Remember RadioShack? It's Now a Crypto Company with Wild Tweets

'Gen Z may not be familiar with the RadioShack of their grandparents, but they're getting to know its replacement,' writes the Washington Post.

'The 100-year-old retailer reintroduced itself on Twitter this week with a stream of often-profane tweets — some since deleted — filled with crude comments and drug references.'
Variations of, 'What in the world is going on?' peppered the comment threads, but a glance of the company's Twitter profile partly held the answer: RadioShack is no longer the electronics store Americans ran to for generations, but rather an online cryptocurrency company that also happens to sell batteries.

'It's our voice, a new voice, one for the people,' said Abel Czupor, the chief marketing officer. 'RadioShack's audience used to be only an older demographic, but as times have changed and e-commerce has taken over, the old voice of RadioShack is no longer relevant.'

Following a decade of decline, RadioShack was delisted by New York Stock Exchange in 2015. In its struggle to find a brand identity, the chain filed for bankruptcy twice, and went from having roughly 5,200 U.S. stores in 2014 to about 400 when private equity firm Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV) purchased it in 2020. REV was formed by Alex Mehr, the co-founder of online dating site Zoosk.com, and Tai Lopez, an online influencer known for coaching about his lavish lifestyle. They launched RadioShack Swap, a decentralized crypto exchange platform that allows users to swap coins or tokens, a format that comes with more flexibility and lower transaction fees than trading... In a May statement, the company reported trading volume of $40 million, with a daily average of $500,000 to $2 million....

Yet with its latest marketing strategy on Twitter, the reactions were mixed. One day the platform itself 'randomly shut down our account and locked us out.' Czupor said, though some tweets were later restored.
The new RadioShack tells the Post that 'Sales have actually grown since we started upping our Twitter game over the past several weeks.' And the founder of social media marketing consultancy Flying Hare Social told the newspaper that RadioShack's tweets may help them gain visibility — because 'Everybody who's interested in crypto is interested in this kind of humor.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.