>>2988916
Same. They were great in the 80's. If I needed a connector or a patch cord I could stop in and buy one, cash, without hassle. Now you have to go online to whatever supplier/distributor, navigate piss-poor layout of a webpage, select your item, use a payment method that requires more hoops to jump thru, then you gotta wait 4 days or more for it to appear at your door. And that's assuming it's in stock and not taking 6 weeks from chinkville.

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poured 1 out for the loss of dis hommie

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I just had to order some thermal fuses for a freezer I was fixing and I thought of radio shack. I think they did sell these.

>>2988916
Pretty much, they got bought out by investment bankers when the brand was failing.
Just like any other electronics supplier at the time,
Maplin in the UK, Dick Smith in Aussie/NZ.
What killed these places is that they gave up on their hobbyist base and started to sell cheap electronic toys, laptops, phones and people lost interest in them.

>>2988916
There are a ton of olaces online that do it better now. Essentially the SEARs of electronics.

>>2988987
>What killed these places is that they gave up on their hobbyist base
Boomer take and wrong, they died because online shopping is easier and cheaper.

Expensive, limited selection, and shit quality. If you had the dough you could build some cool stuff with the things they carried in the 80s like the speech chip.

Failed to make the transition out of malls and the shift to phones was unfortunate. Micro Center has a business. Batteries+ has a business. So radio shack could have had a business.

>>2989045
Eh, they were already fading by the time online shopping became the norm, and like others have pointed out you don't always want to wait a week (or weeks) after ordering to get your parts. Plus, early internet shopping days were plagued by shady, insecure payment options and a lot of people were wary of it. I think Radio Shack failed due to the market; electronics hobbyist stuff was declining thanks to cheap disposable tech and Radio Shack made a failed bid to cash in on that with cell phones, RC cars, and batteries.

>>2989060
Cell phones were profitable for them for a couple years. The electronic parts and appliances hadn't been profitable since like 99, it was cellphones keeping them afloat as long as they did

>>2988916
They were always over priced and started going down hill in the 80's by the 2000's they were shit. I generally only went there when I needed electronic components because they were close. I got a ton of stuff when they closed. I got about $600 worth of stuff for about $60.

They went to shit when they started selling phones, computers, and other mainstream electronics. people not having hobbies as much is partly to blame.

>>2989045
>Boomer take
incorrect. I watched them slowly kill themselves by making their hobbiest stuff shrink more and more. the only time I ever went there after the 80's was for parts. they tried to be hip and modern but charged too much for the junk they sold.

>>2989065
They were moderately competitive in home computers until the late eighties. The rumor was they’d had an embezzlement scandal that left them too cash poor to make a next generation Tandy computer internally. But I can find nothing to substantiate it. They did sell off their computer division in 1993 just before windows and the internet started really driving a lot of home pc sales.

I do not miss their batteries.

>>2989066
They shrunk the section because no one bought hobbyist stuff anymore, now everyone is terminally online and hobbies are pretty much dead for good. People would rather watch some one on youtube do it.

>>2988916
Yeah:( I was there on the final week of one near me. A couple of us cleaned it out of any relays, power transistors, diodes, etc.

>>2988916
Nostalgia bliss with the engineer's mini notebooks.
https://www.worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/Radio_Shack_Books.htm

>>2988956
The effers wouldn't sell you anything unless you gave them your address and phone number. Even if you just wanted one AA battery, they still demanded your information. It was bad enough for 'Seinfeld' to make a joke about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgfaYKoQxzQ

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>>2989275
Damn anon, you guys really picked it clean.

I wish I had bought thousands of sealed type IV cassette tapes when they were sold for 2$.

>>2989270
>They shrunk the section because no one bought hobbyist stuff anymore
Hobby electronics were dead in the water more or less from 1973 to the arduino/3d-printer/SDR era. Seriously, hobby books and magazines were reprinting the same old my-second-radio regenerative receiver projects for *decades*. Take a look at this book:
https://www.fracassi.net/iw2ntf/manuali/practical-radio-circuits-raymond-haigh.pdf
It's from 2003 and you could have built any of the circuits in it during the *Nixon* administration.

Serious hobbyists were buying from outfits like Mouser and Digikey already in the eighties.

