Sure, you can't build whole from-scratch circuits purely from hardware-store parts, but if you run out of resistors/pots/whatever, you can restock pretty cheaply in any town big enough to have professional electricians operating out of it.
Also, I should probably point out that a lot of places (e.g. Best Buy) still do sell electronic components—they just sell combinations of them in lots and call the result a "hobbyist kit." It's much easier on their shelf space, and their employees, to just carry one SKU that you can point anyone looking for components at, which will give them most of what they might need.
For all the other stuff (what you might think of as a "booster pack" to a hobbyist kit's "base pack"), there's no more economical way to get exactly what you want than ordering online anyway. Expecting there to be a store in every rural town carrying every random IC one might need for a project is just insane, when you can order a pull-sheet of them for $2 no matter where you are.
The prices are, of course, high, but when I break a bolt or lose one for my car or other project, Tacoma Screw has an exact (or better) replacement.
The hardware store sells bolts and nuts, too, but the selection is erratic and the quality is dubious. When I don't want my transmission falling off, I want top quality bolts guaranteed.
Edit: I just clicked the link and realized that is the same place lol, yeah it is awesome.
Radio Shack tends to have old leases in 2nd tier shopping centers. Why would they buy a marginal retailer with poor footprint, when you could just lease stores yourself?
There was a time when getting space in malls and strip shopping centers was tough. This isn't one of those times.
it doesn't seem so far fetched to me; amazon being able to pick up a bunch of cheap space in fell swoop.
Now if I could return packages through Lockers, then I'd be game.
Because it's already assembled, at, in theory, lower than market rates and won't take months or a year to assemble. Similar to why companies buy companies instead of building their own. At least in the area that I am in Radio Shack has decent retail locations.
The one closest to where I live is in the prime shopping center adjacent to University of Maryland.
There's seemingly enough in good locations to cherry pick them out.
http://www.radioshack.com/store-locator
(there's no permalink, but try ZIP code 10008)
There are a lot of prime locations in there. No doubt some duds too, but I expect Amazon could cherry-pick.
Putting together the real-estate inventory on your own means a lot more work.
Sell off the nonperforming locations you don't want. Keep and gut the rest. My bet is that Radio Shack as a brand is done.
Which could make for some interesting juxtapositions on the shelves. Kitty litter next to Blu-ray movies, etc. But if it sells, it sells.
I'd much prefer it showing up at my door in two days and would view this as a major UX detriment. It may not be a common feeling, but the opportunity cost of spending an hour or so running errands to various brick and mortar locations around town multiple times a week is a major reason I'm a prime member and do a huge amount of my shopping through Amazon.
I suppose you could do fresh food that way, get my avocados ready ahead of time, but show me them before I sign for them.
As a bonus they could use it to locally store popular items, use the stores as pick-up and drop-off zones (as the site suggests) and have a few computers consumers can come in and use to order directly off of Amazon. I would hate to see Radioshack die, it kind of makes me sad to think the brand could just vanish.
What makes you think that's the strategy it has to employ to succeed? Because it is doing that, and it's not working. Normal people don't buy those things, and certainly a network of thousands of stores stocking resistors isn't a viable business when the small amount of hobbyists just go online.
Maplin has been doing it in the UK (not one of the world's cozy retail markets) with apparent success. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8664813
So sell low margin products and leave out high margin products? How do you expect that to work for a business?
Telecom contracts, however, are high-margin, and they'll have to continue increase their mobile contracts significantly if they want to stay in business.
The worlds best selling smartphone family, Android, has next to no dedicated stores outside of a handful of Samsung and Sony experiences.
It seems to me that the trick to getting more sales at network stores like AT&T is simply paying off AT&T to get it's representatives to push your product. Many buyers go in and ask for recommendations or allow network staff to drive them towards a product. In my experience, the rep will usually push people towards a Samsung flagship. When I visited my local official AT&T last summer, they were pushing A LOT of Samsung gear and didn't have much of anything to say about the latest LG G3 or HTC M8 refresh. They pushed the Samsung Gear watch but didn't have much to say about any other brand.
Amazon would probably boost the sales of their devices much more strongly with some kind of sweetheart promotional deal with a network than they would trying to operate non-network smartphone stores. Who's going to go to an Amazon store to buy an Amazon phone? You go to your network store to look around at what's available.
I could see the smartphones-in-store approach working if they get customers flying through the doors for other reasons (same day pick up, Amazon lockers, Prime-ready electronics show room, etc), and kept them in store long enough to look at phones.
Every wireless store is a 90% dedicated Android store.
Maybe i should add some more color here. If you think in terms of traditional delivery, one warehouse is enough. But i'm not sure that this paradigm (one van drives to a warehouse, collects a bunch of stuff and delivers it), is what works best for on-demand, 2-hour or same day deliveries. Multiple, fast and easy to reach pickup locations are an advantage at scale. Especially for deliveries where minutes matter.
Ultimately, we will probably see a combination of both.
Edit: To clarify, no sales tax was one of the first things Amazon and other online retailers had on their side. They could sell things cheaper, even by a little, and the rest would be made up by not having to pay sales tax. If they have a presence in a state though they have to collect sales tax. If you buy a lot from Amazon it is kind of like taking a 8.5% pay cut in buying power. If you remember back in 1997-8 there were several bills popping up around it. My Google-fu is failing me, but this is a real issue. Amazon even discontinued the associates programs in some states to avoid taxes.
"2 day shipping (free with Prime)"
"1 day shipping $3.99"
"Get off your butt and go get it yourself (closest 2 miles)"
* Delivery by bicycle
* Drone-based delivery
And it would simplify my working arrangement (as an Amazon employee).
Oh please oh please...
For Amazon, getting faster and more convenient delivery might be worth the cost. It helps them in their fight against brick and mortar retailers, and if they're careful about it they could probably leverage a limited physical presence pretty well.
Imagine US government had taken over RadioShack to "protect the jobs" using taxpayers money and spent billions for a so called turnaround.
There are lots of sites that sell the same products Amazon do but target a particular niche. A brand like RadioShack could use the Amazon backend and only expose a particular type of product that fits within the traditional RadioShack ethos.
Hell they could do shipping and receiving like UPS stores if they want. The possibilities are endless.
I'm not sure I see the logic/advantage of taking over existing RadioShack locations as opposed to just making real estate decisions based upon Amazon's own requirements.
A select subset of their stores might be quite select (and limited in number).
It'd be a hell of a lot better than the neglected "demo" devices glued to a display in Best Buy they have right now.
It's where the developing war between Amazon and Google starts to get interesting. Google's approach has been to work with existing brick-and-mortar stores via Google Shopping Express, which I suspect means tying into their ordering and inventory systems. That's also more-or-less an attack on IBM (which does a lot of SMB work as well).
Google gets storefronts, merchandise, direct retail, and business knowledge, while Amazon's got to build that, but has a single unified shopping and logistics system.
I'm not sure which is going to win, though I'm betting somewhat on Google.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-02/radioshack...
