Where else can you go to find any attachment or gadget adapter known to mankind? Sometimes I don’t want to wait for Amazon, and there is no actual store that compares to good old overpriced Radio Shack for having whatever you need. Sigh.
I miss Radio Shack circa 1980.
Hell, I just miss the 80s in general. 
Don’t get me started…
Fry’s is pretty good in this regard, although much, much greater scale. Closest thing to a Radio Shack I have these days (ours only finally bit the dust a month or two ago.)
Testify!
Where I live here in Almost Idaho there are no Fry’s.
I’m fortunate enough to have an electronic parts store right down the road from my house.
It’s kind of cool because the store really isn’t meant for the general pop. Pretty much the only people who shop there are technicians and geeky types.
Has anyone resumed production of Radioshack’s “Robie” coin-eating toy? I regret never buying one. Always wanted one since as far back I can remember.
I may still have my Tandy 1000 around here somewhere, if you’re interested.
I’ve been to Fry’s when visiting the San Jose area for trade shows and conferences and we needed obscure cables. And it makes sense that they have stores there. But the amazing thing was that there were thousands of Radio Shack stores, in every corner of the country, and all stocked some fairly obscure electronic components and other stuff.
In the 1970s, we had a B&W TV and when it stopped working, we would remove the eight or ten tubes from it, labeling each carefully as to its original location. We’d take them to Radio Shack and test them on the tube tester and then replace whichever came up as defective. Radio Shack also sold various electronic gadgets and toys, and later the TRS-80 computers.
And then there was the battery club.
Nothing like it around here now. They didn’t have much besides cell phones and RC toys for a while anyway, but I still miss it just for the occasional part they still carried.
I already have a couple myself, thanks.
No, not kidding.
Just this week, I needed a new door sensor for the house alarm. That seemed like something that RS would have carried. But of course, all the stores are gone.
No one else, Ace, HD, Fry’s, had the sensor. I had to mail order it. Sure, it’s nice to internet buy, but I shouldn’t have had to pay 100% of the cost of the parts in shipping. (Maybe if they hadn’t used a box the size of a toaster, maybe it could have been cheaper. But I digress.)
I used to like just shopping there, looking for cool shit I didn’t know I needed. And I found it, more often than not.
Not even necessarily in towns - some farmers would start a small business and open a RS in the middle of the country. Those were the days.
It’s not just Radio Shack.
I needed a part for my home A/C last week (on the hottest day of the year, naturally). It was a standard part - a 24v coil, 30A contactor. Twenty years ago, I could have found a half-dozen places that would have them in stock within a 5 mile radius. But, it looks like the Internet has killed (or, at least severely wounded) electrical supply houses, too. I had to drive for 20 minutes in 120°F heat to get to a place that had one.
I worked at RS in the early 90’s. I miss it. Still had all the tiny packets of all the parts needed to build whatever motor driven gadget you could dream up.
Radio Shack has become Tiger Direct, NewEgg, Ali Express, and DigiKey and a dozen other suppliers who will ship you exactly what you need for a minimal price. With far fewer devices being user serviceable, let alone user-buildable, this is just a better way to do things. There are still places to get old-school electronics kits, think Heathkit, but they’re few and far between. As they probably should be given the rate they collect dust on a store shelf. The market has adjusted to what the consumers want, and Radio Shack took longer than most to adapt, which is why they went bust(in 2015, the 2017 bankrupcy may have been because SoftBank, in the guise of Sprint, shafted them).
Enjoy,
Steven
So did I. One of the worst experiences in my life.
I’ll never forget walking into a Radio Shack once in the early Macintosh days when Radio Shack had large poster-size ads with tons of text taped to their windows which attempted to convince people that PCs were better than Macs. This was before Windows, and the command-line interface still ruled the Microsoft world. I had previously experimented with a Mac and couldn’t help but both laugh and roll my eyes when the ad declared that it was necessary to use a ‘contraption called a mouse’ in order to operate the Macintosh.
I recently needed to replace two female spade connectors to repair my decades-old clothes dryer. Parts that I could have easily found at a Radio Shack. The local hardware stores only carried wider connectors, and electronic box stores only carried “kits” of multiple-sized, gold plated connectors for $25 and up. I finally found the size I needed at an auto parts store. $4 out-the-door and the ol’ Whirlpool is up and running (again).
I made a helluva lot of money off the crappy software sold with the TRS-80 computers. I had about a half-dozen RS managers who would refer irate customers to me to debug the software.
Good times, good times.