They might be still good in Canada. A few years back, RS sold all its Canadian outlets to Circuit City which operates under the name The/La Source. They told me they would honor RS battery cards. Maybe they still do.
At one point, I relied on the Media Guy at work for batteries for my test equipment. He had battery cards at Radio Shack. I began buying my own batteries. Those things sucked.
From their name and the fact that they are over 100 years old, I think it safe to conjecture that they were originally in the business of hobby electronics which meant radio back then. My father worked for such a company (Radio Electronic Service Co. located around 5th and Market in Philadelphia) during the 1920s. Guys (never women) would come in on Thursday (payday) with their pay envelopes (not checks) with, say, $12 in it. They would take out 60 cents for trolley fare (they worked 6 days a week and fare was a nickel), another 60 cents for lunch and ask what new could they buy for $10.80 (they still lived with their parents and maybe gave them a dollar a week for rent and meals, so make that $9.80). Radio was as big then, or even bigger, than i-devices today. And these guys were the serious hobbyists. Radio Shack lost them and never came up with a replacement business.
I vaguely remember the TRS-80, aka trash-80, but not much about it. If you weren’t Apple or making a PC-clone, you didn’t have a chance. Bad management decisions there.
Stone knives and bear claws, please. I’m building a mnemonic memory circuit to interface with this 23rd century tricorder I bought off of a guy who had a mechanical rice picker accident.
The TRS-80 was extremely successful and a worthy contemporary of the Apple II, both released in 1977. The IBM PC platform wouldn’t show up until 1981. RadioShack seriously missed the boat by trying to ride the success of the TRS-80 after that time. The first Tandy PCs were not fully IBM compatible. The Tandy 2000 was based on the 80186; better than the 8088 in the first IBM PCs, but with proprietary video hardware that meant a lot of software wouldn’t work on it. So everybody got an IBM because that’s where the software was. IBM later upgraded to the 80286 with the PS/2 platform (the best PC ever constructed) and the rest is history.
Not quite; they were founded in 1921 and it seems unlikely for them to make it to a hundred years old.
Here’s a crazy idea though; sell the remaining locations to Shake Shack (which just went public) and convert the stores to Shake Shack restaurants. They’ll save a fortune by not having to change the second half of the sign out front.
Don’t forget the PCjr-based Tandy 1000.
Speaking as someone who cut their computer teeth on their very own, at-home TRS-80 in 1980 (for 600+ dollars!) I always hate it when it’s referred to as a ‘trash 80’. Comparing it to an IBM or Apple computer is meaningless, they were two completely different eras and classes. The first Apple, the Apple II, was roughly in the same era, but it cost three to four times as much! When I was in high school (the school of course had Apples) the other computer geeks used to make fun of me for having bought a so-called ‘trash 80’ and say how Apples were so much better. To which I’d reply, “Yeah, so when are you gonna get you’re very own Apple II?!” and they’d say, “Ah, er, um…” 
Anyway, I find it rather ironic Radio Shack finally going out of business after all these years. In my neck of the woods I can think of at least four malls that peaked in the 80s, then were essentially empty by the 2000s, then finally were rebuilt recently. Yet throughout the years all of them maintained a Radio Shack as the only surviving store during that whole time!
I’ll hate to see Radio Shack go. I still use a couple sets of Optimus house speakers. I always liked their car stereo speakers. They were kind of pricey if they weren’t on sale, but when they were on sale they were deeply discounted. They went on sale a couple times a year.
I most recently used Radio Shack to get the parts for the cruise control in my Yaris. It turns out all U.S. spec Yarises have it installed but Toyota just leaves the stalk off if it isn’t ordered. Two N/O pushbutton switches, a few resistors, and a few feet of wire did the trick! There will be nowhere to get stuff like that around here if the Shack goes away.
The Source actually filed for bankruptcy protection a few years ago. Bell Canada bought them out of receivership.
Anybody remember Radioshack.com the superstore they had in Denver? That was pretty sweet I thought, I loved going there. It was like an actual electronics parts catalog that you could walk through and touch before buying much bigger than any other parts store I had been too.
PS. It appears almost impossible to Google for a store called Radioshack.com for obvious reasons.
Not surprised. Their latest store redesign was absolutely awful and made them look like generic cellphone flybynight shops. I know they were hardly doing gangbusters before that, but nail in the coffin.
