Radio Shack is announcing closing of more than a fourth of their stores (1100). Although I’ve never been overly fond of the company, if they close the one store near me, there will be no place to quickly get some of the equipment I use all the time (parts, cables, etc.).
Is this the end of a hacker era? While you no longer have to bolt and solder the components of a computer or radio together like you used to, are experimenters now dodos? Or is it entirely due to Internet stores replacing brick n mortar ones and experimenters are as alive as ever?
If you haven’t seen the ads in that article, watch them. Clever.
Radio Shack has increasingly become a place where experimenters aren’t welcome. That used to be their bread and butter, but they attempted to become a lite version of big box stores, and the shift failed. Over the last decade, the variety and quantity of such parts has been cut in at least half in every store I’ve looked at.
Whenever I need electronics equipment, my first choices in Houston are Electronic Parts Outlet or Fry’s. They have the equipment I used to associate with Radio Shack.
If desperate, I might try a Radio Shack on the off chance they have useful components (and will be disappointed 90% of the time). I don’t want or need to buy TVs, cell phones, laptops, or tablets there, even if that is their current focus. I can get a wider variety and better prices on those items elsewhere or online.
This indicates a major weakness of the new retail model. Sure, the selection is exponentially better on line, but that’s for stuff you can get in a week. Online retailers have driven specialty brick and mortar stores out of business, so if you need (or want) something in an hour, or just want to chat with someone who knows what they’re doing, you’re out of luck, especially in a smaller market.
I think there will always be stores like Radio Shack (or independent equivalents) in large markets, but if you’re Joe Small City in a town of 60,000, you’re stuck in O Brother Where Art Thou territory. “Well ain’t this place a geographical oddity! Two weeks from everywhere!”
ETA: **Antibob **is right in this specific case. The back of the store is like the funny uncle of Radio Shack these days. Most everybody who works there tries to pretend it doesn’t exist.
For the past 20-30years, they’ve been perhaps a parts supplier of last resort. They were OK if you needed just one of something, or you needed something right now.
Otherwise, catalog suppliers like Digi-Key and Jameco were my first pick as they were cheaper and stocked a wider variety. More often than not, I could fill out the order form to mail-order my parts and have them shipped for less than what they’d cost at the Shack. Now, online ordering makes it even easier.
Experimenters are obsolete just to RS’s business model.* I have rarely gone there in the last 5 years. Local places like Fry’s are better (but not great) for getting something today. But I order online all the time.
RS’s online web site is horrible. The search is practically useless. And many pages on parts don’t actually give the specs for the part! Umm, what is the temp for that thermal fuse? That’s sort of important. The web site should stand on it’s own as useful as well as drive business to the store. It doesn’t. That alone tells you how messed up RS has been.
But then again, they don’t seem to have a viable business model at all anymore.
“My area,” according to Yelp, includes a 25 mile boat ride to one of the stores (I have to supply the boat). Putting “electronic parts” and my ZIP code into Yelp shows about 6 candidates; a Cellphone store nearby (very high prices, no selection), an iPhone repair facility about 30 miles away (ditto), and 3 Radio Shacks more than 50 miles away. Oddly, the one RS in town isn’t on that list (did it close down already?), but it is just half an aisle (literally) in a hardware store. Yelp didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, but thanks for suggesting it. (It’s hard to hide a store in a town of 10,000!).
With the rise of the Internet, just about anything is available within a week, most sooner. I ordered some office supplies online last Sunday and they just showed up at my door with no rush delivery charges. We’ve come a long ways from when I used to write out an order from the Allied Catalog, get a Money Order, mail it, and wait about 6 weeks for parcel post from Chicago.
I use B&H Photo-Video (NYC) for much equipment, and that takes 3-4 days; Monoprice for cables and adapters (about a week). Nothing takes longer than that unless it’s coming from China.
I think the demise of Radio Shack will hit small towns the hardest; in big cities, there certainly are many more options.
It seems to me that electronic tinkerers are on the decline. Ironically, being an experimenter these days is easier than it was 30 years ago because you can get so many cheap parts that have huge amounts of functionality in them. Want to build a radio receiver 30 years ago? Ok, get prepared to solder together about a hundred components. Want to build one now? Here’s your radio receiver chip. Add a couple of discrete components and you’re done. Want to add spiffy digitally controlled volume and tone controls? Here’s your chip for that. Designing electronics these days is more a matter of building blocks rather than circuit design, at least for some things.
As the experimenters drop out of the market though, so do the easy to deal with parts. The fancy whiz-bang chips are getting much more rare in DIP packages, and soldering surface mount parts is definitely a big step up in difficulty (many hobbyists can’t handle surface mount parts at all).
One big exception to this is stuff like Arduinos. That’s taking off like hotcakes.
