My memories of Radio Shack involve giving them your name, address, phone number, mother’s maiden name, rank, blood type, inseam, high school fight song, and favorite Beatle before they would hand over that 29 cent alligator clip.
mmm
But you could get a free battery each month.
Or P D Q Bach’s Concerto for Horn and Hardart.
I always used
James Earl Carter
1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Washington DC 20500.
Worked great. 
Nice to know I’m not alone about having zero nostalgia for Radio Shack. The people who worked there had that same obnoxious demeanor as Jimmy Fallon’s computer guy on SNL. Luckily, when I started really getting into amps and guitar pickups I discovered a large independent electronics store which had a much bigger selection, better prices, and friendlier staff.
I never ran into that one.
Maybe it depended on what store you were using. Some of them were relatively independently run.
Sears had decent hand tools. I have too many as it is though now. I guess Ace sells Craftsman. Never liked Craftsman power tools.
The irritating thing about Radio Shack’s address harvesting is that they wouldn’t let it go when you told them you were already on their mailing list. They wanted your address Every. Single. Time.
Some stores did. Some not. I suspect it also varied between e.g 1970, 1980, and 1990.
I was inconveniently located for my local Fry’s - it involved a bit of a trek along my least favorite busy stretch of congested freeway. As a result I went rarely, usually because I wanted something now and Radio Shack was useless and Best Buy wasn’t quite niche enough. So I saw it’s growth and failure in stop motion, from it’s bustling heyday to it’s startling decline.
My last visit was actually oddly grim and a little depressing. I needed a new cpu cooler or at least cooler fan pronto as mine had just died. The store was dusty and had an endless vista of barely stocked shelves in a cavernous warehouse space, each area with one very small cluster of boxes with a choice of mostly exactly one dubious-looking off brand item. It was nearly empty of people except one strangely large cluster of employees shuffling about like an amoeboid mass, alternately ignoring you then mobbing you like hungry vultures. It was weird and this was a year or three before the final end.
I’d probably vote for a pre-decline Borders over Waldenbooks or B. Dalton’s - I found my local branch had a deeper, more eclectic catalog of books. But I do miss the old box bookstores.
I eventually got smart.
Radio Shack clerk: I’m going to need you to fill out this form…
Me: Yeah, not gonna do that.
Radio Shack clerk: OK.
The local ones were like that maybe 6-12 months before the end. There had been news reports of them changing the way they pay suppliers or something–whatever was up, it was clear that they weren’t getting new stock. So yeah, empty shelves and empty of people. I don’t recall the amoeba of employees but it was always true that in certain areas, if you showed the slightest interest in something you’d be hounded (because they paid on commission for some products).
The store was always kinda weird in some ways but that was part of the charm.
My recollection of Fry’s is that the floor staff was entirely salespeople on commission. They kept to the big ticket areas like TVs and all-in-one PCs. There was nobody there to answer your questions about repair parts or components.
Yes but mine is on Elston in Chicago but it was super cool having them across from each other. Looks like 2500 N vs 2645 N Elston. I think I went to another Tiger in Schaumburg or Hanover Park 15 years ago, too.
Reading through the wikipedia, I hadn’t realized Tiger and CompUSA were eventually the same entity. All stores were closed by 2015.
It looks like a lot of their remaining locations are either inside of gas station/convenience stores, or truck stops.
Surprised Howard Johnson’s hasn’t been mentioned yet. I have some fond childhood memories. As I do of Big Boy, which still has some restaurants around, but I tried one last year for breakfast and it was completely bland and generic.
Come for the RAM, stay for the soda and Funyuns.
If you’re from the DC area, you’ll remember the Hot Shoppes.
Both they and Howard Johnson’s served those weird fried clams known as “clam strips,” which were pretty much tasteless. But, as their slogan claimed, “Kids Love 'Em.”
Hot Shoppes also opened a chain of “Hot Shoppes Jr.s” which were meant to compete with McDonalds and Burger King. I worked at one briefly but was fired when I showed up for work tripping on LSD and demanding hamburgers for me and my friends.
There was a Peaches Records or two in the Boston area but there were more Strawberries. I’m not sure if there was some kind of connection with the fruit motif.
FtGKid2 had a friend that worked there in the computer dept. Earned so much money on commision they decided it was too much and made the friend a salaried manager, which greatly cut their pay.
Guess who quit and went elsewhere?
Way back when, Fry’s was better stocked in electronic parts and tools as a Radio Shack. It was great.
But they had issues: E.g., asking for id on a credit card payment despite my card’s rules (at the time) explicitly saying the retailer could not ask for id. Asking to see the receipt at the door. I just walked by them.
Like many stores, Fry’s bought stuff from wholesalers on a credit-like deal. Once the stuff sold, Fry’s would pay the wholesaler. Once they got into trouble the wholesalers asked for money in advance. This is not good. So the shelves went bare and 3rd party people started renting space in the store to sell all sorts of weird stuff. Bankruptcy ensued.
Compare to MicroCenter which is still going. They actually were extremely busy during the lockdown as people and companies were getting stuff for work-from-home. Sadly, since we moved the nearest is quite a ways away.
A non-zero element in the disaster that killed Frys (IMHO, it was going to fail eventually anyway, but this greatly accelerated the issues) is the massive fraud a certain gambling obsessed VP perpetrated.