The first Fry's Electronics store sold groceries and electronics. I recall going to the Sunnyvale store in the 70's, and I thought it was interesting that I could buy potato chips and computer chips in the same store. Now Fry's sells mostly consumer electronics and appliances plus electronic components for hobbyist. They still sell potato chips and other junk food, but it's in a small section of the store by the checkout counters. The Fry's store in Austin also has a small cafe in the middle of the store.
I remember fondly visiting Fry's on Lakeside Drive and Oakmead Parkway in Sunnyvale in the 80's. They also sold toothpaste and hygiene products which some nerds apparently forget to use (I can't believe anything is more important than personal hygiene).
Fry's moved to another building in the 90's at Kern and Lawrence Expressway. All Fry's I've seen since the 90's have a some kind of a theme. At Kern, the building was painted black with silver dip-pin looking features all around. It had an ESC button on the exit door and the bag checker girl asked me once what ESC meant. To which I replied "it's a way out of the program" and she said "Escape?" with big Anime puppy looking eyes.
These days Fry's is all over the valley and all feature a cafe. The latest Sunnyvale Fry's (now in the old Singer-Link building where I used to work in the 80's) has a baby grand player piano which gives the store a wonderful ambiance (located near my old office). It also has technology history displays such as an original Farnsworth TV tube, an Apple 1 computer, an original Lee de Forest vacuum tube, and a vintage Varian Klystron. See this: http://www.windyhillpublications.com/silicon-valley-sub.htm about half-way down the page in articles.
The Fry's food-stores chain was bought by Lucky stores IIRC.
I have never understood this idea in the modern corporate world that we have to keep trying to revive a dead horse. Get a new CEO, restructure this and that, finally ending up by being bought for peanuts just for the brand name, and so on. (Is the "RadioShack" brand worth anything?)
Why not say "We did what we wanted to do. We had a good run. Now it's time to shutdown and move on". Shut the thing down, sell the assets, distribute what's left among the share holders and that's it.
Might it not be better to do that now, before the thing is so far into the ground that the shareholders get nothing?
Or is this just a way of the never ending succession of CEOs to suck some money out of the carcass?
Like I said, someone else will take over those locations, or some of them, and have a go at making something new.
Why not say "We did what we wanted to do. We had a good run. Now it's time to shutdown and move on". Shut the thing down, sell the assets, distribute what's left among the share holders and that's it.
Might it not be better to do that now, before the thing is so far into the ground that the shareholders get nothing?
As a public company they are limited in how the company's assets are dissolved. Their quarterly losses are not yet debilitating for such an extreme action. They can't liquidate and hope not to be mired in shareholder lawsuits from now until doomsday. At most they could hope for a hostile takeover, then initiate a poison pill divestment that would have the same effect -- i.e. what Lucky did with Gemco. But they can't just call it quits if they don't want to be in court for the rest of their lives.
@Gordon
I admire your loyalty to Radio Shack. I just wonder where retail electronics is going. It seems we buy all and everything on-line and have it delivered to the door.
Mr. Land, the inventor of Polaroid one day announced as president of the corporation that he had simply run of of ideas to pursue and it tanked the stock. They never recovered.
Corporations are supposed to have perpetual lives. But the business environment changes. I just can't see why some corporations shouldn't just fold up and go away.
They can't liquidate and hope not to be mired in shareholder lawsuits from now until doomsday
True. And I think that's part of the whole system I don't understand.
To my naive mind one could say:
"Look shareholders, we can wind up the whole thing now, sell the assets and divide what's left among the shareholders. Or, we can get a new CEO, again, reorganize and "refocus", again, and when the whole thing goes down the toilet you get nothing. Which do you want?"
Luckily, in a cheap location in the outskirts of Helsinki I have Partco. They only do electronics. They have all the Rs and Cs you can imagine, They have Z80's, 68000's, Raspberry Pi and Beagle Bone. They are doing very good business.
There is nothing wrong with taking a public company private. It looks better to have a wealthy corporate suitor though. Chrysler is going public again for example (not a personal vote for their products).
My feeling is that going public tends to be a way for the 'smart money' to sell out a big chunk of its position. Just look at Facebook.
On the other hand, we have had a economic downturn and uncertainty which is good for the brewery businesses, and Budwiser went private, no longer available for public investment.
