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.
hhgregg was a regional appliance-and-electronics chain across the South and Midwest, and on April 7, 2017 it announced it would close all 220 of its stores and go out of business. Founded in Princeton, Indiana on April 15, 1955 by Henry Harold Gregg and his wife Fansy — the name is simply the founders’ initials and surname — it grew over six decades from a single appliance store into a publicly traded chain operating across 21 states, headquartered in Indianapolis, with fiscal-2016 revenue of about $1.96 billion. For a long stretch it was where households in two dozen states bought the refrigerator, the washer, the flat-panel television, and the extended warranty to go with them, talked through the choice by a commissioned salesperson on a polished showroom floor. When the liquidation was done in late May 2017, all 220 stores were dark and roughly 5,000 people had lost their jobs.
The detail that defines the collapse is that hhgregg sold the two categories least suited to its model and most exposed to its killers. Commodity consumer electronics — televisions, especially — are precisely the goods a shopper can price-check against Amazon and Best Buy from the showroom floor, and hhgregg’s higher-cost stores could not win on the tag. Appliances, the more defensible half of the business, came with thin margins and a heavy reliance on in-store financing, which tied the chain to the volatile rhythm of big-ticket household spending.
What killed hhgregg was the ordinary e-commerce squeeze that flattened a generation of electronics retailers — falling prices on high-tech devices, a price-transparent internet, and an Amazon that did not need a showroom at all. The chain had gone public near the top in July 2007, at $13.72 a share, just as that squeeze was tightening; for the next decade it fought a slow, losing margin war. By early 2017, with a term sheet and more than 50 prospective buyers explored, no one would keep it whole.
So the verdict is a clean liquidation. hhgregg filed Chapter 11 on March 6, 2017, failed to find a going-concern buyer, and converted to a wind-down on April 7. The brand’s afterlife is the licensed-website kind: Valor Group bought the name and intellectual property for about $400,000 in June 2017 and relit it online — a logo, not a chain.
Ultimate Electronics was the West’s high-end consumer-electronics and home-theater chain, and in the spring of 2011 it liquidated its last 46 stores and ceased to exist. It began in 1968 when William and Barbara Pearse opened a Team Electronics audio/video franchise in Arvada, Colorado, a Denver suburb, on $15,000 of their own money. They left the franchise in 1974 and renamed the store SoundTrack; the company changed its name to Ultimate Electronics, went public in 1993, and grew into a chain of big, gleaming superstores selling premium televisions, audio, and custom home-theater installation across the Mountain West and beyond — 65 stores at its 2004 peak. By April 2011 every one was gone, the fixtures sold off in going-out-of-business sales.
The detail that makes Ultimate a study in slow death is that it failed twice. The first failure came in January 2005, when the company filed Chapter 11; Hollywood Video founder Mark Wattles bought 32 of the stores out of bankruptcy through his Ultimate Acquisition Partners and closed the rest, betting he could fix a broken retailer the way he had others. He could not. The reorganized, Wattles-owned company filed Chapter 11 again on January 27, 2011, and this time there was no rescue — it converted to liquidation and wound down its 46 remaining stores.
What killed Ultimate Electronics was the same vise that crushed every other big-box electronics chain of the era. Best Buy had the scale and the lower prices; Amazon had no stores and no overhead; and the high-end, high-service, big-footprint model Ultimate ran was the most expensive way to sell goods a customer could increasingly price-check and order online. Premium service and a knowledgeable floor were a real advantage — and, as Circuit City had already discovered, an advantage that could not by itself cover the rent on a fleet of superstores when the margin on the merchandise evaporated.
So the verdict is a liquidation in two acts: a first bankruptcy that shrank the chain and changed its owner, and a second, four years later, that finished it. The brand did not limp on as a website; it simply ended.
Brookstone was the mall chain that sold the things you didn’t know you needed — the massage chair you tried for twenty minutes, the levitating speaker, the nose-hair trimmer, the gadget you handled in a bright store and then, increasingly, bought somewhere cheaper. Founded in 1965 in the Berkshires as a mail-order catalog of hard-to-find specialty tools, it became a fixture of American malls and airports for half a century. On August 2, 2018, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy for the second time in four years and announced it would close all 101 of its remaining U.S. mall stores. The mall chain was dead; the brand was not. Roughly 35 airport stores, the website, and the wholesale business survived under new owners, which is why the verdict here is not liquidation but online-only.
The chain’s whole proposition was tactile, and that was both its charm and its fatal exposure. Brookstone stores were a hands-on demo floor: you sank into the recliner, you flew the toy drone, you squeezed the travel pillow. That experience cost money to staff and to lease in a high-traffic mall — and it was, by design, perfectly reproducible by a customer who tried the product at Brookstone and then ordered the same item, or a near-identical one, from Amazon for less. Brookstone had built a showroom for a catalog it no longer controlled.
Brookstone did not fail because anyone hated it. It failed because the mall traffic that justified its expensive lease footprint collapsed, and because the gadgets it specialized in — the speakers, the headphones, the chargers, the novelty tech — became exactly the category that e-commerce commoditized first. By 2018 the company carried liabilities reported as high as $500 million against assets of $50 million to $100 million, and the “extremely challenging retail environment at malls,” in management’s own phrase, left no version of the store worth saving. The airport business, which sold to a captive audience of bored, time-rich travelers, was the only physical format that still worked.
The afterlife is the licensed-label kind. A New York brand-management firm, Bluestar Alliance, and a California electronics manufacturer, Apex Digital, bought the name, the airport stores, the e-commerce operation, and a stake in the roughly 550 Brookstone-branded stores in China. The recliners are gone from the mall; the logo lives on a website and on a wall of products in Terminal B.