D4

Gohan: Dad, I’m 25.

Goku: So you don’t want apple slices and nuggets with a toy?

but there's one thing i found when doing this. the first chronological pesterlog that includes a timestamp is this one where dave pesters sleeping jade. it's still 4/12 where jade is, pretty late in the evening. but remember that they're in different timezones. the timestamp in this pesterlog displays jade's timezone since she's the one checking it

yanno, i wasn't sure why i got immediately obsessed with the takara ponies but then i remembered how I love anthros so much i was considering getting a g1 pony and somehow beheading it and sticking it on a custom made anthro body and i was like oh wait. yes this is right up my wheelhouse.

my therapist gave me a feelings chart and when I circled more than one told me to choose one feeling. in social skills group, they were always asking questions like, “is talking about airplanes expected or unexpected behavior?” and “it depends” was not the right answer- talking about airplanes is unexpected, inappropriate, abnormal, bad behavior (at least when you are one of Those Kids. when you like things too much you aren’t allowed to like things anymore)

here is your behavior chart, you either get a sticker or you don’t. here is your anger scale, you aren’t allowed to say you don’t know. we need an answer that fits into a graph because we are graphing your anger. here is a social story where everything is so simplified it resembles real life about as much as stick figures resemble people. here are your right and wrong answers and you play, move, think wrong

They started out selling niche electronics supplies. Capacitors and transformers and shit. This was never the most popular thing, but they had an audience, one that they had a real lock on. No one else was doing that, so all the electronics geeks had to go to them, back in the days before online ordering. They branched out into other electronics too, but kept doing the electronic components.

Eventually they realize that they are making more money selling cell phones and remote control cars than they were with those electronic components. After all, everyone needs a cellphone and some electronic toys, but how many people need a multimeter and some resistors?

So they pivoted, and started only selling that stuff. All cellphones, all remote control cars, stop wasting store space on this niche shit.

And then Walmart and Target and Circuit City and Best Buy ate their lunch. Those companies were already running big stores that sold cellphones and remote control cars, and they had more leverage to get lower prices and selling more stuff meant they had more reasons to go in there, and they couldn't compete. Without the niche electronics stuff that had been their core brand, there was no reason to go to their stores. Everything they sold, you could get elsewhere, and almost always for cheaper, and probably you could buy 5 other things you needed while you were there, stuff Radio Shack didn't sell.

And Radio Shack is gone now. They had a small but loyal customer base that they were never going to lose, but they decided to switch to a bigger but more fickle customer base, one that would go somewhere else for convenience or a bargain. Rather than stick with what they were great at (and only they could do), they switched to something they were only okay at... putting them in a bigger pond with a lot of bigger fish who promptly out-competed them.

If Radio Shack had stayed with their core audience, who knows what would have happened? Maybe they wouldn't have made a billion dollars, but maybe they would still be around, still serving that community, still getting by. They may have had a small audience, but they had basically no competition for that audience. But yeah, we only know for sure what would happen if they decided to attempt to go more mainstream: They fail and die. We know for sure because that's what they did.