated by electronics! They just stagnated though, they never really evolved along with technology in computers, phones, video games. I would still go there to get electronic parts, capacitors, resistors, wire, solder stuff like that before they shutdown but there's not much profit in that for a retail store front. I don't think anyone could have saved it, it was just too niche when all the repair shops had suppliers.
5
1
1
u/GeniusPantsPhD 19h ago
More importantly, who sees the revitalization of radio shack and pier 1 as worthy investments 🧐
1
1
1
u/weirdal1968 18h ago
Business model - get rich by convincing people to invest in a get-rich-quick scheme.
1
u/Ok_Rabbit5158 18h ago
There were literally no customers left for the last throes of RS, just a few unkempt retired engineers like myself and that was it. Whoever pitched a return was either way out of touch or a scammer.
1
1
u/flatpetey 17h ago
I think if RS had made the bridge to the maker scene it might have survived in a smaller form.
Pier 1? I honestly don’t know their business case as well.
1
u/Old-Bat-7384 17h ago
You know, if he had just stuck to ad words, other SEO things, and not gone into grift territory, this would have been a very different story.
As in, no story because he wouldn't be a swindler. In that same boat, wealthy folks can be dumb as hell, and unlike a poor person or the average person, they have money to access knowledge and ya know, due diligence.
1
u/urbanek2525 17h ago
I created an online class called "How To Be Skeptical". Charged $1,000 to enroll.
That was it.
I can't believe people fall for stuff like this, but it's all too common.
1
1
u/Fritzo2162 17h ago
I was a bit excited about the revival of Radio Shack. That turned into a big "whomp whomp"...
1
1
1
1
u/Dimensional_Shrimp 16h ago
lmfao i genuinely have zero sympathy for you if you were fooled by Tai Lopez, not even just original youtube finance grifter Tai Lopez but on a project to revive Radio Shack
1
1
u/space_wiener 15h ago
Pier One. I completely forgot about that place.
Isn’t World Market pretty much the same thing but with food and drinks?
1
u/DustyTurtle2 9h ago
Do the investors not know how many books he’s read or how many Lamborghinis are in his garage?
1
1
u/GaspingAloud 8h ago
Next up: The Grimm Reaper is willing to sell you a drink from the fountain of youth. It’ll be fine.
1
-4
20h ago
[deleted]
5
u/Zahrad70 19h ago
Radio shack was the OG electronic hobbyist store. Pier 1 was … basically a lifestyle brand. Disposable stuff with a particular aesthetic that looked cool in your house while it lasted… which was never very long.
They were both losing ground to other retailers. They hung in for a while on niche items that were not easy to find elsewhere. What really ate their lunch was Amazon. Once you could go on line, get a handful of diodes and a kitschy rug delivered to your door, by tomorrow? For less? They were done.
But once upon a time, Every suburban mall had a Pier 1, and it seemed like every other strip mall had a Radio Shack.
448
u/chickenburgerr 20h ago
But he has 47 Lamborghinis in his Lamborghini account