Feeling Lost inside RadioShack

out how on Radio Shack on the Brink. Hey guys, I'm Jonathan and I'm Ariel, And I apologize that was a little bit of a weaker intro than I don't right when I saw that intro, I was just like, well, this is clearly love Shack. I'm going to have to our Fred Schneider. Was I just I didn't set myself up to continue the joke. Yeah, that's fair, that's fair. Uh. And also we are based out of Atlanta, so we have a particular affinity for B fifty two. Yes, yes, I was gonna be like, hey, I'm Radio, Well we

are not talking about B fifty twos today. I wish we were, because that would be rock and roll. But we're talking about Radio Shack, a company I remember well because you know, I grew up in the nineteen eighties mall culture, and there was a radio Shack and just about every mall, and I have lots of memories of going into those places and looking around and thinking I should really want to buy stuff in here, but I can't find things I want to buy because it turned

out I didn't have any needs for diodes or anything. Yeah, they had a niche market, and then they had a bizarre market, and then they had no market. And we'll get into that um, but before we do, I just want to say that this is another listener suggestion who asked for this Sarah Rosenbaum asked for this one an excellent So, Sarah, this is This is the story of Radio Shack, and we're gonna give you a quick down and dirty rundown of the history. So it was founded

in nineteen in Boston, Boston. In fact, that's where it stayed for forty years. It was just in Boston. There were a couple of brothers, Theodore and Milton Deutschmann, who created the store, and they were you know, it's kind of they had come out of the catalog retail business. Yeah, they were. They were selling surplus items, largely radio pieces from they had gotten from the army, plus army pieces, so they were just a single store and then they

started selling. They really didn't release their first official catalog till a while after they started, but they were still mail ordering and they were mostly focused on Ham radios, as the intro suggested, not like you know, your your

standard transistor. Radio transistors weren't a thing yet in nineteen twenty, so these were the sort of radio sets you would set up at home and used to broadcast and receive from other Ham radio operators, a lot of amateur radio operators, so you know, to put this in perspective, Boston got its first commercial radio station in the same year that Radio Shack opened, so that so commercial radio was not

really a thing yet. There had been some amateur radio enthusiast who had been broadcasting on limited licenses, but licensed commercial radio was just starting to become a thing, so different era. Yeah, and they were really focused towards those hobbyists and making this hobby more accessible to everyone, kind of like code acted with their cameras. But the thing is, at the time there weren't really many stores doing this. Not only were radio's cutting edge, but this whole electronics

hobby thing was also kind of news. So they were a front runner in this business at the time. It was also kind of hard to sustain because you're talking about a niche market already, right Like, you're you're catering to by definition, a small group of people, So building and maintaining a business on top of that was challenging. I mean, they did well for a little while, but it was it was small. In fact, as I said before,

they didn't issue their catalog for a while. It wasn't until their first official catalog came out and it over the next couple of decades they only grew their stores to like nine they only had nine stores, yeah, all in the Boston area, and they were opening up to

other areas of electronics as they were coming onto the market. Yep, they added music as one of the things they were offering, which makes sense because this is right around the same time that you started getting things like not just the radio sets that were meant to just pick up the commercial radio stations, but also things like gramophones things like that, you know, things that could play recorded music trying to

keep up with the change in the industry. Now in the fifties, radio shacks started selling private label products and this is something that they would toy with over the years, just creating their own versions of whatever the hot new tech item was, or pieces to make your own version of the hot new tech item. And by the early sixties they were a leader in the market. So they were a front runner, but they really made a niche

for themselves. But then they made a mistake. And I can't even say that I would say looking at it that you you could know it was mistake. They offered credit in their store. So it was only a mistake in hindsight, as they offered credit at their stores, but then found it very difficult to collect upon debts to them. But Macy's did fine with credits. So yeah, so they were in deep financial trouble by the early nineteen sixties. And that's when a guy named Charles Tandy, the leader