So I begin to wonder what is really the use of publically traded companies if we seem to be getting the slackers.
Chysler went bust, then was taken as a private holding. Now they want to cash out after getting a lot of help from the government and very likely the Federal Reserve is taking a big profit as well.
Private deals are available to accredited investors (paraphrasing: individuals having $1M net worth not including primary residence and having a sustained income of over $200K a year ($300K family) - Rule 501 of Regulation D, Securities and Exchange act of 1933).
Such deals available include: shares in pre-IPO private corporations, seed capital, angel investments, hedge fund speculative investments, limited liability partnerships, and other higher risk investments that average people can't possibly comprehend.
When an IPO goes public, the shares of a hot company earn huge returns and average Joe climbs on the apple cart (allegory from "A Random Walk Down Wall Street", Malkiel). Then 6 months later, lucky pre-ipo average worker and executive options are exercisable. If things go well, the apple cart doesn't crash and draws more "investors". How far the apple cart can travel before crashing depends on many factors.
My conclusions? 1. High return investing is rarely available to the public, and the only people who can succeed in that are the really smart ones. 2. It is illegal for non-accredited investors to participate in private deals ... which makes me think that Kickstarter is doomed. 3. Investors diversify, while speculators throw all their money at schemes and pray for a good outcome, thus average investors don't get richer or poorer while speculators can become rich and destitute. 4. General observation, there are signs on the investment highway - if you can't read the signs you shouldn't be driving.
We need to stop talking trash about Radio Shack before Gordon loses his shirt. Look what's happened in the past five days... maybe just because of us???
As for all the confusion about why companies remain in business or not.... just remember that the same people who were running Wall Street in 2007 are still there. No rules have been changed. No lessons have been learned by lawmakers nor by the public.
It would be nice if there was an electronics retailer similar to Home Depot. A place where you can get basic training and the people have some understanding of electronics. Perhaps Radio Shack can 3D Print parts for people at some of their locations.
Ken,Never heard of Aldi, although the German Lidle is around here. Something must be working for them as their owners are worth billions. The richest men in Germany. Do you think RS could continue to supply resistors, capacitors, transistors, LEDs, Propellers from under the counter when they switch to quality cheeses, meats and produce. I think it's an excellent idea, geeks need food as well:)
But there are Aldi stores in the UK. Aldis business model is not about the quality of the products, it's about the lowest price. In fact, any other food retail chain offers 'no name' products at exactly the same price as Aldi.Maybe RS should get in contact with Conrad http://www.conrad.com/ce/ . As kids (TRS80) we called RS 'the american Conrad'. They are in business for over 100 years now. They have huge stores at the margin of the city core with dozens of staff in each store. I wonder how they'd survive. Seems they are quick in detecting trends, sold a lot of satelite TV stuff in the 90s and are now in home automation, always served to the car tinkerers. But they still run big parts counters within their stores. They sell mobile phones too but on maybe 5% of their store area.
We need to stop talking trash about Radio Shack before Gordon loses his shirt.
No worries; I sold my stock long ago.
I'm actually not a big fan of Radio Shack, as some of my posts over the years have shown. But I do believe in the concept, at least as I outlined it earlier. There's money to be made, but the current management is unable to pull it off. They're trying to be too many stores at once. That's hard even for the Targets and Walmarts of the world. RS is a piddling strip mall retailer, and they need focus more than anything else.
On going private: this is infinitely doable, as RS's market cap is under $350M. There's generally a premium to buy the outstanding shares, but a venture group could likely use some leverage and go in with under $100M and buy the whole thing. That's less than the cost of a Hollywood blockbuster these days, and with the right turnaround plan, a safer bet.
[h=1]Analysis: Refi at RadioShack just buying time[/h]
A new refinancing at RadioShack (RSH) only buys the retailer about 41 days of life at its current cash burn rate, calculates SA contributor The Stock Stooge.
Even after the company gets a Q4 boost from holiday spending by consumers, it's unlikely that it can survive six months without selling a large amount of equity, according to the warning.
It is painful to watch the end of a corporations life... it can take years and years to arrive with gyrations in and out of bankruptcy court, religious revivals of the brand's 'good name', and so on.
But the reality is that if you can't sustain sales to meeting all expenses, take your capital and do something else with it.
