Please, please, Amazon, leave 1/16 of the shelf space for electronic components! Pack them densely, don't offer customer support, and charge high prices. We need brick and mortar places to buy components. It might be worth a lot of goodwill from electronics tinkerers. Although I guess that's not a big enough group to matter, but who knows...
You know where I can buy a lot of common electronic components these days? Home Depot. Buildings are increasingly wired with various digital sensors, so electricians are increasingly in need of electronic this-and-that to couple them together.
Sure, you can't build whole from-scratch circuits purely from hardware-store parts, but if you run out of resistors/pots/whatever, you can restock pretty cheaply in any town big enough to have professional electricians operating out of it.
Also, I should probably point out that a lot of places (e.g. Best Buy) still do sell electronic components—they just sell combinations of them in lots and call the result a "hobbyist kit." It's much easier on their shelf space, and their employees, to just carry one SKU that you can point anyone looking for components at, which will give them most of what they might need.
For all the other stuff (what you might think of as a "booster pack" to a hobbyist kit's "base pack"), there's no more economical way to get exactly what you want than ordering online anyway. Expecting there to be a store in every rural town carrying every random IC one might need for a project is just insane, when you can order a pull-sheet of them for $2 no matter where you are.
On the other hand, consider the chain store "Tacoma Screw" around here. They sell what you would expect - screws, nuts and bolts, of every description, type, grade, hardness, length, head, etc. It's a marvelous place for an engineer like me.
The prices are, of course, high, but when I break a bolt or lose one for my car or other project, Tacoma Screw has an exact (or better) replacement.
The hardware store sells bolts and nuts, too, but the selection is erratic and the quality is dubious. When I don't want my transmission falling off, I want top quality bolts guaranteed.
I never knew how badly I wanted a store like this around, there've been so many times I'm mid-project or rebuild and the old bolt/nut/fastener/whatever either breaks/gets lost/shot and I just have to wait for the part to come in or wade through the bins at a hardware store which have been waded through by everyone else and now I'm frustrated...
I love how much information McMaster gives you. Mechanical drawings and 3D CAD models of course, and also descriptions of how things are used, the properties of different materials, how to size stuff, etc. All the basic things you need to know to design something.
McMaster-Carr's fulfillment services are truly top-notch. There have been times that I've specifically ordered from them because I knew that I'd have it the next day. They've never failed to impress me with their service.
Their physical catalog is one hard catalog that I really miss! Despite the fact that the website undoubtedly offers more product than the multi-thousand paged hard edition, I remember many projects in my college days inspired by simply flipping through it's pages.
As a studio art major in another life, I can't recommend McMaster-Carr enough! I was doing a lot of metal fabrication, lighting, and plexiglass work, I can't imagine finishing my thesis without their selection and speed. Not to mention all I learned just by reading their great descriptions and images.
If you're in the Bay Area, halted.com has a store in Santa Clara that totally blew my mind. Dozens of aisles of electronics components, including racks of reels of surface-mount stuff. They also have stuff like used oscilloscopes, industrial robotics controllers, etc.
Microcenter in Cambridge has expanded their space for DIY recently, and is decent now for hobby-level stuff. They have a very large selection of various kits, RPi and Arduino shields, sensors, and some tools.
They don't have very much single-component selection -- although, to be honest, YDI Electronics selection is kind of limited too (understandably because, well, internet).
Radio Shack tends to have old leases in 2nd tier shopping centers. Why would they buy a marginal retailer with poor footprint, when you could just lease stores yourself?
There was a time when getting space in malls and strip shopping centers was tough. This isn't one of those times.
They're probably going to be cherry-picking the locations, and the intent will be to buy the leases out, not the stores. They'll bring in the liquidators (perhaps they'll use the same ones that Circuit City used...), sell off the inventory and the fixtures, gut the interior and then redo it with their own interior design.
That is what I was thinking, a lot of Amazon lockers. And to be honest Radio has the 'components' space to itself in most places. I could see making it work if it was also connected to the giant hose that is Amazon's supply chain.
