There is a strip mall on Southeast Powell where the RadioShack sign came down a couple of years ago and the ghost of it is still on the stucco, a lighter rectangle where the sun never reached. I walked past it Saturday on my way to coffee. The space sells vape juice now.
RadioShack filed for Chapter 11 again on March 8. Second time in two years. hhgregg had filed two days before that, and by the time the news reached me it was already sandwiched between other retail obituaries, one more line in what the trade press keeps calling a shakeout.
In 2015 there were essays. The drawer of resistors. The Saturday your dad drove you out for a soldering iron and a nine volt battery. This time there was a filing, a wire story, and a shrug.
That difference is the whole lesson.
Affection for a brand is not equity. It is a record of purchases people have already stopped making, and it depreciates every single year you fail to give them a reason to make another one.
RadioShack had astonishing awareness right to the end. Recognition in the high nineties, warm associations, a real place in the childhood of anyone who ever built something in a garage. What it did not have was an answer to why a person standing in that parking lot in 2017 should walk through the door instead of opening Amazon on the phone already in their hand.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. Someone puts up the awareness number and the sentiment quotes and the room relaxes, because those slides feel like money in the bank. They are not money. They are a photograph of money that used to be there.
The test I use now is simple and slightly rude. Ask what the brand is currently owed by its customers, not what it was owed a decade ago. Owed means a reason to come back this month. Salt & Straw is owed a line down the block because the flavors change and people want to see the new one. Patagonia is owed repeat purchase because the jacket gets repaired instead of replaced. RadioShack was owed nostalgia, and nostalgia does not clear inventory.
They are not money. They are a photograph of money that used to be there.
The second bankruptcy is quieter than the first because the mourning already happened. Everyone said goodbye in 2015. What filed this month was paperwork catching up to a decision customers made years earlier, slowly, one trip not taken at a time.
Barnaby is asleep in a cardboard box that held a router I bought online, delivered in a day, from a company that has never once made me feel anything at all. He does not care. That is more or less the market's position too.