First off, I only use Radio Shack as a last resort. As a resident of Fort Worth, TX, Tandy's longtime headquarters, I can not find it in my heart to forgive their greed in closing the small subway they owned, it was built back in the 60's by a retail store, and Tandy ended up with it. The subway was really a feature of FTW, heavily used by FTW residents, a real tragedy to lose it. FTW residents are not happy with Tandy! Angry would be a better word!
Second, Radio Shack only sometimes has the specialty items I need, often not, and employees don't know what I am even asking for.
Tandy CEOs are, there is no other word, stupid. Tandy had the best craft stores in the country, they were awesome, if you were never in one, you missed really something. Now there is Hobby Lobby, Micheal's, Jo-Ann, but Tandy, with a huge head start, couldn't keep their craft stores open?%#
Lastly, the answer to saving RS is simple and obvious, if you know Tandy history. There is a hugely successful model out there that Radio Shack could emulate. A CEO with vision, not greed, could save RS. But for my part, they can go eat a bugs. They want to know how to save RS, they can put our subway back!
Yes, I like Subway too. I always have a foot-long turkey on whole wheat bread when I go there. Until I found out that the foot-long is really 11 inches long, and that they put azodicarbonamide (AKA yoga mat material) in their bread to make it spongier. I think they've removed the yoga mat stuff, and I continue to go to Subway once in a while.
Wait, did you mean a real subway, like an underground railcar? I didn't know Fort Worth had a subway system. And it was operated by Radio Shack? It probably went out of business because they no longer had the parts to keep it running. If it only ran on cell phone accessories it would still be around today.
Comments
I remember fondly visiting Fry's on Lakeside Drive and Oakmead Parkway in Sunnyvale in the 80's. They also sold toothpaste and hygiene products which some nerds apparently forget to use (I can't believe anything is more important than personal hygiene).
Fry's moved to another building in the 90's at Kern and Lawrence Expressway. All Fry's I've seen since the 90's have a some kind of a theme. At Kern, the building was painted black with silver dip-pin looking features all around. It had an ESC button on the exit door and the bag checker girl asked me once what ESC meant. To which I replied "it's a way out of the program" and she said "Escape?" with big Anime puppy looking eyes.
These days Fry's is all over the valley and all feature a cafe. The latest Sunnyvale Fry's (now in the old Singer-Link building where I used to work in the 80's) has a baby grand player piano which gives the store a wonderful ambiance (located near my old office). It also has technology history displays such as an original Farnsworth TV tube, an Apple 1 computer, an original Lee de Forest vacuum tube, and a vintage Varian Klystron. See this: http://www.windyhillpublications.com/silicon-valley-sub.htm about half-way down the page in articles.
The Fry's food-stores chain was bought by Lucky stores IIRC.
I have never understood this idea in the modern corporate world that we have to keep trying to revive a dead horse. Get a new CEO, restructure this and that, finally ending up by being bought for peanuts just for the brand name, and so on. (Is the "RadioShack" brand worth anything?)
Why not say "We did what we wanted to do. We had a good run. Now it's time to shutdown and move on". Shut the thing down, sell the assets, distribute what's left among the share holders and that's it.
Might it not be better to do that now, before the thing is so far into the ground that the shareholders get nothing?
Or is this just a way of the never ending succession of CEOs to suck some money out of the carcass?
Like I said, someone else will take over those locations, or some of them, and have a go at making something new.
As a public company they are limited in how the company's assets are dissolved. Their quarterly losses are not yet debilitating for such an extreme action. They can't liquidate and hope not to be mired in shareholder lawsuits from now until doomsday. At most they could hope for a hostile takeover, then initiate a poison pill divestment that would have the same effect -- i.e. what Lucky did with Gemco. But they can't just call it quits if they don't want to be in court for the rest of their lives.
I admire your loyalty to Radio Shack. I just wonder where retail electronics is going. It seems we buy all and everything on-line and have it delivered to the door.
Mr. Land, the inventor of Polaroid one day announced as president of the corporation that he had simply run of of ideas to pursue and it tanked the stock. They never recovered.
Corporations are supposed to have perpetual lives. But the business environment changes. I just can't see why some corporations shouldn't just fold up and go away.
To my naive mind one could say:
"Look shareholders, we can wind up the whole thing now, sell the assets and divide what's left among the shareholders. Or, we can get a new CEO, again, reorganize and "refocus", again, and when the whole thing goes down the toilet you get nothing. Which do you want?"
