RadioShack Suffered as Free Time Evaporated

RadioShack Suffered as Free Time Evaporated

Chain Built Itself as Hub of Leisure Activities Enjoyed to a Degree Now Hard to Fathom

By Christopher Mims in the Wall Street Journal

In 1963, the year his company bought a nine-store chain then known by the two-word name Radio Shack, Charles D. Tandy explained to the New York Times why it made perfect sense for a retailer of do-it-yourself leather handicrafts to buy an electronics distributor.

“Leisure time is opening markets to us,” he told the Times. “The shorter workweek, human curiosity, idle hands—all offer opportunities in this business. Everyone’s spare time is our challenge.”

What Mr. Tandy couldn’t know was that the real challenge his company would eventually face was the slow erosion of the very leisure time his company profited from by filling. The company, now known as RadioShack , filed for bankruptcy protection last week.

It’s hard to believe this now, but according to “The Overworked American,” by Boston College professor of sociology Juliet Schor, in the 1950s the shrinking workweek meant universities sprouted departments of leisure studies, to figure out what Americans would soon be doing with their ever-expanding supply of free time.

Then, in about 1970, the trend reversed, and the workweek of the average American began to grow longer.

In 1979 the average worker put in 1,687 hours a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and by 2007 that number was 1,868. The net difference, 181 hours a year, represents more than a month of extra work every year.

Not coincidentally, the 1970s were RadioShack’s biggest decade, and at one point the chain was opening three stores a week. At its peak, it had 7,000 stores. That success was built primarily on the back of citizens’ band radio hobbyists, who bought components from the store and relied on the knowledge of its staff, many of whom were franchisees and devoted hobbyists themselves.

It wasn’t just radios, though. RadioShack sold its own brand of just about anything you might need, from phonograph accessories and smoke detectors to a $15 lie-detector kit.

RadioShack was also the place hobbyists returned to when they needed to repair these goods when they broke. A generation grew up on RadioShack’s “150 in One Electronic Project Kit.”

Related

The story of RadioShack over the past 50 years shows how Americans fell in love with personal electronics. (Originally published Sept. 16)

The average RadioShack customer of the 1980s, on the other hand, came in for a very different reason: the personal computer. It’s easy to forget that RadioShack was once the equal of Apple Computer , having released its TRS-80 in 1977, the same year Apple incorporated. RadioShack unwisely decided only to offer its own software on its earliest PCs, and so it was soon eclipsed by Apple and then the IBM PC.

Those PCs marked the point at which RadioShack adopted a new strategy. Forced to create IBM-compatible PCs, RadioShack began a slow transition from a home for tinkerers and hobbyists to a straightforward retailer of the kind of consumer electronics we have now—the sort that are cheaper to replace than repair.

Bill Gates himself wrote the operating system for the original TRS-80. A teenage Michael Dell saw his first PC in the RadioShack that happened to be stationed between his home and school. Steve Wozniak , who more or less single-handedly designed the Apple I and II, was intensely devoted to RadioShack, and relied on it for parts.

Remembering RadioShack

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But the PCs these pioneers created and popularized replaced weekend hardware projects with basement coding sessions. These still required time, but were mostly the domain of those young enough to still have some claim to leisure. The influence of technology spread, but not, in the same proportion, the priesthood of hardware hackers who made it possible.

As the business of selling parts to hobbyists declined, sales of PCs, and later phones, began to fill the breach. In 1984, RadioShack sold its first mobile phone. And as anyone who walked into one of the company’s stores in the past decade knows, by the end mobile phones felt like the only thing any of RadioShack’s salespeople were incentivized to sell.

RadioShack had an incredible asset in its portfolio of real estate, allowing the company to limp along for decades with lower per-square-foot sales than comparable retailers. But that asset could only delay the inevitable.

RadioShack was once a cultural phenomenon—a place with a unique geographic but also psychological reach, a hub of one of the many leisure-time activities Americans once enjoyed to a degree it’s hard to fathom now, in a time when apps allow those of us with more money than time to outsource even the minutest details of our lives. RadioShack, in turn, had no choice but to become a retailer, a place that sold electronics devoted primarily to consumption.

It’s also true that the hobbyist wares that were the heart of RadioShack are now available on the infinite catalog known as the Internet. But the modern incarnation of the RadioShack hobbyist—the so-called maker—has remained a niche phenomenon in the U.S.

Make magazine, the movement’s bible, has a circulation of only 125,000, whereas RadioShack’s instructional manuals, sold in every store, were printed by the millions when America’s population was about two-thirds what it is now. Just before RadioShack announced its bankruptcy-court filing, it became partners with companies such as Make and LittleBits to sell electronics and robotics kits that felt like a modern revival of what RadioShack once represented, but in 2015 there isn’t enough interest in—or time for—such pastimes to sustain a company the size of RadioShack.

Dale Dougherty, who founded Make magazine, told me that many in the maker movement can’t comprehend why their beloved RadioShack is failing.

“To see it go away is almost to potentially extinguish something that allowed people in almost any place in America to build or repair something,” says Mr. Dougherty.

But that’s the crucial question: How did we arrive at a culture of disposable everything? The simplest answer is that we no longer have time for anything else.