Radio Shack was just spectacularly mismanaged:

Micro Center has a business but not nearly as many locations (Radio Shack tried to go big box in the nineties and failed at it with their "Incredible Universe" concept)
Dell has a business, though I doubt Tandy could have made that shift. Still, they got out of that business just before home PC clones really took off in the mid-nineties
Mouser and Digikey have strong (online) businesses, and even Jameco is still around. Radio Shack had a cool catalog but was never competitive there
Best Buy has a struggling business
Batteries+, as absurd as the concept is, has a business
Parts Express has a business
Ham Radio Online and their competitors have businesses and even some select retail locations

There's a world where the electronics big box store with PC parts and 3D printers and Raspberry Pi doodads and soldering irons and uh, batteries, and maybe even phones and headphones and appliances like Best Buy, is Radio Shack, Tandy is a name in computers, the electronics catalog is Radio Shack, and the audio+radio hobby catalog is also Radio Shack. But Radio Shack didn't make it.

>>2989365
>Radio Shack tried to go big box in the nineties and failed at it with their "Incredible Universe" concept
Far less well known is that during the dotcom boom of the early 2000s, Radio Shack tried out supersize physical stores named RadioShack.com. Unlike Incredible Universe, which was a techy version of Circuit City, RadioShack.com stores were expansions of existing product lines in a typical Radio Shack. Instead of a dozen tech books crammed into a corner shelf somewhere, they had an entire library of electronics books. Instead of a few ham radios, they had dozens of models, plus a fully assembled antenna mast, laid on its side, running the length of the store. Most things that were a special order at a mall Radio Shack, were available to purchase and carry out immediately.
Not sure how many RadioShack.com locations there were, maybe half a dozen. The one I went to was in Buford, Georgia, just outside Atlanta, next to BHFM (if you know, you know).

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>>2989365
>Still, they got out of that business just before home PC clones really took off in the mid-nineties
That would not have helped them. One of the big reasons clones took off was because the prices came down. Way down. Tandy was already having problems completing on price when they left the market. When they first got into computers they tried to completely control their market. The TRS line of machines were custom, not compatible with any other computers, were only sold in Radio Shack stores, and Tandy eventually refused to carry other computer systems at all.* Meanwhile Tandy refused to provide third-party companies the documentation or support they would need to develop for the TRS machines and refused to carry third party software and peripherals for them. Like Texas Instruments and their aborted personal computers Tandy wanted to control everything and it fucked them in the ass.

When they entered the 'IBM compatibles' market in 83 it was because they realized they fucked up and IBMs were now the biggest market. They continued to support their TRS-80 line but the last models rolled out in 86 and the line was discontinued in 91. IBM compatible machines were very successful for Tandy but most of their manufacturing was still done in the USA. By the 90s that was a serious liability. Other companies were manufacturing in Asia and importing machines that they could sell for less than Tandy could. By 93 Tandy knew they were beat and offloaded everything to AST Computers. They didn't have the stomach to shutdown GRiD and their own manufacturing plants and then move everything overseas just to see if they could still complete.

*Many Radio Shack stores were franchised and not corporate owned. Franchised stores could carry what they wanted

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>>2989418
Never heard of Tandy Data Products?
I'm mildly trolling with that as TDP was Tandy's short lived attempt at selling computers at major retailers, and it was a major failure.

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>>2989425
Yeah, that was them trying to dig themselves out of the hole they had dug. They tried to keep everything vertically integrated but ended up squandering a massive early market share. When they started losing share they pulled the TDP thing but found no one wanted to buy a Color Computer under a different name. This was one of their early efforts to move away from the Radio Shack branding. More then a few people dismissed their computers because they were sold next to CB radios and remote controlled cars. That is why they sold their IBM compatibles under the Tandy name. No serious business was going to buy a bunch of Radio Shack branded office machines. That is part of the reason why their early business machines, like the Model 16, flopped (there are other reasons too). Atari had the same problem with their computers.

Tandy had all sorts of weird shit like that. Hell, they started off as a hobby leather company and that part of the business is still going. They had their house brand, Realistic, which they manufactured equipment for but also used rebranded products from other companies. Some corpo suit shithead decided it was a good idea to terminate all the goodwill that brand had built up over the decades. They owned Memorex for a while. As I mentioned, they purchased GRiD and operated it for several years. They are still around and still making the GRiDCASE machines. Picture related. They owned Computer City for a few years. They had the Incredible Universe stores, which were basically Fry's Electronics but run like shit. Fry's ended up buying the 6 locations that actually made money.

