RadioShack in Talks to Sell Half Its Stores to Sprint, Shutter the Rest

This is disappointing, especially since our local RadioShack has recently added a ton of great hobbyist electronics: They carry RaspberryPi starter kits, 4 models of Arduino, Beaglebones, about 8 kinds of shields, tons of robot kits, littleBits, and the usual drawers of random parts. I picked up an Arduino-compatible camera board for $12 on clearance.<p>I have no idea how big the local market for cool, modern electronics stuff might be. And I&#x27;ll be sad if it disappears. But it would be nice if somebody could make a business out of this.<p>But it you haven&#x27;t checked out your local RadioShark in the last few years, it might be worth a look.

Calling Steve Wozniak and AdaFruit: Why don&#x27;t you get together and buy the other half of RadioShack stores and turn them into Maker spaces?<p>They could continue to sell cables, batteries and universal remotes to consumers to help pay the bills while creating a place to learn and buy supplies for tinkerers, robot clubs, hobbyists etc.

This is somewhat tragic, because you can actually buy a wide variety of electronics components at RS which you can&#x27;t get locally anywhere else. Sure, the internet is better in many ways, but it is a loss.

Sprint is 80% owned by SoftBank, who also owns controlling interest in Alibaba. Amazon, Alibaba&#x27;s largest competitor, has been recently talking about getting into physical retail space. It&#x27;s possible Alibaba is thinking the same thing.

Radio Shack in Canada ended up in a similar situation. In 2005, they sold to Circuit City and opened as a rebranded store called &quot;The Source&quot; (after a brief legal dispute about the Radio Shack name).<p>When Circuit City went bankrupt in 2009, they sold the chain to Bell Canada (our version of Sprint or Verizon).

Kind of sad, I remember the TRS80 Model 1, a friend worked on the OS. They Apple and Commodore had the first real personal computers. The Model 1 actually had a real operating system with multiple process support (though not really exposed to the user). Irrelevant today as a business.

Sprint doesn&#x27;t need more retail outlets. They need more cell sites.<p>If you can&#x27;t get a signal on a Sprint phone, drive up to a Sprint store. They have mini cell sites so their demos work.

Bummer but I am guessing this will not be the only brick and mortar store to close now that most things can be bought online.

Where will I buy resistors on a Sunday afternoon! :(