#or pay them so THEY can deal with running the hellsite moneypit
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ok but once again. the small niche userbase needs to be loyal in a way that is profitable or else RadioShackTM goes away anyways in a few years when investors finally get bored of playing hot potato with the money pit. I agree they shouldn't pivot away from their roots and we should be very loud when we don't like the direction of shilling out and copying the Big Stores, but dear god we must understand that they cannot continue to give out capacitors for free
Does anyone remember what happened to Radio Shack?
They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.
Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?
So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.
And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn't compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn't sell.
And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at... putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.
If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn't have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that's what they did.
I don't know why I keep thinking about the story of what happened to Radio Shack. It just keeps feeling relevant for some reason.
#this is me saying: almost no one pays for ad free#i know a lot of tumblr users are BrokeTM#but if you are not broke#please consider paying for this site like you actually want it to keep going#I basically think of it like buying a movie ticket each month#only the movie is like 8 hours a day for the whole month if i want it to be#like they can either sell out or they can sell you a service#but remember the old adage: if something is free then YOU are the product#and tumblr is CLEARLY making good faith attempts to not resort to collecting and selling data#they WANT to sell you a product: their webbed site#instead of selling YOU and your privacy and eyeballs/attention to their investors/advertisers#like buy ad free participate in crab day buy some fuckin shoelaces or a checkmark idc what#but dont pretend that a company that is constantly losing money#is somehow being unreasonable#when they try to make any god damned money#your anticapitalism wont keep the servers running#and even if staff was 100% anticapitalist that wouldn't keep the servers running EITHER#so either buy out the servers and turn tumblr into a crowdfunded fuckin coop or whateverthefuck#or pay them so THEY can deal with running the hellsite moneypit#SORRY for ranting in the tags#i hate the updates as much as yall#but I just. have seen some deeply frustrating attitudes this week
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