Radio Shack, meanwhile, has stuck mostly to old discrete components. They don’t stock fancier parts and their selection of components has gotten more and more limited. Their sales staff has focused more and more on sales and less on knowledge. While there are some pleasant exceptions, most of them just wave their hand helplessly towards the parts bins (they used to be walls of parts, now they are tiny bins) and tell you to look somewhere over there.
Hobbyists have had a better selection and a better price (as long as you buy in bulk) online for a very long time. Radio Shack used to be convenient in that if you needed one part now, you could get it (if they had it). You didn’t need a minimum order, you didn’t have to pay shipping, and you didn’t have to wait. As Radio Shack’s selection has dwindled though, I think more hobbyists are just getting used to the fact that they need to buy online.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve gone into a Radio Shack for parts. But then I tend to keep a nice little stock pile of common parts in my basement too. When I decide to build something, I order the parts online, and if some of the components might be useful for other things I may buy a few extras on that order, which helps build my little stock pile.
I find it interesting, in an economic sense, how different businesses have prospered or failed as technology has changed.
Amazon, Google shopping and eBay prosper, while Sears, Radio Shack and others have failed. Yet I always thought that Sears and Montgomery Ward were ideally poised, at the right time and place, with much of the infrastructure already developed, when the Internet took off for shopping. What could be better than having a warehouse, ordering and delivery system when a warehouse, ordering and delivery system is exactly what Amazon had to build from scratch? Yet they couldn’t make the small, but critical transition.
There’s more to good business than just opening a storefront and hanging out a shingle.
We’ll search out every place a sick twisted solitary misfit might run to.
there are a number of mail order places with higher quality product for the same and lower price. there is minimum order and shipping involved though. you can order all the parts for a project and make out OK.
Rather than saying they are on the decline, I’d say the tinkering is shifting. “Standing on the shoulders of giants” comes to mind.
Years ago, if you wanted to build a system to measure, detect and analyze temperature changes, for example (as I once did), you had to collect small components, design the apparatus, build and test it, interface it, and perhaps program a computer to read it. Now you can buy a turnkey weather station for the same cost or less that does all this and more.
I don’t think this means that experimentation has ended, just that it has moved to a higher level as we build upon parts that are more powerful and sophisticated. We don’t have to write software to display a graph; we can now concentrate on interpreting the graph and integrating it with other data to learn even more.
Am I making sense? It’s tempting to say that everything that can be invented has been and there’s no need to experiment further, but I don’t think this is the case. We can just do more now with less. Experimenters in the 1960s could only dream about using a computer; now we all do. It doesn’t mean we have stopped inventing, innovating, or tinkering.
Radio Shack stopped being relevant at least 20 years ago. I used to visit one every day during my design, hobby and magazine authoring days. The “experimenter” section is rarely more than one alcove these days, and the staff knows even less about those ree-zister things than they do about cell phones.
“Big box lite” is a good description of their flailing model. Even their cable selections shrank to the point of uselessness; I have often needed things like 4-5 3-foot cables to tighten up an AV installation, and could not get certain basic combinations in other than 6 and 12 foot.
A bit sad to see them crumble but surprised that they’ve survived even this long.
I consider myself a tinkerer, I think it’s Radio Shack. Like someone else mentioned, the parts bins are a shadow of its former self. I also feel I’m being particularly generous saying “shadow”. Sometime in the past year I stopped in for widget* to make my wahoozle* work and the two year old running the register seemed clueless about the parts drawers.
*Technical terms used because I have a shitty memory.
Radio Shack has been fairly useless as an experimenter’s resource for a couple of decades now. Maybe longer.
They sort of rode a wave in the 60’s and 70’s when they were sourcing (marginally) acceptable quality cheap stuff from Japan. Japanese stuff got expensive toward the end of the 70’s…but personal computers arrived, and RS rode the first wave with the TRS-80 and CoCo. The arrival of the IBM PC killed that.
Then they started that nonsense of requiring detailed contact info when you bought a $.15 resistor for cash. They also paid on commission, and few sales droids stuck around long enough to be remotely helpful. In fact my experience was that I knew better where to look for what I needed, and if I asked they would not know what I was asking for.
Yes, they were one of the first stores to try and get tracking numbers out of customers, and in typical TandyCo fashion, did it in the most inept, offensive and clumsy way imaginable. That was the first place I saw people get really pissed at the nerd trying to get their name and phone number, and of course the nerds had all the right social graces to handle such situations.
It never occurred to them to make their “Free Battery a Month” card a tracked one, instead of a checkoff one like a cheap diner.
I was wondering if the OP missed the Super Bowl ad. Their whole marketing idea is that they are not the store they were back in the '80s. And I’m pretty sure they spent a pretty penny on that ad, so they were going all in.
I will say the idea of going to a store to get things that aren’t on display is pretty much dead. I went to Radio Shack in the 90s, and I never would have thought to ask about stuff like that. If it’s not on display, I assume the store doesn’t have it. You’ve got to make a big deal about there being stuff in the back if you want people to know it’s there.
