Yesterday, the sale of 1,740 remaining RadioShack stores to hedge fund Standard General was approved by a bankruptcy court. We’ve known since before the bankruptcy filing that their plan is to team up with Sprint to re-open stores that will be part phone store, part RadioShack merchandise. What would that look like? Sprint has already showed us. Well, they showed the federal bankruptcy court in Delaware, which makes them public documents.
Here’s the original document: the later pages aren’t all that interesting to people who aren’t heavily into retail demolition. The document was filed on Monday: if RadioShack’s new management and Sprint stick to the same timetable, stores in the new format will be open in a week and a half.
It looks like the “Fast Start” layout is meant to use much of what’s already there in RadioShack. Of course, all of those displays from other carriers would have to go: the most important task would be removing AT&T, Tracfone, and Verizon displays in favor of Sprint and its prepaid buddies like Boost and Virgin Mobile.
The biggest change would be to the signage. Even though Sprint is supposed to take up only 1/3 of the square footage of each store, you wouldn’t know that from the sign out front.
by Laura Northrup via Consumerist