It's official. Radio Shack is closing their doors. The nearest store to me (in a big city about 60 miles away), is having a "going out of business sale". Yesterday it was 80% off almost everything. But there was little left to choose from. I got a few audio cables, some heat shrink tubing and a couple 12v 1a transformers. That's about all I could find.....
This is a sad day..... Radio Shack is the last of the old electronics stores, and while they have not had much in recent years, I still liked their stores, and over the years I found their equipment was made fairly well.
The guy said they are presently going to keep about 70 stores, which is about one per state, and they will only be in the very large cities.
Radio Shack was NEVER an old time radio store. Except maybe back in the '50s before Tandy Leather bought them.
They sold predominately cheap import stuff. Middle management was draconian at best. Always grinding on the store managers to meet constantly changing quotas. No amount of mismanagement or corporate greed could save them.
So there was a bankruptcy even back then..... I did not know that, but it seems they have gone thru a lot of them. Two recently.
I never understood the connection with the Tandy leather company. Maybe there was no "real" connection, just that they bought the business. (Is Tandy leather still around?).
There was a point when Radio Shack was called Allied Radio Shack. Did Allied buy R.S. or was it the other way around? I dont know much about the history, I only recall what I remember over the years. I remember when they sold Archer brand items too.
However, I was pleased with most if not all of their gear, and I have quite a bit of their stuff, from a few scanners, a radio, several multimeters, lots of plugs and connectors, and a video switcher.
I realize their parts prices were on the high side, but I paid the price because their stores were nearby and handy. Sure beats paying the shipping from most places, and before the internet buying by mail was involved, required mouth to mouth discussions and having a pile of paper catalogs laying around. Far too complicated just to get a resistor, capacitor, phono jack or semiconductor. It was easier to drive to R.S. and just buy it. But I do agree their parts in recent years were very skimpy and limited.
Regardless, I liked their stores and will miss them.....
The only reason I even found out that they were closing is because the
9volt battery connector broke on my portable weather radio, so I stopped at R.S. to buy one. (I did not know they were closing). I had no problem paying probably about $4 for one of them connectors. Now, I'm stuck ordering one from ebay (I found a pack of 5 for about $3), but I hate having to wait a week or more to get small parts like that, and my bench piles up with projects waiting to be repaired, while I wait for parts. Lately, when I buy a part, I usually buy 5 or more and keep them on hand, so I have that stuff here. Its costing me more to stock all that stuff in the end, but there is no way around it....
What once took a day or two to repair something sometimes takes months now, because I have to keep waiting for each and every part I need. Radio Shack provided a good service in that sense, and I was willing to pay their prices for the convenience. Now they are gone, and I'm not happy about it....
Yes. They were traditional when they were a s mall chain in the Boston area. But they were going bankrupt, which is why Tandy bought the chain. And one reason Radio Shack was successful after that was that it was everywhere, at a time when electronics were widening. The average home in
1971, the year Radio Shack came to Canada, had a tv or so, some am/fm radios, maybe a record player or stereo. But five years later, there were pocket calculators, digital watches, home computers, tv games, endless stuff and getting wider, the result of the switch to semiconductors, and then especially digital ICs. And Radio Shack was there on every corner, a more familiar place than the old time electronic parts stores that were in basements away from the mainstream. Radio Shack was niche back then, but it was a place when a wider audience could get those metal detectors or shortwave receivers or scanners or whatever without having to go to some niche store. There was no competition, the others came later. Radio Shack was there every time something new came along, so you could get that Casio music keyboard that would sample, even if you were in some small town.
ANd that's how the parts survived, Radio Shack could sell other things and carry the parts. ANd it worked. I didn't buy parts there much, too expensive and limited in selection, but it was convenient. But since I paid attention and got the catalogs, when I started buying "stereo" stuff, I bought at Radio Shack, usually when the item was on sale, or better yet, a clearance item. And I bought a bunch of computers there, since they were convenient. The catalog gave all the information, I could just go in and get the item off the shelf.