of the Tandy Corporation, sweeps in to purchase the company. Yeah, for a whole three hundred thousand dollars. Yeah, and this is still nine stores in Boston and the Tandy Corporation people who have were around in the eighties. Might think of Tandy Computers, that is in fact the same company, but I think of leather. That's exactly when she started off. Yeah,

there were a leather company. So it's kind of one of those stories where you had a company that was specialized in a particular product and then diversified to almost a ludicrous degree. Charles Tandy was determined to really diversify the company's holdings. Radio Shack was just one of many purchases. He wanted to be the Disney of retail. It sounds like, yeah, and he ended up buying like Dillard's and Peer One and a couple of other types of stores as well

during the same era. And he also wanted to really scale up, like he wanted to build Radio Shack well outside of the Boston area, and he did. They not only increase their numbers of stores drastically, which is something that would come back and bite Deo Shock in the proverbial butt later, but also in expanding what they offered, so still trying to stay current with the market and and catch whatever those trends coming down the line were right.

So the Tandy Corporation ends up selling off all of its non electronics businesses, so they d diversify, but they focus on electronics. Yeah. Now this is the era where they would start to dip their toe in the brand new, in fact, not even established market of personal computers. I want to say a quick aside. They sold off all of their non electronic businesses. But I'll still go to Tandy Leather occasionally, so still out there. Yes, it is still there. Yes, sorry, I just had to put that aside.

All right, back to radio show. Come on, we're not talking about Tandy in this kind of are a little bit all right. So, Yeah, and the A D S they developed personal computers, and they actually started a little early er than the eighties. They started in nine seven is when their first Peter came out. It was the t R S E D and it's sold better than the Apple computer of the time. It was just at the beginning of personal computers. Yeah, they were really pioneers

in the space for personal computers. Before this, you had hobby kits that would be sold to hobbyists, but that that by definition really limited who could buy because there's only people who felt confident that they could wire one together. Yeah, but electronic hobbies was radio shacked niche, So it made sense that they would delve into well, if you want to build a computer, but you don't know how, here's

a computer. Yeah, here's a fully assembled machine that you can purchase right now, and you can have your own personal computer. Uh. The t R S A D is affectionately called the trash a D despite selling over two hundred thousand of them. Yeah, there were issues with that computer, and there would also be issues with radio checks PC strategy, and we'll we'll touch on that now and again throughout this episode. Also by the A D S they were up to thousands of stores from the original nine. Uh.

And in eighty one they got a new CEO. Yeah, the Tandy had passed away in the seventies and then their their interim CEO left and so in eighty one they get their new one. But this is also the time where they start hitting a stalling point because now their computer, which had issues but was still selling, was being outclassed by IBM and Dell. On the startup side, they had Apple to fight with and Dell, and then

on the established side you had IBM. They were kind of caught in the middle, and they weren't innovative enough to stand out like Apple did, and they weren't established enough in the PC space or the computer space, I

should say that they could really compete with IBM. IBM had sort of the business side like for all small and medium and large businesses that that's those the companies went to IBM for their computers, and then home users, more and more people were either going with Commodore or Apple. Man I had a Commodore At this time, they pushed their goals for computer sales down to less than of

their sales. Yeah, they figured that the writing was on the wall and that if they dedicated too much of their effort toward trying to sell these computers, they would ultimately just be hurting their bottom line. So it was it was almost like, let's sell what we have left, but let's not focus on that as our primary revenue source. And and this led to a restructure to shift gears and and and to really try to go into more

mainstream electronics for them. Now we'll talk more about how that effort actually turned out in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break. All right, let's backtrack just a bit. Areal we had just mentioned before the break that in the early nineties that would lead to

a restructuring of their uh their businesses. But in for we have an example of Radio Shack getting into a specific area of electronics that would become both important to the company and ultimately down the road, kind of an albatross around the company's proverbial neck. Yeah, So in eighty four they sold their first home phone, so they went into the phone industry, figuring that would be a big trend. And they also the next year went into satellite TV.

