Building A Mystery...

There's a question I've been pondering for years now - YEARS - and I still don't have an answer. I'm a fairly smart guy, so this lack of a solution has me troubled; is it something I'm just not seeing, or is there some veil the truth is hidden behind. I don't know, and the longer this goes on the more I think there are some things man was just not meant to know. What's the question? Glad you asked.
   How does Radio Shack stay in business?
   Seriously, have you been in a Radio Shack recently? Or even in the last ten years, because they haven't changed at all. They stock store-brand RC cars, terrible off-brand cell phones, grossly overpriced TV and stereo cables, batteries and... that's about it. Every time I've had to buy something at a Radio Shack* there's been one guy working and nobody else in the store. I felt I was interrupting his day, or perhaps a pending drug deal, with my petty commerce. Like going into that suspect hamburger joint, you know the one, that never seems to be open except late at night or early in the morning, and then you find out from a neighbor that Armenians own the place and are using it to launder money from whatever fraud they're perpetrating.
   Radio Shack bothers me and yet intrigues me at the same time. Bothers me because I strongly suspect there's something crooked going on, either at the stores or at the corporate level or both. If you can't reconcile their reported profits with the fact that the stores are mostly empty all day long, then somebody somewhere is fudging the numbers or completely making them up. Intrigues me because, on the off chance they're not totally lying then they have a magic business model, something other corporations would do well to copy.
   But I'm putting my money on the lie. You just can't sell enough batteries and cables to keep a store like that afloat.

Now... what about the Sunglasses Hut? They're always devoid of customers, so the fact that they're still in business seems kind of shady. HA! Get it? Sunglasses... shady... hooo boy... that's comedy right there.


* cell phone charger, cell phone battery, and cable TV adapter. And, with the cell phone battery, I bought a gorilla-shaped flashlight. Really.