And then at some point, other companies were doing the same thing, and Radio Shack stumbled, losing its way.
According to the guy at my local one, they are all closing or have already closed in the last month. This one will be closed the last day of this month. There is so little left that they may as well be closed already but they are also selling shelves and parts of the store's that are not attached to the walls of the building. I offerred to buy the small parts drawers, but they were already sold and paid for. But he said the buyer has to wait till May 31 to pick them up. Some of the largfe shelves were already gone and there were 8 or 9 boxes of cables and cords on the floor because they did not want to hang the stuff again.
I asked if I could make an offer for an entire box of those cables, but he told me to come back around the 29th or 30th. He said right now he must still sell everything at the percentage off rate that corporate told him to do. I may make a trip there on the 29th just to see if I can get boxed deals.
I got a laugh, because I found a connector in the parts bin that was not in a bag, and he said although all small parts were priced at $1 each, he could not sell that plug without a part number, but since I spent over $25, I could have it for free as a bonus. That was nice of him!
One part I seem to find that is more often than not, the correct size, are those stereo 1/8th inch plugs that plug into a computer or MP3 player. They almost always seem to be a sloppy fit and get noisy because of loose fitting.
I bought several cheap ones on ebay and they were all crappy (from several sellers). I bought a Radio Shack one on Ebay for 3 times the price of those cheap ones and it fit perfectly. The seller had 3 left. I bought all of them, even at $6 a piece. I dont know why no one else can make them things to fit properly, but I was happy to find some that did fit and not annoy me with crappy sound.
They may have a gussied up website, but they are still an 'old time' radio store with wooden floors, bins and hang-racks. And I can get a 'onesie' on a Saturday afternoon.
The manager of the local store 40 years ago had a major complaint with the company. Whatever was on sale, the company would ship him many of the items. He had an alotment of so many dollars. He may wind up with half of that in antennas that he could not sell, but could not order many of the items he could sell.
Even back in the 1970's I almost never bought anything from them in the parts line. They did sell a few nice large items. Bought one of the Model 3 TRS 80 computers from them, and a nice police scanner.
Back in the day, when we had Radio Shack in Canada, MOST of their product was middle of the road or better. A lot of their stuff was REALLy good stuff.
There is nowhere else to get a connector or other small part locally. Big box home improvement stores don't have anything close, and the specialty hardware stores were driven out of business long ago.
Yeah, you can get cheaper and better stuff online, but you can't have it when you need it.
People complain about "Got questions? We've got answers", because they took it literally. When in reality it wasn't that they'd be a source of information, but having that adapter fo solve a problem.
I don't think the chain ever deliberately hired "technical people". But, lots of people need jobs, and retail often means flexible schedules. So the teenager interested in electronics would apply for jobs at Radio Shack, since it was in line with the hobby. And I seem to recall something about an employee discount, which had to be good.
So in the seventies I certainly had friends who worked there.
But I think with time, it became a less interesting place to work, more about consumer electronics than hobby type things, so the hobbyist was less likely to apply. Or maybe it's that "electronics" became mainstream, so any kid with a cellphone applied, fancying himself as a "stereo whiz" or something, so the hobbyist had competition.
But in the US, their Franchise stores often were hybrid, selling Radio Shack items, but also other things. I remember going to one, I guess in Maine, in the seventies, able to get some interesting books because they carried more than Radio Shack items.
It's crazy how businesses merge and re-merge, and unmerge. The only connection that Tandy had with Radio Shack was that both were for hobbiests. (Entirely different hobbies).
Allied Radio is gone, but Allied Electronics remains today (their commercial business).
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Since I was on Wiki, I looked up Radio Shack.
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It's a long article and quite interesting. As technology changed, so did R.S. (This article is worth reading).
In that article it says that May 31, 2017 is the official closing date for most stores (except private ones_.
A few months ago I found a Radio Shack calculator dropped on the ground by some recycling bins.
Its an old retro LED job and the = button needs a convincing jab to work - but it has a proper on/off slide switch that doesn't get knocked on in my jacket pocket.
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