RadioShack declared bankruptcy last February and closed around 2,300 of its stores. Around 1,700 of the company’s stores didn’t close, though, and the Shack’s leaders want you to know that not only are they still around, but they’re making progress toward their goal of becoming a neighborhood electronics store.

The continuing existence of RadioShack stores is because of Sprint, which partnered with the retail business’s new owners to put mini Sprint stores in most RadioShacks. One hidden benefit to this arrangement was that the stores no longer need to display, and employees no longer need to sell, smartphones from every major national carrier. That frees up space and attention to maybe sell some other types of electronics.

A writer for Popular Mechanics recently visited a RadioShack that’s finally stocked with the chain’s new assortment of merchandise, and he was impressed, noting that while the stores used to be “run-down phone purveyors secretly wanting to be Best Buys,” now they have more of the spirit of a neighborhood electronics store, and the do-it-yourself electronics kits that used to bring shoppers to RadioShack in decades past.

You can’t by a TRS-80, or any computers at all, but you can definitely buy a soldering kit and other useful toys.

The company’s own executives have to keep reminding people that they’re still around. “Every day I have to explain to somebody that, yes, we are still here,” the company’s VP of stores said. The stores are still here: there aren’t as many of them, but they’re closer to what they used to be, and simultaneously less of a phone store and more of a phone store.

Is RadioShack Back? [Popular Mechanics]

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