11 Ways of Thinking about Radio Shack

And a Yeti full of chicken

Jared Blank

Jul 20, 2022

Hello Gobbledeers,

Today in the newsletter:

Old people I’m related to
Radio Shack
Pornography
Chicken in a Yeti

(3 of those things go together)

No, I Don’t Know What the Hell Is Going on With Radio Shack

Radio Shack has suddenly been in the news again for completely insane marketing-related reasons (here’s a representative article).

(tl;dr: Someone is trying to revive the brand as some sort of crypto something something and to do that they’re tweeting some stuff that, because my mother reads Gobbledy, I can’t really even get myself to try to describe (sex stuff), but after one such tweet (graphic sex stuff), they posted this, which was actually kinda funny:

If somehow you’ve missed all of this, here’s the mid-length version of the story, with personal, historical context that you most definitely did not ask for:

In the 1940s and 1950s, Radio Shack employed my grandmother, which means I grew up hearing a lot about Radio Shack (in a good way!) Apparently, despite the name, it was at some point a place where you went to buy records. Also, my grandmother always referred to it as “The Shack,” which in Radio Shack’s dying days was what they called themselves as part of a rebranding. My grandmother was 50 years ahead of her time. This is the “personal, historical context” part.
Well, part of the “personal, historical context” part. My grandmother worked at The Shack in part (or in large part, or likely in whole part) because my grandfather left my grandmother when my father was a baby. I had a delightful relationship with my grandfather, who at some point re-connected with my father before I came along. He was a complicated man, but wonderful to me. I mention all of this because my grandmother talked about working at The Shack, not because it was a bit of ancient history, but because that company allowed her to have enough of a career to raise my father as a single mother in the 1940s. I can’t really even imagine any of that - not being a single mother in the 1940s, nor having a career in retail that paid the bills so you could raise a child.
In the 1980s my father and I would make trips to Radio Shack to buy some random transistor thingy (tm) for something like $1.17 and every time the poor not-my-grandmother clerk would ask my father for his phone number (which was a thing that happened when you went to buy anything at Radio Shack), my father would - I don’t like to swear here but I don’t really know how else to put it - completely lose his shit (in a good way?) at the poor kid asking for his phone number, which I assume was used for database marketing purposes and yes I’m sure it makes my father sad to know that I’m now (tangentially?) part of the database marketing industrial complex (tm).
It’s (barely?) worth noting that the Radio Shack we frequented located in the Morris County Mall was - even obvious to 11-year old me - located in the town’s dying mall. That mall is now mostly a Walmart. Someone actually posted a video in the last year where they walk through the mall, and that video is titled, “The Saddest Strip Mall in New Jersey.” I would say that is hyperbole. The video is notable because you can see the remains of the Radio Shack I mentioned and the somehow-still-open McDonald’s, which is where I had my birthday party when I was 7.
In my memory, my father and I were at the Radio Shack maybe once every other week. There’s no way this is possibly true. However, the 1980s were a period where families acquired an increasing number remote controls, which required an increasing number of batteries, and I believe we would run over to Radio Shack to buy 2 AA batteries at a time, which may have been the largest packs they had in the store.*
(*that can’t be right)
My father is quite mechanically inclined and I am whatever the opposite of that is (mechanically declined? unchanically inclined?), and he took an early interest in computers. Which led to me taking an early interest in computers, and those early computers always needed cables to plug into other things (cassette decks), and none of the cables were ever compatible with the things they were plugging into, so that necessitated trips to Radio Shack.
It’s here where it becomes clear that Radio Shack never understood the emotional part of their business - a lot of the stuff they had was for do-it-yourself type projects involving electronics. And those projects were often done by fathers doing them with their kids. (I wrote “sons,” then erased it, but let’s be honest - it was mostly sons back then). I think lots of guys my age have memories of doing stuff around the house with their fathers. For me, that nearly always involved Radio Shack.
Sometime in the early 2000s there was a viral thing going around where someone published a Radio Shack newspaper ad from 1991 and noted that EVERY SINGLE THING in it was now available for free on your iPhone. Here is that ad:
My memory of when cell phones became available is quite faulty - I had no recollection of cellphones before the mid-1990s, but in this 1991 ad there’s one for sale for $199. Maybe the point of this whole piece is that our memories are always incorrect.
This was fascinating when I first saw it 20 years ago. And it’s somehow even more fascinating now - a CD player was $159. On sale. That’s $345 in today’s dollars. You now have access to every song every recorded for $9.99 per month. I worked something like 30 hours a week in a supermarket throughout my high school years so I could afford half the stuff in this ad (not the $1599 computer, though). Maybe that’s why teenagers don’t work in grocery stores anymore? Because of Spotify? Or something?
When literally everything you have in your poorly lit 1,200 square foot store in a dying mall is available for free on your phone, you’re going to have to make some difficult decisions (editor’s note: duh). A competitor giving away your product for free does not mean you can’t be successful, though. In the software world, Google Analytics’ free product did not mean Omniture closed their doors. It meant Omniture had to focus on a market segment (enterprise, especially in retail) that was willing to pay for a product that specifically met their needs.

