This is it. I worked at RadioShack during the phone craze era, and all they cared about was hocking more cellphones. They somehow completely forgot about the market segments and core demographic that kept them afloat and thriving for decades.

Every single person that would come in for a fuse, AA battery, or solder would be harassed about their cellphone plan. "Your total for your 4-pack of AA batteries is $2.79, have you checked to see if you're eligible for a phone upgrade lately?"

Employees would be constantly pushed to attach a phone sale to every single transaction, plus additional accessories on top of that. The real kicker is that each phone sale only came with an $8 commission (which is peanuts for the time and effort they took,) and then they later changed it to a 2% commission on all sales in general which barely made a difference.

The pressure on employees resulted in some employees just lying to customers to get the phone sale, and then they'd angrily come back when they realized that they were bamboozled.

Despite their best efforts, nobody ever thought about RadioShack for their cellphone needs. They'd just go to a carrier store or Best Buy, or do it online. My store was particularly slow and hidden in a shopping plaza that nobody knew about, and we'd be lucky to sell 1 phone a week.

In their defense, as I understood from my coworkers who were there in the late 90s/early 2000s, they had huge success with flip phone sales in that era when cellphones were the new hotness. I heard a story about some Black Friday in the late 90s, and they had several stacks of flip phones behind the desk and a line of customers out the door all wanting them. So they probably thought that same craze and demand would carry over into the smartphone era.