One of my neighbors in this little townhouse complex just retired from Radio Shack. I don’t know how long he was with them but he once told me that he was one of the top salesmen. He specialized in big ticket items; he said he sold a lot of computers, TV, and stereo equipment. I’ll have to show him this thread. I haven’t been in a RS in years and haven’t seen a catalog in ages. The link to the catalogs is great.
My first job in the quartz crystal industry was with a company that specialized in making replacement crystals for ham radio operators; it was a small company but it was a lot of fun. We had a ton of Hammerlund radios along with another old brand whose name is lost to me. Ham radio operators were mostly insane but fun to deal with.
Sam although I’m pretty sure I usually disagree with you in other threads, this time I’m right with you.
I had a RS that my friends and I used to go to when we in junior high and high school and the staff there were all electronics hobbyists types. They were very knowledgeable, were genuinely interested in helping my friends and I learn about things, and once we started taking classes in things like electronics and computers (this was late 70s, very early 80s), they were always asking what we were learning and giving us advice and help with projects. Great, friendly nerdy people. It was a terrific place to us.
And yeah, not only would I thumb through the catalogs until they were useless, I had 4 good friends to help me out with that. Pass it to Jerry in 1st class, get it back from Andy in last period. Good times.
But things change, and now we have the intarwebz and computers the size of paperback books and… ah, well. Nothing lasts forever. Everything changes. <sniff>
Oh and BTW… “The Shack”? Not gonna fly. Too generic, too non-descript. No flair at all. They should have gone with something like Tek Hut or House O’ Tronix or something.
I’m not the only one who cares! This is somehow reassuring even if it doesn’t get me a local source for small electrolytics.
About business models and success or failure: beowulf sounds right, but elmwood doesn’t sound so unreasonable either. It’s a plus about electonic parts that they are small for their price - most of them take up less room than the currency required to buy them. Also, much of the variety represents optimizing the capacity or precision of the part for price purposes, so there are 1 W and 1/2 W and 1/4 W and 1/8 W resistors and even 1/16 W leaded resistors available to manufacturers in 10%, 5%, 1% and even 10 ppm accuracy, but you could hand-build the same working circuit substituting the 1/2 W resistor 1% for probably 90% of the others, at nearly the same price if you are buying unit quantities. Finally, many electronic parts are practically fully constrained by just a few degrees of freedom, like “4.9K leaded resistor, 1/2 W, 1%”. Shoppers don’t need to try them on or play with them. They could be in bins in the back room per a stock list on the registers and over the internet. I bet you could assemble the 1000 most helpful parts in dozens quantities in a cabinet smaller than the old tube testers. Maybe businesses like HAM and chemical photography would wind up merging to share smaller and smaller retail spaces…
I have fond memories as a youngster going into the local RS and looking at all the electronic parts. I used to ride my bike up there and spend an hour or so looking at everything. (A geek in training, I was.) I got to know the folks working there, and I think they kinda felt sorry for me, as they would sell me small electronic parts (resistors and capacitors and whatnot) for about half the advertised price. Looking back, I’m not sure how they were able to do that, but they did.
I’ve often wondered if RS has ever made any money on the electronic parts they sell. I’m guessing they’ve lost money on it.
The last time I was in an RS, I noticed they had put all their parts in a tool chest. I suppose it’s a more efficient arrangement, but I miss the walls of parts hanging on hooks.
It’s a bygone era for the most part. In the 1960’s and 1970’s a lot of folks would spend their evenings hunched over a bag of parts and smoky soldering iron. The world of electronics was a fascinating and mysterious world. Those days are gone.
On a positive note, I live near Dayton, OH. Have any of you been to the third floor in Mendelsons in Downtown Dayton? It contains a mind-blowing supply of old electronics components. Literally millions of capacitors, switches, meters, resistors - you name it. Simply amazing.
I was a Radio Shack Manager in the early to mid-80’s. In most cases there is huge gross profit, but not nearly enough volume these days (on average) in the tweaky electronic component area stiff to support keeping any kind of stock on hand. If a store’s SKUs (stock keeping units) don’t have a pretty high turn ratio in terms of how often they sell and need to be re-stocked you’re just warehousing it, and you can’t afford to do that given the typical retail $ per sq ft rents in a mall, strip mall or power center.
