Radio Shack Amazon Locker

With Radio Shack’s situation looking dire, folks like Amazon and Sprint are circling like vultures for its retail space(Wired).

As a card-carrying computer nerd of the 80’s, my first computer was a TRS-80 Model I 4k. That’s four kilobytes of RAM. I have two Radio Shack soldering irons and countless electronic doodads. But it’s been a while since I needed anything more than batteries from them.

In early 2013, a friend of mine shipped me a package via an Amazon Locker. The locker happened to be in a mostly desolate Radio Shack near my home. The email announcing that my package was in a locker named Annika also included the above coupon.

It struck me as a little bizzare, that a bricks-and-mortar retailer would lease out precious floor space to the enemy. I hoped for the sake of Radio Shack shareholders that they were charging a pretty penny for the privilege of becoming a transient UPS Store / Mailbox Etc. The coupon didn’t work on me. I opened up my locker cell, and I struck up a a quick conversation with the store staff. Except for my Amazon package, I left empty-handed.

The retail location of the store is in the middle of a busy commercial block. A well-travelled light rail line runs half a block away. A Starbucks is across the street. A US Post Office, with actual PO Boxes, is next door.

For the small Radio Shack, the locker unit was huge, maybe occupying a good 12 feet of shelf space four or five feet high. This in a store that maybe had 20x of that locker in total.

When I asked the staff about the locker, they said it was an experiment. The big computerized box disappeared a few months later. Its departure was followed by at least two store renovations in the year or so since.

Now think about the entire store filled with a gigantic Amazon locker. It would be the exact opposite of a retail store. That store would be truly a store, as in storage, where every cubic inch of product was always pre-sold. It would the exact opposite of a Radio Shack, where every cubic inch of product, it seems, will be never sold.

UPDATE: Added TRS-80 note.