Every been to Fry’s? :dubious:
In 1970-71, our garage band recorded our “albums” on a Realistic 909 reel-to-reel tape deck. We weren’t that great of a band, but the tape deck was awesome.
I had a Realistic “color organ” at the time, that was pretty awesome too.
I hate to admit it, but I used to work there many years ago. It was every bit as horrible as portrayed.
I will not shed a tear when they go Tits-up.
I used to love RadioShack. They always had neat stuff. In 1999 I bought a portable 4" LCD TV that ran on 4 “D” batteries. It served me well until the digital conversion. Still works, but there’s only one low power analog station still on the air.
Circa '92, I bought the last Tandy 1000RL computer my local store had in stock.
You really shouldn’t call someone a dick in MPSIMS, even if he called himself one first.
No warning issued.
twickster, MPSIMS moderator
It was 100% a play on his own post. Apologies if that was misunderstood or not entirely appropriate.
I just remember that my Dad used to call the place “ack” because the one in the local mall perpetually had only had non-burnt-out light bulbs in those letters of the sign.
The weird offset R logo they’ve been using for the last several years bothers me in sort of the same way, like the letter fell out of position in the circle.
That, or the whole place is “registered,” as in “registered offender.”
i have a battery card.
They wouldn’t hire me when I was an unemployable college graduate in the late eighties. One of the interview questions was which of the other interviewees I would hire. Apparently saying that it wasn’t a good idea to hire someone purely on the basis of appearance wasn’t what they were looking for.
I haven’t been to a Radio Shack in maybe 20 years but I was a regular in the 70s and 80s. Still have about 50 pounds of odd screws and shit from the various “hardware paks” to prove it.
Late 70s or early 80s one of their fliers had a coupon for a free flashlight.
Took the coupon and rode my bike to collect my freebie.
I was harassed for probably 20 minutes about what good is it to have a flashlight with no batteries and why wasn’t I buying batteries. This was the huge cheap flashlight that took 8 D-cells and still was barely able to light the bulb.
20 minutes of hard sell on a 9 year-old that didn’t even have any money with him.
Radio Shack never successfully navigated the transition between “electronics as a hobby/nerdy thing” retail presence and the “electronics as a mass-market category” item.
When I was a kid, you could buy televisions, stereos and VCRs at department stores and appliance stores, but if you wanted anything outside of the very most generic mass-market things, Radio Shack was your only option in many places. I had a metal detector, a robot arm, and a bunch of other electronic toys from Radio Shack, and my Dad was forever getting parts for his shortwave there. It was also the place to get things like chromium oxide cassette tapes and cassette tape cleaning kits, as well as computers in the early days. We also got a replacement NiCD battery pack for our cordless phone there sometime in the 80s.
As time went on, electronics became cheaper and more widespread; Radio Shack never really caught on to the sea change; they should have stayed with their concept, not their product mix. Stuff like home theater, cell phones and X10 would have been things along the same lines of obscure that their original stuff was; but PCs, RC toys, tapes, batteries, etc… were crap sold better and cheaper elsewhere.
I think the last half-dozen times I went to Radio Shack, it’s been to get some sort of adapter cable for a stereo, DVD player or PC. I think the last non-cable/adapter I bought there might have been some cassette tapes or batteries back in about 1992.
Bingo. Also that they should have stayed in the niches and never tried to compete as a general retailer.
There’s a niche they could have beaten the world at by low-pricing quality - give the endless tide of electronics buyers a low-cost alternative to the high markup on such things at Best Buy, Circuit City and all those retailers who made their profit from the add-ons. RS cables were okay in that respect, but a bigger selection of their standard quality at slightly lower prices, and push that facet… oh, well. Too late now.
I can get any cable of any type in any quality level I like for a few dollars from Amazon now. That niche has been eaten up by Big A like so many others.
Yeah, I’m not so sure what they’d be doing today that would be successful; maybe a focus on home automation and similar stuff that might need a billion little local trips for connectors, etc…
There’s no good provider of “connectivity” even though that task has gotten much simpler with HDMI, USB etc. All of the bits and pieces that make our gear work tend to be OEM, junk, overpriced, under-engineered or lacking in innovation. RS could have built a sturdy foundation in that space while it was available.
This. I bought a television at Best Buy about 10 months ago. Big Samsung smart TV, and they were having a pretty good sale.
But the salesman kept leaning on me to buy HDMI cables and a surge protector from them. And I couldn’t avoid it. It took them forever (like half an hour) to bring the TV up from wherever they kept their stock, and the whole time he was selling me. And the price was something like ninety bucks. I guess that’s where his commission came from.
Needless to say, I didn’t buy a cable or a surge suppressor from Best Buy. Can’t remember where I got the necessary cables for the TV (naturally, they didn’t come in the box). Might have been Radio Shack, except that I stopped going there years ago when they would absolutely demand addresses and phone numbers, and then when they started getting relentless about selling cell phones and service.
Consider yourself lucky.
There is a chapter in the slave, I mean employee manual on that little maneuver. :rolleyes:
God, that place sucked. I think it may have given me PTSD.
I was a Radio Shack trainee then manager from 1981 to 1986. Although the story is circa 2003 and paints it as a low paid retail hell managers in the mid 80’s were paid on store profitability and you had some guys making six figure incomes on high volume stores. They changed the pay plan (IIRC) in the late 80’s so that did not happen anymore.
In it’s heyday it was an exciting and interesting place to work.