Closing date uncertain for local Radio Shack
Published 12:00 am Saturday, February 14, 2015
Vicksburg Radio Shack’s four employees are living in a world of uncertainty.
The store, which has been in the city for 41 years, is located on Iowa Boulevard in a strip center near Walmart. It is among the 162 company-owned stores targeted for closure by the Fort Worth, Texas-based former electronic giant that filed for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcy laws. But there’s no indication when the proverbial ax will fall, closing the Vicksburg store.
The company, which employs 25,000 people nationwide, reached an agreement with Standard General, its largest stockholder, to let Standard General acquire 1,500 to 2,400 Radio Shack stores, according to reports published in The Dallas Morning News. Radio Shack has also filed a motion with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware to close its remaining 2,000 company stores.
Local store manager Tasha Andrews declined to comment on the closing, saying only that she did not know when it would happen. A corporate spokesman for Radio Shack also said no closing date has been set for the Vicksburg store.
The store is the second major retailer in the city to close this year.
Bookland, an affiliate store of major book retailer Books-A-Million of Birmingham, Ala., closed its store in the Vicksburg Mall Jan. 24.
Radio Shack opened its Vicksburg store in 1973 in the Battlefield Mall on North Frontage Road, now the location of Blackburn Motors, according to information from city directories. It moved to the Pemberton Square Mall, now Vicksburg Mall, in 1985, and stayed there until sometime in late 2010 or early 2011, when the store was moved to its present location.
“It was a great company to work for; the benefits were fantastic,” said Greg Peltz, who managed the Vicksburg store from 1992 until 2010.
Peltz began working for Radio Shack in 1988 as a part-time, temporary worker during the Christmas season. He managed the company’s store at the Metrocenter Mall in Jackson, and another store in Pearl before returning to manage the Vicksburg store. He was later a district manager over 30 stores in Illinios and returned to manage the Vicksburg store.
“The store was $1 million a year store,” he said. “I don’t know what happened after I left.”
Radio Shack, he said, “was very close to my heart. I hate to see that that’s what’s happened to them, but that’s (the company’s situation) due to poor management.”
Founded in 1921 in Boston by brothers Theodore and Milton Deutschmann and named for the small room that held a ship’s radio equipment, Radio Shack began as a small store and mail order company that sold equipment to amateur radio operators. The company later expanded to nine stores in the northeast, and in 1954 began selling its own products under name “Realistic.”
It was acquired in 1963 by the Tandy Leather Co., which later changed its name to Tandy Corp., and in the 1970s changed it to Radio Shack.
The company was known as an innovator in electronics, and introduced the TRS-80, one of the earliest mass-market home computers.