Both of these things they held onto for a really long time, and the phone, the phones in particular, would end up being kind of a weight around their neck, but they kept trying for it. And I don't know why really at this time, Radio Shack is so desperate, and I feel like it was maybe a little bit sooner than they needed to be, and maybe the reason that they declined so much, they were so desperate to stay relevant that they just spread their net far and wide as to what they needed to do to to

make their company profitable and successful. So they moved into cell phones, they moved into satellite TV, opened up specialty stores like Computer City and Energy Express Plus, which sold batteries and Incredible Universe, which is basically Fries. And later on when they closed all those because that didn't work, they sold off Incredible Universe to Fries. Because when I was reading the description of what how an Incredible Universe was set up, it was it was made to compete

with best Buy. Um, yeah, we used to have an Incredible Universe here in the Atlanta area. I take it you never went. I never went, but I've been to Fries and I was like, well, this is the same layout.

So the Incredible Universe that was here in Atlanta not only did they sell electronics and stuff, but and this is a little side note, they had a recording booth where you could record yourself doing karaoke and they would actually burn it to uh desk or or they'd actually even recorded to cassette back in the day, and then you would have your own recording of you doing karaoke. And that's why somewhere floating around my house there's a recording of me doing I Fought the Law and the

Law one that's French Schneider from Theft two. When I hear that, Um, so you know, I went a little bit into how they diversified all these stores and how they eventually closed off. On the cell phone side of it. They moved into cell phones in nine that caused a lot of problems because it tied up their employees in

the registration process. If you've ever bought a cell phone, which I'm guessing most of our listeners have, it takes a while to set up for the first time where you're actually establishing your your phone number, you're establishing your account, which would be most people at that time. Yeah, back in the early ninees, that's when everyone's first doing. I mean I didn't get one until the late nineties for me, but but still, I mean I remember distinctly like that

was a long and involved process. If you're talking about stores that typically were fairly small and had, you know, a relatively small staff, maybe three or four people working the store at any given time, tying them up in a forty five minute process was a bit of a hindrance. And on top of that, and I'll talk more about this later in the episode two. At radio Shack salespeople were given an incentive by earning a commission on sales

if they reached a certain amount per per sale. So if you're tying up a salesperson for forty five minutes, and that person also is counting on commissions to make up part of their compensation. That's got to be a stressful environment too, because that's forty five minutes when you can't be selling other stuff to other people. Well, and then that's forty five minutes other people who want to buy other stuff don't have somebody to help them find it.

Along with that, in two thousand and four, they tried remote kiosks to sell their phones or other people's phones, like in Sam's Club Target, and that didn't go very well. It started to and then it fell apart. And then in two thousand and fifteen, when they were really in the mire, they did a partnership with Sprint, and that also it didn't go well. So for over twenty years they tried to make cell phones work, figuring that would be where their big market was, and it never seemed

to work. It makes me wonder why they stuck with it for so long. Yeah, well, and part of it might have just been this misguided desire to try and counteract that trend they had where they weren't focusing on stuff where they were taking that more you know, widespread, wide net approach where you're not giving any one part of your business a deep level of attention. It's just that they ended up picking perhaps the worst, the worst

of their mini businesses to really focus on. Yeah. So after all of their spinoff stores had closed and they just had the original Radio Shacks, which we're doing okay, Yeah, they kind of hit their peak. It's the best year for Radio Shack. And they opened their website quite a few years after Amazon came on the scene. Yeah. Yeah, this is another one of those things that a lot of people point to, Like if you do a web

search for why did Radio Shack go bankrupt? They're usually five or six points that are most of those articles really focus on. And we just talked about two of them. The cell phones are a big one, and then the late jump on the internet commerce side was another big one. Well, and even wasn't really commerce. You could you could read press releases and you could find a store, but you couldn't buy anything. Yeah. So even then they were like they were even further behind because it would take time

