Incredible Universe — The 185,000-Square-Foot Store Too Big to Make Money

Incredible Universe was the largest, loudest, and most expensive bet that the electronics-superstore era ever made — and it lasted barely five years. Launched in 1992 by Tandy Corporation, the parent of RadioShack, it was a chain of consumer-electronics megastores so enormous that a single location ran to roughly 185,000 square feet of sales floor and warehouse and stocked something like 85,000 items. The concept, conceived by Tandy chief executive John V. Roach, was “shopertainment”: part store, part theme park, with a central rotunda and stage, banks of televisions, karaoke, a “Kids Universe” play area, and staff borrowed from Disney’s vocabulary — departments were “scenes,” employees were “cast members,” shoppers were “guests.” By late 1995 there were about 17 of them. On December 30, 1996, Tandy announced it would close or sell every one, and the chain was effectively defunct by March 31, 1997.

The problem was not that customers disliked Incredible Universe. The problem was arithmetic. A store that big cost an enormous amount to build, stock, staff, and light, and it had to do extraordinary sales volume just to cover its own overhead — let alone turn a profit. By analysts’ reckoning the stores lost about $90 million in 1996 alone, and only six of the seventeen were ever consistently profitable. The format was a spectacle that could not pay for itself.

What killed Incredible Universe was overexpansion in the most literal, per-store sense of the word: each store was simply too big and too costly to be profitable, and the chain rolled the format out faster than the economics could justify. It arrived just as Best Buy and Circuit City were perfecting a leaner, cheaper big-box model that delivered most of the selection without the rotunda, the karaoke, or the day-care. The customer could get the television without paying, in higher prices and thinner margins, for the theme park around it.

The afterlife is neat and slightly ironic: Tandy sold six of the profitable Incredible Universe stores to Fry’s Electronics in 1996 — a chain that would itself build a cult on wildly themed megastores and then, decades later, collapse for related reasons. Tandy retreated to its core, kept its roughly 6,800 RadioShack stores, and never attempted anything on that scale again.