RadioShack bankruptcy leaves Sebastopol dealer in limbo

Can RadioShack transform itself one more time?

Independent dealer Andy Cohen in Sebastopol is among those waiting to see whether the once-iconic brand can fight back from bankruptcy and keep working with him and the other owners of roughly 900 franchise stores, including some that have served small-town America for nearly four decades.

Among tech retailers, RadioShack has been the proverbial cat with nine lives, outlasting a string of competitors over the generations as it transformed itself from a business for ham radio hobbyists into a national computer and electronics retailer.

For certain baby boomers, the company can still evoke nostalgia for its long-gone mail-order catalogs, its former free battery of the month club, its ground-breaking personal computer and the multitude of gadgets it once carried.

But the rise of online retailing and stiff competition for cellphone sales have raised questions about how much life remains in the 94-year-old RadioShack. The worry was summed up in the theme of the company’s funny but self-deprecating 2014 Super Bowl ad: “The 80s called. They want their store back.”

In the wake of RadioShack’s Feb. 5 bankruptcy filing, Cohen and more than 100 independent U.S. dealers have banded together to make sure their views are represented in the court proceedings.

Not wanting to simply sit on the sidelines, the dealers find themselves both voicing hope that RadioShack can survive its latest crisis while at the same time insisting that their own stores will continue even if the company shuts down.

“We’ll probably be fine,” said Cohen, who noted that his Gravenstein Highway North store now makes most of its money in 3-D printing, a separate income stream from the products that RadioShack provides. He and other franchise owners said customers will continue to look to them for specialized products and services, regardless of the brand on their business signs.

The dealers are looking ahead to March 23, when a bankruptcy court will oversee an auction to determine who will buy the chain’s assets and name. The hedge fund Standard General, a major lender and stockholder, has won the role of opening bidder. It has said it would acquire up to 2,400 of the stores and would operate up to 1,750 of those outlets with wireless carrier Sprint by using a store-within-a-store model. And it has offered $20 million for rights to the RadioShack name.

Richard Mikels, the Boston attorney representing the dealers, said his clients have two key questions. The first question is who are the actual buyers behind the Standard General deal?

“The second question,” Mikels said, “is do they want to do business with the dealers?”

The outcome of the auction should make clear the fate of RadioShack’s 4,000 stores and 27,000 workers.

The company already has closed its Santa Rosa Plaza outlet, but its seven other corporate stores in Sonoma County remain open, as is Cohen’s store in Sebastopol.

However, the deadline to use RadioShack gift cards ended Friday, according to a leader of the dealers’ ad hoc committee. Some early estimates put the value of the outstanding gift cards at $44 million.

In its bankruptcy filings, RadioShack listed assets of $1.2 billion and debts of nearly $1.4 billion.

Internet search engines overflow with stories about how RadioShack flourished after its 1963 acquisition by Tandy Corporation, as well as how the company eventually lost its way amid a revolving door of corporate executives.

In the years before personal computers, both the dealers and the company representatives “understood each other because you were both kind of geeky,” recalled Deb Noffke, who counts herself “second-generation RadioShack.” She runs her family’s Shawano, Wisc., store, which became a company dealer in 1976.

In those pre-PC days, the hobbyists who came to her family’s store included adolescent boys who wanted to know how to build their own electronic devices. About five of those young men went on to tech careers, eventually moving to the West Coast, she said.

Similarly, Bloomberg News recounted that before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple, they bought diodes and transistors from RadioShack to build a device “that tricked the phone system into letting them make free long-distance phone calls.”

After Fort Worth, Texas-based Tandy acquired RadioShack, the company caught the citizens band radio craze. In 1972 it sold its first all-electronic calculator and in 1977 was among the first companies to offer a personal computer, the TRS-80, with its operating system created by Microsoft’s Bill Gates. RadioShack followed up with its “Model 100” laptop in 1983, its first mobile phone in 1984 and its first satellite television systems in 1985.