before they would start to offer any sort of online sales. Yes, and then they got a new CEO. Yeah, and get used to get used to that sentence. Yeah. Yeah, Now the CEO did something good. He did the stores in the store model, so all the places you could buy use subscriptions had their own like little sections in Radio Shack your satellite TV, your self service, your Internet. He was one of the first to do this. Uh. And in two thousand, you know, things were going good, Tandy

changed their name to the Radio Shot Corporation. Yeah. So Tandy at this point is taking the identity of one of its subsidiaries essentially. But Radio Shack was really facing stiff competition, not just online through Amazon, which was growing rapidly and starting to build upon its original business as an online bookstore by offering other stuff, but also with

the big box stores that were dominating the market. It was also tough because the general perception was that the stuff you could buy at Radio Shack was not different than the stuff you could buy at a lot of other places, but also was more expensive. Yeah, they didn't. They couldn't make up the price elsewhere like Walmart could or like Best Buy could. Now they didn't have lost

leaders like a lot of other stores did. So um, they they tried to compensate that for that by having knowledgeable employees who could help guide customers for stuff that they needed, but that wasn't quite enough to to counteract

this problem. Yeah. Another another thing is because they were trying to compete with Best Buy, they ended up having this really weird mix of hobbyist pieces and periphery items and then weird obscure gadgets that nobody wanted to buy, Like the q CAT bar code reader came up quite a few times in my research as something that they stalked a lot of and nobody knew why they needed it, so nobody bought it. Let's skip ahead a little bit

further to two thousand five. That's when David Edmondson, who had been in Radio Shack since the nineties they had held numerous positions, was the new CEO. He lasted for all of about a year at CEO. Because here's the problem. When you become CEO, if in fact you haven't been completely upfront and honest about your background, you typically come under a lot of scrutiny when you're leading a company. And as it turned out, Edmondson had not been totally honest on his resume. No, he said he had a

couple of college degrees when he had none of those. Yeah, And here's the thing is that this is not a story unique to Radio Shack. There actually are a few high profile stories of executives who rose to a level

where such FIBs came back to haunt them. So someday, I think for the Brink we'll need to do an episode where we specifically cover that kind of thing and talk about some of the people who have infamously been either been forced to resign or chose to leave positions because it came to light that they were not entirely honest about their backgrounds. I agree. But now back to Radio Shack. Yes, So in two thousand six, Radio Shack

finally started their buy online shipped to store feature. Yeah, still not really competing with Amazon because of Amazon, they shipped directly to the customers home. And now they're getting losses. So now they're also having to close doors to corporate layoffs and their stocks are starting to plumb it. Yeah, Edmondson was replaced by the interim CEO and that was just for a few months, and then Julian Dave replaced that interim CEO and became CEO after having been a

part of kmart before. Yeah. A good track record of turning companies around. But yeah, he had this reputation that he was able to really, you know, save um companies that were struggling. But this was a particularly tough position to be in well, and I guess it's kind of foreshadowing because Kmart didn't end up doing too well either. Then two thousand nine comes around and Radio Shack pulls a stunt that would end up making it sort of the butt of jokes for about two years. And it

was a rebranding effort. What was Radio Shack proposing it? Do you change their name to the Shack, which when I hear I think of the love shockto Ago, Yeah, back to the fifty two. Yeah, but not everyone immediately thought of a little spot down the Atlanta Highway. A lot of people thought that it just made it sound like it was kind of this shabby backwoods sort of

business to call it the Shack. Uh. This was also, by the way, the same time that Pizza Hut was toying with the idea of just becoming the Hut like Jaba. So yeah, this ended up becoming, like I said, a punchline for a lot of different outlets. So if you do, if you do a search for Radio Shack and the Shack, you're gonna get a whole bunch of articles from two thousand nine that are just mercilessly making fun of the company for trying to be hip and cool and what

