Tales From The Old RadioShack, or We went almost a whole summer in Texas without AC

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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An interesting article on the dying giant RadioShack with some fascinating comments from those who worked there.
SBNation :A eulogy for RadioShack, the panicked and half-dead retail empire
Our entire store had exactly three employees; my co-worker and I worked 40 or 50 hours per week, and he worked a minimum of 70 if he was lucky. We often had just one employee at the store at any given time, and sometimes, when there weren’t any customers in the store, he’d take a nap in the back room. More than once, while he was back there, someone would walk in and shoplift hundreds of dollars’ worth of stuff off the shelves and walk out in plain sight.
*A friend of mine worked at a RadioShack in a decrepit mall that has since been torn down. There was a restaurant upstairs, and in the middle of the night, its floor collapsed, along with its plumbing. He opened the store the next morning to find it covered in sewage and human waste; to hear him tell it, there were fifty pounds of it all over the place.

Any reasonable business, of course, would immediately pick up the phone and hire a hazmat team. Our district office ordered my friend to clean it up himself. When he refused, he almost lost his job.*
Once, during a store visit, my district manager scolded me for not wearing the name tag I didn’t have, and insisted I wear a proper one, any one we had lying around. I had the option of being Chad or Elizabeth. I decided to be Elizabeth, and then he said that no, I could not be Elizabeth.

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We went almost a whole summer in Texas without AC. Yep, they didn’t get it fixed until it was time for weather change. ( Actually about KMart, but noteworthy as how some employers resolutely don’t mollycoddle their staff. )

  • …I worked at radioshack. It was when they had stumbled upon an actual “hit” in these tiny remote-controlled cars called ZipZaps. There was actually a crowd of people lined up to get them when we opened. My manager was kind of a jaded, cynical prick, though…so he had us hold back about half of the cars so those people that came early couldn’t get them. I believe “fuck those guys” was his reasoning.*
    Classic science fiction covers are remarkable. Most of them involve comically bemuscled men with the kind of buxom women who only exist in a fifteen year old’s wet dream leaning on them. Sometimes these women are human. Disturbingly often, they are feline.
    A female pimp who would come in every month or so with a new girl who she’d get a new phone on her account. She must have had 15 lines over different accounts but it was probably a good investment since it cost her nothing up front and only $10 a month to add a line to her “family plan.”
    How many times were you told to fuck off after asking for the phone number of somebody who bought a pack of AAA’s?
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Christmas of 1986 and 11 year old me drooling over the display of r/c cars they had. Man, they had some cool stuff back then. I remember around this time that they got big into batteries, offering a reward program with a card.

A few years later buying wiring, switches and such for a science project and being amazed at all the stuff you could get. It seemed like such an endless assortment crammed into a corner of the store.

I can also remember even before all that and computers being on display with games.

Radio Shack used to be cool. Lots of good memories, especially this time of year.

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Back before the interwebs (and sites like Digikey) Radio Shack used to be the only place to easily/quickly find electronic components like op amps, resistors, capacitors, breadboards, and so on. But I used to fucking hate going there because they insisted on having my name and address for every single purchase. The one time I refused to surrender my personal info, the sales guy seemed really confused and uncomfortable, and the mood during the rest of the transaction was as though he had discovered I wasn’t wasn’t wearing pants and was doing his best to ignore it.

I don’t know when they stopped collecting customers’ names/addresses, but I still hate going there and do so as rarely as possible.

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I did hobbyist-level electronics design in the 80s and used RS parts and so forth whenever I could, because they were available nationwide (and even a bit internationally). (As a reader of the magazines and such, I really hated projects with parts only available to electronics engineers and those with accounts at parts distributors… if not from a single unit-level specialty seller.) (As **ME **says, those before-the-webz days were a PITA.)

I interacted with a couple of different stores and the main company in Texas, working on a number of projects that never went anywhere - if you remember Forrest Mims III and Don Lancaster, you’ll have a picture of what I was doing. Unfortunately, I wasn’t as big a name and so the crew in Plano or wherever the hell Tandy HQ was yanked me along for years on some things, taking rewrite after rewrite of proposals and book drafts and project plans without ever getting off the treadmill. (Or, I should note, paying me a dime or so much as an extra free Battery Club battery. I had to go buy my own bits and pieces from them to design and propose kits and the like.) It wasn’t the usual sort of thing - as, basically, a freelance writer I was used to being dragged around on a string. Tandy/RS was… different. It was more like dealing with Scientology or Mormons or Amway or something - there was a weird cult-ish, insider/outsider mentality that got in the way of absolutely everything.

As, basically, a freelance writer, I was never averse to extra income, so a couple of years I tried to sign up as Xmas help at the stores. I knew the managers well - first name, special orders, occasionally lunch at the McD’s next door, that kind of thing - and all three told me, over time, that they could not hire me because I was too knowledgable - they were bound to hire only iggerant neat young men in white shirts and ties who knew nothing about electronics, so that their knowledge would be RS-approved or nothing. They actively did not want anyone with wider knowledge.

In the course of these long waltzes, I spoke at length with - well, their star writer of such things. He reinforced the whole vaguely cultish, us-v-them atmosphere by turning the conversation to JEEzuss at every opportunity.

It was long, weird trip. Visits to RS stores over the years have only reinforced their IKEA-like oddness and against-the-grain retailing attitudes. I’ll be almost sorry to see them finally go… but it’s a faint “almost.”

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The thing that always amazed me was that Radio Shack, ostensibly the bastion of all that was high tech, had employees writing down stock numbers and figuring sales on calculators for probably a decade after everyone else had switched to point of sale machines. I’m not even sure they had cash registers.

