Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
ts.
By moving into stores, they suddenly have a very limited amount of stock available, lose their major advantage and pick up a significant disadvantage.
Why?
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In days of yore, one could walk into Radio Shack, and walk out with everything you needed for your ham shack, including an appointment for taking the required tests in Morse, etc.
Today, Radio Shack sells two things:
* Batteries;
* Cell Phones;
Were Amazon, Google, or another outfit with vision, and the willingness to risk some venture capital to purchase RS, they could position themselves to do serious damage to Target, K-Mart, Family Dollar, and Walmart. They'd also damage "dollar stores".
Radio Shack would sell:
* Batteries;
* Cell phones;
* Plastics & ceramics printed to the customer's specifications;
* Amazon ebook kiosk;
That third item would require around US$50K investment per store. The only additional inventory would be the daily drop of plastics and ceramics.
As an Amazon store, RS could offer "next day customer pickup". High tech is nice. High Touch is a customer service winner. Whilst customer service and RS are mutually exclusive, that need not be the case. With a corporate takeover, HR could enforce "high touch or be terminated" rules, without running afoul of EEOC/ADA legislation.
High Touch also means that you can return that product you purchased online to a human being offline.