is considered to be a misguided attempt. Yeah. So after that failed attempt at success, uh, they have yet more CEO turnover two thousand eleven. Two all had new CEOs. None of them were able to surmount the rising losses that Radio Shack was experiencing, which from two thousand twelve on that's all they experienced. They spent two points six billion since two thousand up until this time trying to

purchase their own stock to bolster their share prices. We usually save lessons towards the end, but sometimes we might as well go ahead and insert them in the middle of an episode. And here is one that we've talked about numerous times, right the idea that if you have an unstable executive team, that spells really bad news for the rest of the company, and to not be able to establish a stable foundation for leadership, it's no surprise that the company was struggling. If you can't keep the

same CEO for more than a year. Then, as each person comes in and attempts to shape the corporation according to their own you know, leadership style, You just all you have is just an unending period of trying to adjust, and just as you're getting close to aligning with the leader's vision, they're gone and you've got someone else in. The whole process starts over again. Yes, well, in two thousand fourteen they got yet another CEO. At the time, they had ended two thousand thirteen with a loss of

forty million dollars. The CEO came in, he wanted to do another restructure, improved the management, improved the marketing, change up the store design to make it edgier and cleaner and brighter, to expand the products offered, with a goal of becoming profitable again by two thousand fifteen, still holding onto those smartphones. And this was the seventh CEO in eight years. This turnaround cost more than he expected and

they ended up having to take out loans. So they took out a five five million dollar line of credit from g Capital and then a two hundred and fifty million dollar term loan from Salis Capital. And you'd think that the bigger loan would be the problem. But it was actually the Salist capital loan because it meant that they couldn't close any more than two hundred stores in a year without getting permission. And they had a really

bad holiday season and they needed to close stores. They needed to close about a thousand of them, and Salis was saying no, yikes. So they were they were between a rock and a hard place, as they say, And it would have been smart too close the stores because at the time they also had stores very close together, so they were competing with themselves. They were suffering from

like a Starbucks syndrome. Yeah, I have a note later on that I might as well mention it here that in Sacramento, California, in a square mile area, they had twenty five stores, So that's a store for every square mile. That is a heavy concentration of radio shack stores. When you specifically think that this is a store that's still largely is marketed toward hobbyists. I mean, if you ever w into a radio shack, you were looking at a

lot of tiny, little electronics parts. I mean they had fully assembled stuff too, but they were mostly known for selling components. It's more confusing than a home depot. In February two, they tried to bump up their marketing by doing a Super Bowl commercial and it cost him four million dollars. But they didn't really explain in the commercial all of the changes that they had been trying to put into place, so consumers didn't really know why do you give radio shack a chance? So it was a

four million dollar expensive mistake. Yeah, they didn't have the same success as Old Spice yep. So by September two they enjoyed the great success of that Super Bowl commercial.

And by that I'm being facetious because they had posted a quarterly loss, the tenth consecutive quarterly loss, but this one was nearly a hundred twenty million dollars and worse than that, they were running very low on off rating cash, to the point where it was quickly becoming evident that if something didn't change, they were not going to stay

in business. Yeah, their stock was barely above a dollar, which as we know, is the threshold to stay on the nasdack, and Salas was still saying they couldn't close those stores to get any additional revenue in and this is what leads up to bankruptcy. But we'll talk about that right after this break. Two thousand fifteen, Radio Shack is in really awful shape. They have defaulted on loans, They had a couple of really poor years in general,

and terrible holiday seasons in particular. They fall off the NASDAC because their stock price finally drops below the threshold, and then without any other real options, they file for Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection. Yeah, they had to close two thousand, four hundred stores, but then they were by one of their creditors, General Wireless Operations, Yes, and they took over running the remaining hundred stores. By this time, Radio Shack