Having used Amazon Lockers a lot, I don't really get it. If you don't want a package sitting on your doorstep all day, have it delivered to work. And Lockers has a maximum size limit that I hit every so often that negated that option. Having it show up at my desk is a lot more convenient.
Now if I could return packages through Lockers, then I'd be game.
Here in Germany we have a nationwide network of those:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packstation
like a 24/7 automated post office.
Great for getting _and returning_ shipments not just from Amazon but from most any online merchant.
Not everyone has the option of having stuff delivered to work. For me, my (large company) mailroom has a habit of taking about two days to actually get your mail to you, so the Locker at the end of the block is ideal for me.
The people working in the mail-room here started objecting to the number of Amazon packages arriving each day (non-business time spent, etc. etc.) so no more at-work deliveries. :(
"Why would they buy a marginal retailer with poor footprint, when you could just lease stores yourself?"
Because it's already assembled, at, in theory, lower than market rates and won't take months or a year to assemble. Similar to why companies buy companies instead of building their own. At least in the area that I am in Radio Shack has decent retail locations.
I wonder if this is their in for B&M stores. I can also see this as part of their plan to start shipping items before you even buy them. I click checkout and it tells me to just go pick up the item from Radio Shack on 6th and Weidler.
Locally malls have transitioned from "sells everything" in the 80s to about 95% womens clothing, the food court, and that radio shack that just wont die. Being in the mall MIGHT be useful if amazon wants to expand its sales of womens clothes.
I am not, as far as I know, a woman, but I could find it incredibly useful to go "somewhere" and get 3-D scanned / measured and then have a giant clustered database translate my exact physical measurements into this mfgrs idea of a "M" vs this mfgrs idea of a "L" or whatever. Not to mention shoes, where I'm about a 10.75 so 50/50 odds if a 11 fits me better than a 10.5, and some kind of "big data" might help. Money saved in return shipping alone might make it financially worthwhile for amazon to run a "scanning booth" store.
I still think the best solution is to measure the normal tailors measurements with a tape, upload them, and then have manufacturers upload the exact measurements of their clothing in corresponding areas.
Crowdsourcing would allow people to mention wash shrinkage, and tolerance delta's for items.
Be cool to say I'm X size, and this is my favorite shirt. Show me more that are of similar measurements.
Some companies are already doing that. True Fit is the one I've seen when shopping for an Arc'teryx jacket. I think I've seen it elsewhere, but I couldn't tell you where.
It wasn't particularly accurate, in my experience. It told me to get a medium when a small actually fit better, but it also didn't have my favorite shirt in its database, so I had to go with something that had a decent but worse fit as a comparison.
I actually get cat food and water fountain filters as a subscription through Amazon and they always offer me kitty litter on the home page. They just don't have the kind I use.
There's a difference between shipping on a pallet in the same semi trailer as 51 other pallets and shipping in a cardboard box from a fulfillment center.
> There's a difference between shipping on a pallet in the same semi trailer as 51 other pallets and shipping in a cardboard box from a fulfillment center.
True, but Amazon (amongst others) is increasingly making the economics of delivery more feasible.
I LOLed at that because my monthly subscribe n save is due later this week and over the years the delivery is getting physically bigger to the point of almost requiring palletized delivery, like the cardboard box is getting so big and heavy my wife has problems moving it. I have hit the UPS shipping limits in the past. Its not just food, I get stuff like dishwasher detergent on a schedule, shaving cream, bath soap, laundry detergent, trash bags... I don't buy much at brick and mortar stores anymore except for fresh/frozen and emergencies. Who has time to stand in a food store once a month for five minutes selecting a box of kitchen trash bags at a price higher than amazon would charge, times about 20 other items?
>I click checkout and it tells me to just go pick up the item from Radio Shack on 6th and Weidler.
I'd much prefer it showing up at my door in two days and would view this as a major UX detriment. It may not be a common feeling, but the opportunity cost of spending an hour or so running errands to various brick and mortar locations around town multiple times a week is a major reason I'm a prime member and do a huge amount of my shopping through Amazon.
When shipping costs add 50% to the price of a cheaper item, and the store is convenient, free instore pickup is a killer feature. I've bought lots of stuff that way from Walmart.