Radio Shack has gone though several metamorphoses over the years and they have to follow the money.
Anyone remember those ‘Science Fair’ electronics kits? They had springs in them for contacts, so you could build circuits for scores of things. I had a 100-in-1 kit when I was a kid, and spent many hours playing with it. I remember making a light-sensitive oscillator, where you could pass your hand over the detector to change the tone. There was a siren, and an AM transmitter, and loads of other projects. (Well, 97 other projects.) I was even learning what the stripes on the transistors meant.
Every year I looked forward to the flyers they sent in the mail. They had a coupon on them for a free three-cell flashlight. It was a really cheap flashlight, grey with a red bezel, that would stop working after a short while. But I loved them when I was a kid. (Kids love flashlights!)
A long time ago, I found a mint-condition Allied catalog from 1972. I don’t know what happened to the catalog – it must have gotten lost in one of my moves – but that catalog had some much awesomeness it was overwhelming.
There’s an ad for that free flashlight on the Radio Shack Catalogs cite. Unfortunately, given their user interface you can’t directly link to it.
The parts were a big profit center for Radio Shack back in the day. the margin on them was huge, because they were sold in small quantity. A 2-pack of resistors might sell for $1.99, and Radio Shack’s cost on them was probably about a nickel. And to make it better, the product didn’t change much over the years, so you didn’t really have inventory spoilage. A resistor or capacitor could stay on the shelf in a store for ten years if need be, and still be perfectly saleable. And they took up very little space, so they were a fine item to stock so long as you had some level of parts sales at all.
The problem today is that these parts don’t sell at all. That market has completely dried up. The other problem is that when Radio Shack migrated to the malls in the 1980’s, the cost of floor space skyrocketed and they could no longer afford even the modicum of space the parts took up.
Really, the ‘culture’ of Radio Shack died when Radio Shack moved into the malls. The stores got smaller, and had to focus more on mass-merchandize. That meant knowledge of electronics was no longer required in their salespeople. The higher amounts of traffic made the stores less personal and less welcoming to the chatty hobbyists who wanted to browse and talk shop.
But ultimately, the old model of Radio Shack was doomed, because the eleectronics hobby changed and withered. Remember Heathkit? It was huge back in the day. Today, gone (some vestige lives on as a teaching company). But Back in the day Heathkit was as important to hobbyists as was Radio Shack.
But there are a lot of situations where overnight delivery just isn’t fast enough, and I need a store open mall hours. I have a serious electronics retailer easily available, but they’re only open 7 to 5, Monday through Friday. But if I’m doing sound and I need a female XLR connector to repair a cable, I can get it at the Shack on a Saturday night.
“F” connectors, BNC adaptors, RCA cables of various types - forget resistors and LEDs, I just need a source of connectors and cables that is open later than 5 PM.
I haven’t been to a Radio Shack in years, and more than likely will not go back. My husband and I went in because I was looking for an item. I knew exactly what I wanted, and was ready to talk to the employee: but the dude talked to my husband and refused to acknowldege my existence. I told him I was the one looking for the part, and if he couldn’t talk to me, then I would be happy to tell him where to stuff a bunch of live electrical wiring.
To most of the people working Electronics Retail these days, that might as well be in Russian, translated from the original Martian.
And the problem isn’t having the stuff in a box out the back, it’s that when people know you’ve got the stuff in a box somewhere, they come in and say “I’m trying to rebuild a NoiseMaster Stereo from 1978; what ohm resistance diode do I need for the flux capacitor between the pre-amp and the output?” and the staff end up standing there bewildered thinking “A what? From when? With a what now going between the where?” (remember, they get paid the same where they work at an Electronics store or a Supermarket or any other retail job) and nobody ends up happy.
It’s really not worth the hassle for physical store businesses, in other words. But one guy, who really does like his electronics and knows his shit can run a net based mail-order business specialising in all this stuff. It’s high margin, so he can make money in his spare time, he’s got the knowledge, and the dedicated hobbyists get what they need from someone who knows what they’re doing.