You may have a Batteries Plus Bulbs store near you. In 2022 it would certainly seem that this chain has no reason to exist - Amazon has a broad assortment of batteries and bulbs. But batteries and bulbs are two categories of products where you may very well need those items now, not tomorrow (lest you have to go to the bathroom in the dark, for example). Plus, there are lots of varieties of both of those products.

Radio Shack could’ve chosen to specialize (they briefly did choose to specialize - in cell phones, which of course had massive amounts of competition, so they offered nothing unique). Radio Shack could’ve become Batteries Plus Bulbs. Or it could’ve been the world’s best hobby shop. Or Cablez R Us. They had options and somehow they chose none of them. Frog in boiling water.
So like a long string of failed young thespians who turned to the world of adult entertainment in an attempt to keep themselves afloat, the new owners of Radio Shack are leaning into the Twitter equivalent. If a sex tape can make a star of a Kardashian, maybe a sex tweet can make a star of Radio Shack.

Every half-assed marketing pundit has already gone online and complained about what they’re doing on Twitter, and how unprofessional it is and whatever.

I think the bigger point is that repositioning is incredibly challenging. If Radio Shack thinks their best hope as a company is to target 20 year old dudez who like to joke about sex stuff and getting high, then by all means, lean into it. NOT leaning into it is usually the bigger issue in this situation. If you’ve ever worked somewhere where you’re trying to reposition the company, undoubtedly you’ve pitched new messaging and new branding and someone says, “yes, but that’s going to upset our current customers.” Well, yes. It might. Coming up with new positioning and messaging isn’t that difficult. Coming up with new positioning and messaging and being comfortable moving away from your old self - that’s difficult.
My grandmother re-married in the 1960s to a fantastic man whom I came to know as my grandfather. (It was definitely confusing as a child to understand how I had 3 grandfathers.). This grandfather spent much of his life in the movie business - the first half of his career working for movie studios as a salesman. Then, later, worked as a distributor of adult films (“sex pictures,” in his words) in Philadelphia in the 1970s and early 1980s. My family, too, pivoted from Radio Shack to the adult world, and they did it successfully. But VCRs came along, and people didn’t need to go to the theaters to watch that type of film (did you know that adult content is currently available on the Internet?) and my grandfather decided he was done pivoting and moved to Florida.

A brand is the sum total of all of the associations someone has with a company. I’m not annoyed or disappointed that Radio Shack has abandoned its brand to make puerile comments on Twitter. I’m disappointed that so many of my memories of my family have somehow been intertwined with nonsense from a Twitter troll.
Readers’ Corner

Reader Rosemary P. was brave enough to admit that she owns the non-$4.95 Yeti bucket from last week’s column and swears it’s perfect for marinading chicken. I think a $4.95 bucket is also perfect for chicken marinading, but what do I know?
I just realized that $40 Yeti is sitting on an Aeron chair, the Yeti cooler of office chairs.
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