This could be very interesting if it proves to be true. Seeing Amazon purchase Radioshack and then miraculously return it to its former glory and exclusively sell electronic components, hobbyist kits and stop selling things like TV and phones would be a move that I would wholeheartedly support as would my inner 7 year old self who has fond memories of going to Radioshack with my dad and buying a bag of LED's and various electronic components to build things.
As a bonus they could use it to locally store popular items, use the stores as pick-up and drop-off zones (as the site suggests) and have a few computers consumers can come in and use to order directly off of Amazon. I would hate to see Radioshack die, it kind of makes me sad to think the brand could just vanish.
They already sell electronic components, Arduino and Arduino accessories, multimeters, drones, etc. Almost all the Radioshacks in my city (San Francisco), and in my old city (Troy, MI), stock these things.
What makes you think that's the strategy it has to employ to succeed? Because it is doing that, and it's not working. Normal people don't buy those things, and certainly a network of thousands of stores stocking resistors isn't a viable business when the small amount of hobbyists just go online.
TVs and phones are very low-margin products. Batteries are high margin products. I think the RadioShack cost for a 2-pack of AA batteries is about 5-20 cents, and they charge like 5 dollars, right? A TV or phone costing $500 to RS probably sells for $502. At least, that's how The Source works in Canada (former RadioShack).
Telecom contracts, however, are high-margin, and they'll have to continue increase their mobile contracts significantly if they want to stay in business.
Pump n dump. There's a story on bloomberg that radioshack had been a target for months of leveraged buyout rumors in pump n dump schemes and now, finally, "woosh sound of relaxation" thats all over. LOL little optimistic, not done beating this dead horse yet.
Pump and dump doesn't require that the stock be traded on an exchange -- the idea is to manipulate perception and, thereby, demand to improve the price you can sell at, which applies no matter what mechanism you are using to sell.
Right, I'm aware of 1) what pump and dump is and 2) the fact that unlisted stocks can still be traded. But the reason the NYSE suspended trading is to prevent pump and dump amidst talks of a buyout with Sprint, Amazon, etc. It's much harder to do so with unlisted stocks...
The NYSE didn't suspend trading to limit the risk of pump and dump directly -- though that's probably among the reasons for their general policies on delisting. The NYSE suspended trading because RadioShack stated that it did not intend to present a business plan identifying how it would return to compliance with NYSE's minimum $50 million market cap requirement for listing. As is policy when that occurs, NYSE suspend trading and began the process for delisting the stock.
Eh I doubt that the issue is brick and mortar representation.
The worlds best selling smartphone family, Android, has next to no dedicated stores outside of a handful of Samsung and Sony experiences.
It seems to me that the trick to getting more sales at network stores like AT&T is simply paying off AT&T to get it's representatives to push your product. Many buyers go in and ask for recommendations or allow network staff to drive them towards a product. In my experience, the rep will usually push people towards a Samsung flagship. When I visited my local official AT&T last summer, they were pushing A LOT of Samsung gear and didn't have much of anything to say about the latest LG G3 or HTC M8 refresh. They pushed the Samsung Gear watch but didn't have much to say about any other brand.
Amazon would probably boost the sales of their devices much more strongly with some kind of sweetheart promotional deal with a network than they would trying to operate non-network smartphone stores. Who's going to go to an Amazon store to buy an Amazon phone? You go to your network store to look around at what's available.
I could see the smartphones-in-store approach working if they get customers flying through the doors for other reasons (same day pick up, Amazon lockers, Prime-ready electronics show room, etc), and kept them in store long enough to look at phones.
Why do I need to acknowledge that? That's not a knowable thing.
In fact, I'd argue that they're the most profitable company IN SPITE of B&M stores.
My evidence is clear: ALL OTHER BUSINESSES on the "most profitable list" do not have B&M stores. Proof is in the pudding, the list of most profitable companies is a list of no store companies, and Apple is an outlier not a rule.
LG only sells it's latest HBS900 headset at AT&T stores and when I visited, their only model was tied down to the table - no way for me to pick it up much less wear it before I was supposed to buy it.