was only in the US and Mexico. They had become more of an international market, but they had to close those down as part of this this long decline. In two thousand and sixteen, it looked at first like things might be turning around, right Yeah, Yeah, General Wireless Operations seemed to be doing a good job. Their expenses drop,

the profits were up. But they had made a partnership with Sprint in two thousand fifteen, as we had mentioned before, I believe in an effort to share store space and kind of share markets, and that was eating up their profits. It wasn't as profitable for them as they wanted, and they actually filed a lawsuit in two thousand seventeen against Sprint for five hundred million dollars in damages because they said Sprint was using confidential information they got in making

that partnership to basically open competing stores. Wow, just cannibalizing this partnership that they had made with Radio Shack. Print fought that allegation. Um, I actually don't know how it turned out, guessing in sprince favor. They did end up

buying a bunch of the store space. So Radio Shack had filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy, emerged from bankruptcy after being bought by their creditor, and then in two thousand and seventeen they filed for it again, which is unusual because typically companies are not allowed to file for bankruptcy twice in such a short period. But there was an exception here. Yeah, usually you're supposed to wait seven to ten years, or you have to wait seven to ten years,

I guess. But because they were filing bankruptcy this time under the name gw OH, they didn't have that restriction. It was technically a different company because you had a different owner. So at this point it really got grim. You know, before they had closed all but fifteen hundred stores. This time they closed significantly more than that. Yeah, they ended up with only seventy two company stores by the end of this bankruptcy, which would be even less later

on as they continue to try to fight this. Yeah, they did have relationships with stores that had essentially licensed the ability to operate as Radio Shack. These were dealers stores, or around five hundred of those, and some of them still exists. Yeah, but they didn't known those. Yeah, it's the radio shacks you see today. Those are the licensed entities that have essentially paid to operate under radio Shack. But here's a crazy thing. This seems like a drop

you can't come back from. But radio Shack exited bankruptcy a second time in January, despite the fact that but half the people out there wouldn't be able to tell you what radio Shack is. Yeah, they're technically still around and technically out of bankruptcy. Now. They're owned by Kensington Capital Holdings and they're hoping to make a gross revenue

of million dollars. So these days they're really focusing on online stores so they've got an online store, and then they have this relationship with the independent dealers who are operating under the Radio Shack name. But they are independent. It's not like it's not like the company owns those stores. They do have semi stores. Yeah, they have like they have like stores within other stores. Yeah, kind of the

way that Toys r Us came back a little kiosks. Yes. Yeah, So looking back at some of the lessons, we've talked about a few of them, the idea that the company had a lack of focus and because it was trying so many different things, it wasn't doing any of them particularly well. And I feel like they jumped the shark on that, like they started freaking out before things really

got that. I feel like they probably could have made a better run at the personal computer space, in particular, if they had a chance to really invest in that. But I think they saw where the competition was and decided that they didn't want to have to to fight in that same space because it was going to be really fierce fighting. The early Tandy computers did have a reputation for being somewhat let's say, quirky um, but people like quirky, Yeah, and well they could have come back

from that. I know people who really genuinely loved the Tandy computer, but for a lot of people, it's like you're loving it despite its faults kind of thing. But they weren't able to stick around with it long enough to really make a huge dent in that. And then you know the fact that the business started off as something that focused on hobbyists ultimately limited itself. In fact, that's where you can find a lot of radio shack. Many stores are in hobbyists stores and hobby towns. I

think they're called. Is primarily where which I had never heard of, hobby town No, yeah I have. I've been in hobby towns. Another problem, as we talked about, is how many stores I opened. So Tandy expanded the company, but he didn't really take into account regions. Yeah, it was. It was there was not enough strategy applied to the expansion.