As a kid who was an electronics hobbyist, I used to love browsing the place, although their prices were high enough ($1.09 for a couple of resistors?) that I’d usually buy from an electronics catalog instead (which was agonizingly slow in the days before the internet and ubiquitous two-day UPS deliveries).

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I built a robot for my high school science project, and RadioShack was a godsend. My local one must have been an anomaly, as it had a couple of quite knowledgeable guys working there and if I could explain what I wanted, they could almost always figure out what I needed.

I remember getting a full explanation of the differences among a SPDT, DPST, or DPDT switch and once I got it, my project got much easier.

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My first computer was a TRS-80 with a cassette tape drive. Better hope you remembered to get the leaderless cassettes or you would lose the first part of your program when you saved. Ah, the good old days!

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Circa 1976, I’m about 9.5 years old. There’s nothing but 1970’s geeks in the place, perhaps six. I was Looking for some kind of adapter. “Is it male or female?” I’m asked. “What’s the difference?” I ask, and they all snicker. “Can I tell him?” the closest geek asks, and the clerk says no, and before he actually shows me the two kinds, I know what he means.

In later years, I loved to play with BASIC on their TRS-80’s. Not just the “GOTO 10” loops, some good stuff. Way before my dad got us a IBM PC. And they were the best place to find a resistor or breadboard. Some solder. Sad to see they became FAIL.

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I still have two of the pocket computers here. I scored the “big” cassette interface with the printer at a swap meet a few years later, then killed it by plugging the power supply into the data port… only Tandy would design something with the same connector used for different functions in which misconnections would damage something, and then mark the ports with teeny faintly-raised letters in the plastic.

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[QUOTE=Amateur Barbarian]
if you remember Forrest Mims III and Don Lancaster, you’ll have a picture of what I was doing.
[/QUOTE]

So I’m guessing you’re also not Steve Ciarcia.

One bit of fun I stumbled on tonight is an archive of scanned Radio Shack catalogs at www.radioshackcatalogs.com

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Is RS totally sinking? I understand they’re trying to get back into the maker/DIY business. They are doing a lot of sponsering at Instructables.com and they had a presence at the NYC Maker Faire.

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I too, hate going to Radio Shack. I suppose my last trip there must have been about 7-10 years ago. I was trying to find some fittings to coax for my video cameras, but they really were a bit skimpy on getting the proper fittings I needed on that as well, or if they had something that would have worked better, they weren’t able to help me find it. Made several trips there trying to get something to work going through all of their little bins, finally after perhaps the third time there, I settled on some fittings that would possibly work, but not the best for my situation. The woman snarly replies, “oh, you’re actually going to buy something this time.”

How Radio Shack has made it this long is a mystery to me. They have almost nothing to offer, and are often maxing out their prices on what little stuff that can be found much easier on-line now at often at a fraction of their costs.

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It’s kind of sad to think of Radio Shack going away, even though I understand why. For years for me it’s been the store that I know will have the exact cable or converter doohickey I need when I’m in the middle of hooking some electronic thing up to some other electronic thing. Yes, I know I can order it from any number of places on the internet, but when I’m in the middle of trying to get something to work, I want to run out and get the part NOW dammit, not later I the week or even tomorrow.

And every time I walk into the store it seems like I’m the only customer, and the one sales guy doesn’t appear until I’ve spent 10 minutes trying and failing to find the part myself (I probably woke them up from their nap in back). Then I tell them what I’m looking for, and they invariably seem to know exactly what and where it is (even if I’m not sure what I need- I might say, is there something that converts aaa to bbb?), and magically find it off the shelf/ pegboard for me.

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No, but I had a positive spaz attack when I discovered Circuit Cellar’s HQ in a nearby town (by driving by) - I don’t think I could have told you even what general region of the country he lived in, so it was as unexpected as spotting Elvis.

A little later I crossed paths with a guy who worked for him for many years.

Strange, small little world here. :slight_smile:

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Radio Shack used to be one of the greatest stores in the world. You could get just about anything in there. However, now they don’t have very much in the stores and lots of times if you wish to buy something they have to order it for you. The Radio Shack stores in my area aren’t very well stocked and are all failing. I suspect they will go out of business within the next year.

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(1970s Radio Shack)
Hello Count! How can we help you?
Oh, seems this vacuum tube is broken. Let’s test it on the Radio Shack Tester (crowded geeks scatter). Yep, broken tube. I’ll get you one now, it’ll cost $0.39.

(2010s Radio Shack)
Uhh, you need help?
“Oh yeah, in one of these drawers we might have the connector you want. Yep, here it is. $29.99”

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Back in the DOS days I was a dumb kid who fdisk’ed (essentially wiped all the hard drives) all the display computers in my local RS just to be a dick. I still feel bad about that.

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First, the 2014 SDMB Award for best post/username combo. :smiley:

Second… so it’s all YOUR fault, you dick!

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Up until a few years ago, we had an outlet version of Radio Shack a couple of miles down the road. The front of the store was outfitted like a regular Radio Shack, but the back room was where you’d go to dig through their graveyard of old computers and random crap.

It was like going to a flea market.

On the same shelf there’d be an out-of-box alarm clock, a RC car with the helpful label “Missing a Wheel” and HAM radio equipment that looked like it dated to the Kennedy administration, right alongside last year’s laptop models and open-box video games. The prices ranged from “are they serious?” to “giving it away!” with no detectable rhyme or reason. To call it disorganized would be a huge understatement.

I was sad to see them close it though. I bet the liquidation of THAT warehouse o’ crap made for an interesting time.

I also suspect they’ll be toast in the next year or two.

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Yeah, don’t have what I’m looking for? I’ll just DEL . as many computers as I can on the way out before sometime notices what I’m doing…