I'm pretty sure that Amazon will use the best positioned stores as forward stocking locations. They experimented with a similar concept at WebVan i believe. I also think they now realize that what Postmates and Instacart are doing today (using the city as a warehouse) is actually working and can be attractive to customers.
They're small but if you took Amazon's warehouse layout and Kiva robots, you'd get an incredible storage density. Coupled with lockers, pre-stocked with Amazon's top products, and staffed by one or two people, you'd have a pretty good system.
I can only talk about our (Postmates) experience but having multiple pickup and drop-off locations increases the efficiency of a fleet dramatically. In larger cities like New York, LA, etc. multiple warehouses are a huge advantage. Off course i'm mostly referring to on-demand or same day deliveries here.
Maybe i should add some more color here. If you think in terms of traditional delivery, one warehouse is enough. But i'm not sure that this paradigm (one van drives to a warehouse, collects a bunch of stuff and delivers it), is what works best for on-demand, 2-hour or same day deliveries. Multiple, fast and easy to reach pickup locations are an advantage at scale. Especially for deliveries where minutes matter.
Ultimately, we will probably see a combination of both.
That's a call that has to be made on the demand side. Some of us have a steady flow of overnight boxes coming in from DigiKey and Mouser containing, well, nothing very expensive or interesting to most people.
They should treat the stores as a cache for whatever people in the area order. If someone orders something, send two and put one in the store. That should make things interesting.
Oh no I sure hope not, the tax will be back and that is enough to move me to other sites in several cases.
Edit: To clarify, no sales tax was one of the first things Amazon and other online retailers had on their side. They could sell things cheaper, even by a little, and the rest would be made up by not having to pay sales tax. If they have a presence in a state though they have to collect sales tax. If you buy a lot from Amazon it is kind of like taking a 8.5% pay cut in buying power. If you remember back in 1997-8 there were several bills popping up around it. My Google-fu is failing me, but this is a real issue. Amazon even discontinued the associates programs in some states to avoid taxes.
IIRC, aren't you supposed to calculate your owed taxes for your state and then pay when you filed? Of course not many people do this, and the IRS (or state equivalent) has no hope of enforcing this.
In some states, "use tax" is due on goods or services bought out of the state and used in the state. I don't know how widespread it is, but I don't think there's a blanket law that applies over all the US.
They currently collect sales tax in 24 states[1,2], and I'm guessing the writing is on the wall in the other 26. I don't know if there's any truth to this Radio Shack rumor, but I'd expect that avoiding tax nexus status probably isn't as big a deal for them as it used to be, because they're going to be forced to do soon, one way or another.
It might, but Amazon has been slowly losing the sales tax fight [1]. I imagine they'll do this in phases or do it in places where they're likely to have sales tax levied on them in any case.
For Amazon, getting faster and more convenient delivery might be worth the cost. It helps them in their fight against brick and mortar retailers, and if they're careful about it they could probably leverage a limited physical presence pretty well.
Well of course one cannot prove that global financial collapse would not have followed from a decision not to "make whole" some of the various counterparties of AIG and some other failing institutions. (Perhaps some would say that we got something of a GFC even with those heroic efforts?) Neither can one prove that pension and other benefits defaults on the part of two of the fourteen automakers with factories based in USA would not have had some knock-on effects beyond the retirees of those two companies. We don't get to react to the same economic situation twice. Those who staked their reputations on the interventions aren't going to publicly regret them. Likewise, those who at the time worried more about the long term have seen nothing to change their minds.
But that is just my point. There is no empirical reason to believe or disbelieve in 2B2F. There are myriad political reasons to do both. Not all questions must be answered, and if this is the only sort of answer available, I'll pass.
Proving a counterfactual is of course difficult, but there's no need to. There are numerous financial panics which have been precipitated by the failure of a single firm, or an interconnected set of firms.
The loss of Lehmann in 2008 very nearly precipitated this, and in multiple histories of the 2007-2008 crisis, it's cited as the reason that a bailout was created.