It was. We've seen this story multiple times right where we've seen stores, stories about how stores would open up and they would end up competing with themselves because you would have locations that were so close to each other that rather than add to the revenue you're generating in that region, you're really just adding to the cost of operation because you're not getting more customers. The customers are

just going to one store or the other. So instead of doubling your customers, you have the same number, but you have twice the costs. And that was a real problem throughout many regions that radio shack was operating in, Like I mentioned Sacramento, but that was just one example. Yeah, and then the online sale thing. Yeah, the fact that they waited too long to get into that. I wrote

in the notes that they got radio shackled. The thing is I wonder, I wonder if they had jumped on that bad Bandwigens sooner, if they had come out with a website. Because they're dealing with electronics, they should have been able to come out with a website that worked decently.

If they had done that around the time that Amazon was getting its presence, maybe the loyal customers Radio shock had would have stayed with them because they'd be more convenient and by the time they could get the stuff on Amazon for cheaper, they'd already have their accounts set up on Radio Shocking would just be easier. It's possible. Uh we It's hard to say because between then and

now we also had the dot com bubble burst. So granted, radio Shack would have been coming at this from an established company perspective, not from a startup that suddenly owed huge amount of money to in the bubble. Yeah, they were all right. They lasted through that time largely because they didn't they weren't in that space. I also mentioned

the fact that salespeople were partly compensated on commission. This also earned Radio Shock a reputation for having pushy staff because they were trying to upsell customers and get like. They were only earning commissions if they're if the sales were hitting a certain amount per customer, So if it was under that threshold, you didn't get a commission for

that sale. So there was an incentive to get people to buy more stuff so that you would hit those goals and you would get a commission on the sale. So if you never walked into a radio shack during those days, the experience was like this. You walk in. Immediately someone swoops in, can I help you? And you're like, I'm just looking thanks, and you're looking around for whatever, and then you take two steps someone else swoops it, can I help you? Because everyone wants to try and

get the commission on that sale. Totally understandable, Like it was a strategy to motivate the salesforce, but it created an experience for the customer that was sub optimal. So while it motivated the salesforce to try and move more product and thus create more revenue, you were alienating the customer base. And that was a problem, especially as online was growing, because people are like, at the deal of that crap? If I go online, no one bugs me.

I just I searched for it in the search bar and then I click a little link and I buy it then and I'm done. Yeah, and they didn't really have stable management to help push any brief at Lazation projects through. Yeah, there were a lot of starting stops because you'd have people with big ideas come in, but they wouldn't last long enough to actually see it all the way through, and then it would be back to the drawing board with the next person. So a lot

of lessons to learn here. It's hard to talk about because they went in so many different different directions. You're like, where do I even start well, And it's also complicated because of the connection to Tandy, which is its own like, we can do another Brink episode about Tandy, which technically ties directly into Radio Shack I mean Tandy and Radio Shack or synonymous. By the end of it, you know, there are other parts of Tandy's journey that would tell

us more stories that are more valuable lessons. So I do have one fun fact to end this episode, because it was a pretty long descent into the brink. They were they were on the brink and then they fell down, but it was they kept hitting stuff all the way down, so it took a while to hit the bottom. Do the goofy whoa? So what's your fun fact? Right? So there. Their item that was in production the longest was the

Flavor radio. It was in production from through two thousand one, the same design, which is not a radio that if you look at it, tastes like different fruits go badly. The Snowsberry station tastes like snowsberries. When I read it, I was like, flavor radio radios and you eat them. No, they were just multicolored portable radios, kind of a precursor to the walkman or or the iPod. Okay, cool, somehow I never had heard of that, so that I learned

something today the pocket sized transistor radios. Cool. Well, that wraps up this episode of The Brink. We look forward to hearing more from you guys. So if you have any suggestions for other show topics that we should cover, you should contact us. How would they do that? Areal? They would do that by emailing us at feedback at the Brink podcast dot show. Yep, and you can go to our website that's the Brink podcast dot show. You will find an archive of all of our episodes and

more information about your beloved hosts. And that's it for this episode, so I guess until next time, I am Jonathan Strickland and I'm Ariel. Casting The Brink is a production of I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H