Once you walked past the cell phones and iPhone speakers, there were still hobbyist parts and beginner kits the last time I went, which was refreshing. They even had Arduino kits, but vastly overpriced. From what I saw being sold (in December) they were making most of their money selling RC cars.
I received my electrical engineering degree in 1980, right when Radio Shack was at is zenith. Their catalogs at the time were great reading - lots of computer configurations, games, and even some half-way (but not great) stereo systems. Home / personal computing at that time was really undecided. Tandy had the bad reputation even then. I heard Trash-80 while at college from a professor; he said the connectors were tin plated and tended to corrode easily. Apple, Commodore and TI were available, and programmable calculators were a big deal. The future was a lot clearer after IBM made its PC announcement in 1981.
They had some tech and spec sheet books in the 80s that I still have. One store here, as I mentioned, had a guy who didn’t know what a transformer was. Another at a mall was heavy on parts until they folded.
We have a RS franchise in the corner of a local hardware store. I rarely go there, because their prices are astronomical compared with other sources (cough, cough…monoprice.com), but if I can’t wait for Internet ordering and delivery, I’ll stop in. This store claims they aren’t much affected by the bankruptcy, as they are not a company store. Time will tell.
The clerk that helped me yesterday was quite knowledgeable, and suggested two alternate ways of solving a minor cabling problem. He didn’t hesitate to show something I could buy for $5 instead of $20 that would work just as well, as long as I knew how to solder. So he was both helpful, honest, and took the precaution of asking if I could handle a DIY task that many people couldn’t.
So not all RS stores are staffed by idiots.
An interesting blog post from someone who worked at RadioShack ~10 years ago: A eulogy for RadioShack, the panicked and half-dead retail empire. Looks like the writing has been on the wall for quite a while.
I remember fondly the plasma ball they always had on display at the front of the store when I was a kid (my husband eventually bought one for me, but I don’t think he got it at RS) and the stuffed kitten I got for Christmas with the AM radio inside (unfortunately, the radio eventually broke). Last thing I think I bought there, though, was a replacement VHF/UHF TV antenna when my roommate broke the rabbit ears off my set in ~1995. We recently became cordcutters again, so it’s once again back in use.
Yep. We called it “Shit Shack”
Back in the tube days, it was the place to go to check and buy tubes.
The Radio Shack near me is still open as if it’s 1989, only without Tandy computers Realistic speakers, or walls of electronic parts. Full shelves, no discounts, no clearances. I visit every couple of days, hoping they’ll start marking down Bluetooth speakers, flash drives, or shortwave radios. Nope. Business as usual.
I actually went there on Thursday to get a battery charger for my phone. Of course they declare bankruptcy at about the same time, so go figure.
They are long since separate entities. 1975 in fact. (Article from 1982)
I ran a store in the mid 90s, and could see it’s decline. The manager previous to me sold a lot of computers, so had high sales, but low (or negative) profits. I had slightly lower sales, but high profits as all of the North Shore MA HAM operators would come (or be sent) to my store to buy from me. I knew what they needed to build or fix their systems, and get their antennas wired up properly. Lots of profit percentage, but low dollar sales in the parts area.
I realized after a year or so of running the store that management had it’s head in the wrong orifice, on top of doing the math and realizing I could make the same hourly rate with much less stress flipping burgers.
In the 90s, it was pretty clear they wanted to be a ‘large electronics’ retailer (TV, VCR, Stereo) but didn’t have the shelf space to display a large number of options. Electronics change often enough that a store couldn’t keep current items on the shelf, and those that were aged weren’t selling off the shelf to make room for the new stuff. Brand awareness came into play as well. Who’d buy a Realistic (that wasn’t the brand, and my memory is failing) TV, when they wanted a Sony or a ‘major brand’? They couldn’t compete on cost.
The sales model is also all off for most customers. I recently needed a new pair of earbuds, and couldn’t get someone to ring in my $20 sale as they were working on closing the paperwork on phone sales. It was like I was imposing on them to break away from the paperwork for the big sale to make the small sale. I remember being in the same situation, so I tended to be more patient than my wife, who had never worked in that model of sales. I can walk into Best Buy and pay at any register. A small strip-mall Radio Shack can’t maintain that much of a staffing level.