Complaint Review: radioshack

It's been many years since I dealt with this company, on both sides of the counter. A cut throat business that stole from its customers, and employees, and investers too. In the end, the entire place colapsed. Between stealing, prostition, this place was a gold mine of memories, bad and good, but still, I figure I write a report since they are still around and let everyone know what they are really like.

I was a kid when I worked for them. I had plans of my own to do my own franchise when I got older, and glad I didn't, because RadioShack who was once a Franchise Company, got greedy and forced just about everyone to sell their stores back to them and the few who refused, well I don't know what happened to those as they had vanished from their stores and anyone and everyone I talked to couldnt not tell me, other than it was lucky I hadn't put my money into my own store. Managers came and went like the seasos, and everyone was always told that they were fired for stealing. Took me years to realize it was far from the truth, at least for a good portion of them.

When I worked there, I was forced to sell phones to people who did not want them, or afford them. Same with their Tandy computers like the Tandy 1000. Despite the fact they advertised the pcs as 100% compatable back then, it was far from the truth, and they knew it. Most programs needed to have their own version written for their machines, and memory and hard drives, you got caught in a system where once you bought the pc when you wanted to upgrade, many found out the hard way you could only buy their components. Try anyone elses it would not work. Ram, Hard drives, just about every upgrade for their machines had to be Tandy or nothing. District managers stole from their managrs, managers stole from their employees and customers. As I said before, many were fired for theft, but only a few really did steal.

For instance, one of the many stores I got thrown into due to staffing shortages, had a manager who really did steal and it took me a few years while talking to my friend to realize what really happened. A young woman who was pulling two jobs just to make her mortgage, had her purse stolen from my managers filing cabinet. I had actually seen the guy earlier as I was coming to work. Entered the store, clocked in via the POS and not an hour goes by that the woman I worked with came out of the back crying that her purse was gone and had assumed when it got busy, someone in the store took it. How can someone get in the back of our store unnoticed, go through 8 file cabinets that squeeled when opening, and find her purse? The manager came back and when she cried to him, and they called the police and made a report, he left again and said he would go looking for it. Guess what, he came back 15 minutes later with it in his hands and told her he found it in a garbage pail in another shopping center. I was a kid back then and believed it. We all went to a bar that night where he took out a wad of cash and bought her a drink. That should have been the second thing, but didnt know a managers income, and he stole from me too. Blamed it on the district manager who was a crook anyway.

Raadioshack was so short handed, many sales employees like myself were forced to work in other stores pulling 80 hours a week, yet only paid 40 with empty promises of getting extra paid time off later. I coppied every reciept from when I got there to getting off to prove I was in the store. It got me the unemployemnt all other employees failed to get because the store reported them for theft just to get out of paying the portion our state required. Plus almost got my manager arrested in the end. Before that happened in the end, I'll fill you in on the prostitution ring an ex manager ran out of one of the stores. No one had rold me why the manager left, or the employees, just that it was a dead store in a dying shopping center where 90% of the stores were long closed. I was about 17 by then and the only one opening and closing this store during the summer. What was basically a deserted shopping center, actually had a store with customers. For those of you who worked in one of these stores in a ghost mall, knows what I am talking about when there is normally no one in your store and despite the fact it should have been closed, RadioShack at the time NEVER closed its stores.

Anyway, I go in and open this store and with all the free time, went through boxes and boxes of little part restock. Finding where they went in a store you dont normally work at is a game in itself, but I got it done. It was the customers who came in that totaly caught me off guard. Someone walks in, you put down what your doing and help them. Normally it would be a chance to push a PC, or Phone, or just someone needing a battery for a phone or toy. Instead, it was a lot of older guys asking me if so and so was back yet. This went on for a few hours after I opened and had assumed it might be some girl who worked there. But in fact, it was 4 girls names I never heard in my life, not even when I happened to call that store from mine needing a reciever transfered to mine for a sale. Then the most wierdest thing happened. This 14 year old girl walks into my store, and before I can ask if they needed help, their pager they are wearing goes off. She doesnt even ask me, she just walks into the back room and picks up the phone and makes a call as if she had just walked into her own house. Don't know who she called, but I was now in a situation because another girl about the same age comes into the store chatting with whom I thought was her dad.

I was now worried of trying to kick the girl in the back room out, and while doing this having the two who walked in steal something big and running. A trick many tried in our stores, get a single employee in the back of the store, then the other steal a ham radio, or portable TV, or even a PC. It was when I decided to take a risk and tell the one who just walked into the store to please hold a moment, Id be happy to help them, but had to get someone in the back of my store out. It was then the girl in the front adknowledged after she walked and looked into the doorway, that the girl on the phone was with them. The guy with them I thought to be their dad left the store and now I have two kids besides myself in the store and one of them now flirting with me telling me since I'm new there, they have a system, and will teach me their rules. Another two entered my store and now I got 4 kids trying to run their own business (Oh, I didn;t even know what they were doing being so nieve until the police came) I managed to get my own phone back and call my own store to let them know I was having trouble, before I got cut off as one of them started using the hone in the back again. It was when the police came and that they had gone out the back door, that I found out what was truely going on, and why nothing was said to me on past staff. Yes, the manager had made some deal to use the store as some kind of teen prostitute safe haven. After calling my mom, she came and picked me up and I locked the store telling the district manager I was never going there again.

It was 3 weeks later I got fired after refusing to work a single hour more unless I got paid over 170 hours due me. I actually used one of Radioshacks own phone recording devices against them. I won my unemployment but sadly, nothing was ever done about the 170 hours they owed me.

As for many of the other things, selling used pcs as new that management knew to be broken, was just a few other things that happened there as well. I'll update this later, there is a tun of behind the counter things you wouldnt believe went on in the stores.