The choice seems clear to me.
I agree, I try to buy most of my produce there.
They always seem to have the best prices on cauliflower, broccoli, peppers, etc.
C.W.
Luckily, in a cheap location in the outskirts of Helsinki I have Partco. They only do electronics. They have all the Rs and Cs you can imagine, They have Z80's, 68000's, Raspberry Pi and Beagle Bone. They are doing very good business.
http://www.partco.biz/verkkokauppa/find_us.php?language=en&osCsid=mm2md81r6hra896qrlvsg7gtp3
I'm not so worried yet
On the other hand, we have had a economic downturn and uncertainty which is good for the brewery businesses, and Budwiser went private, no longer available for public investment.
So I begin to wonder what is really the use of publically traded companies if we seem to be getting the slackers.
Chysler went bust, then was taken as a private holding. Now they want to cash out after getting a lot of help from the government and very likely the Federal Reserve is taking a big profit as well.
The rich get richer .... Here's how.
Private deals are available to accredited investors (paraphrasing: individuals having $1M net worth not including primary residence and having a sustained income of over $200K a year ($300K family) - Rule 501 of Regulation D, Securities and Exchange act of 1933).
Such deals available include: shares in pre-IPO private corporations, seed capital, angel investments, hedge fund speculative investments, limited liability partnerships, and other higher risk investments that average people can't possibly comprehend.
When an IPO goes public, the shares of a hot company earn huge returns and average Joe climbs on the apple cart (allegory from "A Random Walk Down Wall Street", Malkiel). Then 6 months later, lucky pre-ipo average worker and executive options are exercisable. If things go well, the apple cart doesn't crash and draws more "investors". How far the apple cart can travel before crashing depends on many factors.
My conclusions? 1. High return investing is rarely available to the public, and the only people who can succeed in that are the really smart ones. 2. It is illegal for non-accredited investors to participate in private deals ... which makes me think that Kickstarter is doomed. 3. Investors diversify, while speculators throw all their money at schemes and pray for a good outcome, thus average investors don't get richer or poorer while speculators can become rich and destitute. 4. General observation, there are signs on the investment highway - if you can't read the signs you shouldn't be driving.
As for all the confusion about why companies remain in business or not.... just remember that the same people who were running Wall Street in 2007 are still there. No rules have been changed. No lessons have been learned by lawmakers nor by the public.
The water's fine. Jump on in.
True enough. Started opening them in 1989 and now they have 310 of them. Still, I have hardly been to there recently to notice.
No worries; I sold my stock long ago.
I'm actually not a big fan of Radio Shack, as some of my posts over the years have shown. But I do believe in the concept, at least as I outlined it earlier. There's money to be made, but the current management is unable to pull it off. They're trying to be too many stores at once. That's hard even for the Targets and Walmarts of the world. RS is a piddling strip mall retailer, and they need focus more than anything else.
On going private: this is infinitely doable, as RS's market cap is under $350M. There's generally a premium to buy the outstanding shares, but a venture group could likely use some leverage and go in with under $100M and buy the whole thing. That's less than the cost of a Hollywood blockbuster these days, and with the right turnaround plan, a safer bet.
http://seekingalpha.com/currents/post/1381492?source=feed
Monday, Nov 4
9:05 AM
[h=1]Analysis: Refi at RadioShack just buying time[/h]
But the reality is that if you can't sustain sales to meeting all expenses, take your capital and do something else with it.
Second, Radio Shack only sometimes has the specialty items I need, often not, and employees don't know what I am even asking for.
Tandy CEOs are, there is no other word, stupid. Tandy had the best craft stores in the country, they were awesome, if you were never in one, you missed really something. Now there is Hobby Lobby, Micheal's, Jo-Ann, but Tandy, with a huge head start, couldn't keep their craft stores open?%#
Lastly, the answer to saving RS is simple and obvious, if you know Tandy history. There is a hugely successful model out there that Radio Shack could emulate. A CEO with vision, not greed, could save RS. But for my part, they can go eat a bugs.
Wait, did you mean a real subway, like an underground railcar? I didn't know Fort Worth had a subway system. And it was operated by Radio Shack? It probably went out of business because they no longer had the parts to keep it running. If it only ran on cell phone accessories it would still be around today.