RadioShack Employees Had No Idea Whether Their Stores Were Doomed

(Phillip Pessar)

Moderately perceptive RadioShack employees could look around their stores and follow the news in recent years and tell that something was about to happen to their employer. Yet RadioShack employees had very little information about what was happening to their stores and whether they could expect to have jobs in the future.

The college town of Athens, Georgia will now be left with zero RadioShack stores. Sure, the people of Athens will muddle through, but how employees say that how they learned about the doomed state of their stores reminds us of the last days of Wet Seal. That chain, as you might recall, was a young women’s clothing retailer that recently shut down. Employees claim that they were assured the stores would stay open even as managers clearly knew that the opposite was true. “[T]hey told us specifically not to look for jobs, that everything was fine, and that we had low inventory because they were just going to remodel the store,” one former assistant manager says that Wet Seal higher-ups told her.

One RadioShack assistant manager in Athens told the Red & Black, an independent University of Georgia paper, that something similar happened…except that preliminary lists of stores that were going to be sold and stay open and stores that were going to close had been made public. We published an early list of proposed store closings on February 6, the day after the company declared bankruptcy.

The assistant manager told Red & Black that his regional manager didn’t know that the list of which stores would remain open had been released to the public as part of court documents, and continued to insist that his store would stay open.

Radioshack closings leave employees in dark [Red & Black]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist