RadioShack: How a Tinkerer's Paradise Ended in a Crypto Meltdown

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In 1921, brothers Theodore and Milton Deutschman opened a Boston shop for amateur radio operators and named it after the wooden room that housed a ship's communications gear. By the early 1960s RadioShack was effectively bankrupt, until leather goods tycoon Charles Tandy bought it in 1962 for $300,000. He killed the mail order catalog, cut 40,000 items down to roughly 2,500, opened tiny strip mall stores, and filled them with high margin house brands like Realistic. The result was a store within a few miles of nearly every American household.

This episode follows the full hundred year arc, from the TRS-80 that put a pre-assembled computer in ordinary homes for $600 to the decisions that hollowed the company out. Embarrassed by its hobbyist image, RadioShack sold its factories, chased Best Buy, and rebuilt itself around cell phone commissions just as the maker movement arrived. What followed was layoffs by email, a CEO with a fabricated resume, $2.6 billion in stock buybacks, two bankruptcies, and a vulgar Twitter persona selling crypto.

• The Battery of the Month Club gave away one free battery a month, a loss leader that guaranteed foot traffic and impulse purchases like soldering irons.
• At the peak of the mid 1970s CB radio craze, that single product category made up nearly 30 percent of RadioShack's total revenue.
• In 2000 the company put $35 million into the CueCat, a cat shaped barcode scanner that tethered to a desktop computer and flopped completely.
• In August 2006 more than 400 headquarters employees learned by email that their jobs were gone and were given 30 minutes to pack their desks.
• Unicomer, a franchise partner from El Salvador since 1998, kept to retail fundamentals and acquired RadioShack's global intellectual property in May 2023.