RadioShack — The Parts Store That Sold You a Phone Instead, and Died

RadioShack was the place a generation of Americans went for the thing no one else stocked — a resistor, a 9-volt battery, a fuse, a length of speaker wire, a CB radio — and on March 8, 2017 it filed for bankruptcy for the second time in two years, after which all but a few dozen company stores went dark and the name slid into the half-life of a licensed website. Founded in Boston in 1921 by brothers Theodore and Milton Deutschmann as a mail-order supplier to ship radio officers and amateur “ham” operators, it was bought out of near-insolvency in 1962 by the Tandy Corporation, a Fort Worth leather-goods company, for about $300,000, and remade into a national chain of small, dense, knowledgeable stores. At its 1999 peak it ran roughly 8,000 outlets across the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and for decades it was, in the most literal sense, the corner electronics store of the country.

The detail that turned the collapse into a parable is that RadioShack spent the last decade of its life trying to be a phone store, and was good at neither phones nor the parts business it abandoned. The hobbyist who once wandered in for a soldering iron found an aisle of cellular plans and a clerk asking for a name and address; the phone buyer found a smaller, dingier version of what the carrier’s own store and Best Buy did better. The chain that had genuinely been the maker’s pantry — the place that sold its own TRS-80 personal computer in 1977, years ahead of the field — could not work out what it was for once the components went to the internet and the gadgets went to the smartphone.

What killed RadioShack was a failure to adapt, compounded by a doomed bet on mobile. The components-and-batteries business was structurally tiny — a high-margin trickle that paid the rent on thousands of small leases but could not grow — and the small-store format was perfect for parts and hopeless for the big-ticket electronics that migrated online. When management leaned the whole chain into selling smartphones, it tethered its fate to carrier commissions and to a partner, Sprint, whose interests diverged from its own. A first Chapter 11 in February 2015 carved the company up; a second in March 2017 finished it.

The afterlife is the licensed-label kind. The brand and customer data were sold for $26.2 million in 2015; the trademarks have since passed through Retail Ecommerce Ventures and, from 2023, the El Salvador-based Unicomer Group, surviving as a website, a dealer network, and a logo on imported batteries — a name that outlived its stores by changing what the name was attached to.

Sharper Image — The Gadget Mall Built on One Air Purifier

Sharper Image was the gadget-and-novelty retailer of the American mall — the place with the massage chairs you could sit in, the air purifier that hummed in the window, and the catalog full of things no one knew they wanted. In February 2008 it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and by the end of that year all of its roughly 187 stores in 38 states were closed. Founded in San Francisco in 1977 by Richard Thalheimer — who started by selling a running watch through a mail-order ad and built it into a glossy catalog and a chain of stores — it spent three decades as the high street’s showroom for the gadget as gift: the ionizer, the nose-hair trimmer, the noise-canceling headphones, the demo unit you played with and meant to come back for.

The detail that turned the collapse into a cautionary tale is how much of the company rested on a single product. The Ionic Breeze air purifier — silent, bladeless, heavily advertised — became Sharper Image’s signature seller and, by some accounts, a large share of its profit. When Consumer Reports tested it in 2002 and found it removed almost no airborne particles, then followed in 2005 by warning it emitted potentially unhealthy levels of ozone, the company’s flagship product and its credibility took the hit together. Sharper Image sued Consumers Union for libel, lost, and was ordered to pay the magazine’s legal fees; a class action over the Ionic Breeze followed and settled in 2007. The litigation drained cash precisely as the gadget-store model was faltering.

What killed Sharper Image was a thin product story meeting a recession. The catalog-and-store concept depended on a steady supply of novel, must-have gadgets and on discretionary spending that vanished as the 2008 downturn took hold. With its signature product discredited, three straight years of losses behind it, and suppliers tightening credit, the company filed Chapter 11 in February 2008 and liquidated its stores by year-end.

The brand, though, did not die — it was bought. A consortium acquired the assets in 2008, and the Sharper Image name has limped on ever since as a licensed catalog and online label, passing through Iconix Brand Group and then ThreeSixty Group, which paid about $100 million for the global rights in December 2016. The stores are gone; the logo sells gadgets on a website.