The most notable instance in the past century was of course the Great Depression precipitated by the Great Crash of 1929. If you've not read John Kenneth Galbraith's book on the topic (short, comprehensive, and highly readable), I very strongly recommend it. It was precisely a case of general financial contagion brought about by grossly excessive moral hazard, and spread throughout the world.
There's a long list of financial panics caused by the failures of single firms, generally financial or with a significant financial impact:
In the sense of creating regional depressions or declines in economic vitality, there's a long history of manufacturing first entering, then departing, various locales. This happened in many of the former factory towns of England, then New England, the Steel Belt extending from Pennsylvania through Ohio and Michigan in the U.S., the garment and furniture industries in the southeastern U.S., and the aerospace and defence industries in Southern California following the 1990s defence budget cuts. Or pretty much any extractive industry boomtown anywhere.
Some of those have left lingering poverty, others simply resulted in a former golden age which has never fully recovered.
As the example of manufacturing shows, nothing can last forever. There is no principle of morality that says all steel must be forged in Bethlehem PA forever. Self-described "capitalists" (not a shot at you, but I'm sure you know the type) wax poetic about competition and creative destruction, right up until the moment when their complicated financial instruments are rendered worthless by bankrupt counterparties. But this discussion is still a political one. If the government hadn't had the money to spare for these purposes, we would never have heard of 2B2F.
This too big to fail is a random assertion coming out of nowhere. Several large corporations have failed from A&P to Enron without any effect on global economy. Also, the fact that government interference leads to any better outcomes is not evident. What exactly has happened to Detroit today ?
Amazon sells so many different things that it is difficult to find products within a particular niche. When you look for educational toys on Amazon you will not presented with electronic kits (for example) because mostly that is not what a generic customer wants. Even if you go looking for a particular niche it can be very tricky.
There are lots of sites that sell the same products Amazon do but target a particular niche. A brand like RadioShack could use the Amazon backend and only expose a particular type of product that fits within the traditional RadioShack ethos.
Would this be a precursor to their delivering items themselves? I wonder if it would allow them to effectively have mini warehouses which are just behind a convenient store front. Something like Amazon Basics, simple items Amazon users buy all the time just now in your neighborhood shopping center.
Hell they could do shipping and receiving like UPS stores if they want. The possibilities are endless.
I'm pretty sure they already do this in major metro areas. Many of my Amazon-as-vendor purchases are delivered by "A1 Courier". Often at unexpected hours too.
Scott Galloway talked about this at last week's DLD. You can hear his points and arguments at 6:50 -very insightful video on why Amazon has reached a point where they must make a brick and mortar acquisition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCvwCcEP74Q
Bezos could refocus on DIY, hobbyists and maker culture... classes (or sponsorship thereof) would be a good direction to get the cash register filling. It's hard to compete with online, open-source, but there are some things people would pay for (and want) in-person.
I'm not sure I see the logic/advantage of taking over existing RadioShack locations as opposed to just making real estate decisions based upon Amazon's own requirements.
A select subset of their stores might be quite select (and limited in number).
Perhaps Amazon Local could expand and extend as a storefront hub that connects with the city's businesses. Or maybe I just wish I could get local goods in Amazon's purchase model
This makes little sense for Amazon. They have a huge product line. What items would they put in a retail outlet? Unless it's a desperate attempt to push their phone/tablet line.
I have always wanted Amazon to have a store so I can play with their kindle products before pulling the trigger. Hopefully this deal can make that happen.
Not to mention make an impressive and accessible demo-space for their increasing stake in devices and media (try Amazon Prime Video! try Kindle Fire!).
It'd be a hell of a lot better than the neglected "demo" devices glued to a display in Best Buy they have right now.
It's where the developing war between Amazon and Google starts to get interesting. Google's approach has been to work with existing brick-and-mortar stores via Google Shopping Express, which I suspect means tying into their ordering and inventory systems. That's also more-or-less an attack on IBM (which does a lot of SMB work as well).
Google gets storefronts, merchandise, direct retail, and business knowledge, while Amazon's got to build that, but has a single unified shopping and logistics system.
I'm not sure which is going to win, though I'm betting somewhat on Google.
