If you need a new (old?) VHS tape rewinder you better scoot your tush out the door right now and see if RadioShack still has one. The store’s new CEO is all revved up and ready to give some 220 of the company’s stores a whole new look, and is ready to refresh the retailer’s image by dumping all those old products it used to hang onto. Just don’t call it The Shack anymore, please.

CEO Joe Magnacca has the big job of trying to get RadioShack back into the game, a game dominated by mega retailers like Amazon and eBay. To that end, the Associated Press says the newly renovated stores will be turned into bright, airy bastions of shiny, trendy electronics.

Those stores that don’t get the makeover treatment will still move toward other merchandising changes, like displaying phones by manufacturer instead of sitting on tables at the front of the store organized by wireless carrier.

“I want to be the store that people go to and say, ‘I want to go to RadioShack and see what’s new and exciting,” Magnacca said. “Key for us is how do we make the stores shoppable, and not overwhelm the customer.”

As for those home phones or other past-peak electronics you might’ve visited RadioShack for in the past, they’re going the way of the dinosaur, if the dinosaur is only online or residing beneath the surface as a fossil.

“We used to be known as a company that holds onto products until the very end of their life cycle,” Magnacca said. Some of those products will still be sold but just in limited quantities or online. Others will be gone forever, like the box of VHS tapes you finally set out on the curb last month upon realizing you will never, ever need them again.

Let’s hope this works out better than that whole “Call us The Shack! All the cool kids do!” debacle of 2009. Because that was fun.

RadioShack revamps some stores [Associated Press]

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