Re: What? (Score 1)

It wasn't the Mom and Pop stores, it was the company owned Verizon and ATT stores that killed them. When I worked at RS in the mid 2000s the nearest Verizon store was over an hour drive. The Mom and Pops nearby were shady as heck, nobody wanted to deal with them. Once a company Verizon store opened down the street, that was the end for RS in that town, because Verizon store always had an extra "$150 credit" or something customers couldn't use at RS and could undercut us every time. Then RS nationwide switched from (was dumped by) Verizon who didn't need them anymore, and they started selling ATT. Except they never made big money from ATT sales because again, the ATT company store was just down the street. The executive team at RS by that time was a bunch of morons who could only repeat "Cell Phones, Cell Phones, Cell Phones" because it was all they knew. All the others who could build business in other lines were run out of the company because their numbers were always so much less than the cell phone people's. And RS was all about the numbers, if you weren't the top guy you were always in some kind of trouble. So those non-cell phone people left during the good cell phone years. And when that dried up the company had not only no other revenue streams to turn to, but no other executives who had the know-how to save the company. Fin.