When Charles Tandy died they really were like a ship cut loose from its anchor. North was just a transitional leader. Roach seemed to have a handle on things but the 90s did not go well for him. He was like Jack Tramiel like that. The business changed and he failed to change with it, to the determent of Tandy. Everyone after that was just another corpo suit shithead.

>>2989310
43 year old here, this bullshit, stupid prices, and bugging you when you were just browsing was so annoying. Radio Shack has me wondering how GNC is still in business I'm so many malls. Who's retarded enough to buy protein powder from them when there's a million cheaper alternatives?

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>>2989439
Switching over to MS-DOS worked out well for them as Tandy was the best selling PC brand for several years but eventually Gateway and a million other clone makers moved far faster than Tandy could dream of doing. Think you got it right about John Roach. He was a good leader for the 1980s marketplace but became lost by the mid 90s. That he was the creator of the TRS-80 might also have blinded him to the changes in the larger market, even after embracing MS-DOS machines. By the time Windows 95 rolled out, there was little reason for anyone to head to The Shack for a computer.

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>>2989515
The last few years, Gateway 2000 was an OEM for Tandy computers, as well as others. Before they got out of the market completely and started selling other peoples computers. Once the Tandy name was buried they sold IBM computers for a bit and then switched to Compaq and other less expensive models.

>>2989270
>They shrunk the section because no one bought hobbyist stuff anymore,
We had some good hamelectronics stores. Plus a bunch of surplus equipment/antique stores. City starts shreiking about the "optics" of tool/equipment hobby stuff and pressures many to shut down. Some hobby shops survive by closing their tool, mechanical and electrical parts sections. Grandma hobbies are still OK (Michael's shops).

>>2988957
this was the only real loss

>>2989418
>>Still, they got out of that business just before home PC clones really took off in the mid-nineties
>That would not have helped them
I think we're in violent agreement here ("I doubt Tandy could have made that shift") but it's just maybe clearer to me that other companies succeeded where they failed, so their failure was not inevitable.

They had a similar failure in the Unix market with the Model 16, which supposedly had some early success. Other Unix vendors succeeded (until Linux on commodity hardware + the dotcom crash) though that market was always brutal.

>>2989439
>This was one of their early efforts to move away from the Radio Shack branding. More then a few people dismissed their computers because they were sold next to CB radios and remote controlled cars. That is why they sold their IBM compatibles under the Tandy name. No serious business was going to buy a bunch of Radio Shack branded office machines.

I don't think this was really an issue in the early days, when they were competing with small integrators and VARs. Before the IBM PC in 1981, there was a whole ecosystem of dealers for mostly Z-80 mostly CP/M based small business machines and Radio Shack did OK in it especially with the Model III. They almost couldn't help but sell the Model I into that market without trying because they were there and had national brand recognition. But the PC in 1981 was an extinction level event for that kind of small business computer, not just Tandy's, and nobody had branding like IBM in those days.

>Tandy had all sorts of weird shit like that. Hell, they started off as a hobby leather company and that part of the business is still going.

Coleco was also originally the Connecticut Leather Company. Odd, eh?

>They had their house brand, Realistic, which they manufactured equipment for but also used rebranded products from other companies. Some corpo suit shithead decided it was a good idea to terminate all the goodwill that brand had built up over the decades.
The Realistic brand was not that strong because their quality and performance was always sort of hit and miss. Every so often they'd hit with something like the Electrostat 2a or Mach speakers or the PZM micropgone that are still well-loved, but it's really down to very specific items. People loved the Minimus speakers, for example, and still do, but they sound terrible. I agree that shuffling to Optimus and then RCA didn't help, either.

>>2989310
Interestingly I never experienced this between 1984 - 1992. But from 1993 on until 1998 It was all pervasive. They told me it was in case you had a return or warranty issue. I used to give a fake name and the store address & phone number when asked. lol.

Although I did briefly work at my small-town RS in 1997 for about 4 months. Worst job I ever had and absolutely refused to deal with the cell phone side of the business. 100% of every motherfucker cellphone owner would come in and complain it's not working. Did you pay your bill? Yes. Call provider. Call taker reports owner is 3 months in arrears so their phone was shut off. Jesus f--king Christ... every goddamn time.

While there I did go into the customer database. It was stored on a computer in the backroom and head-office would only query it for the number of total customers for catalog shipment. I deleted every person that hadn't shopped there in 3 years or more. Deleted myself and others who I know had moved away. Removed thousands of names. The result? My friends down at the post office no longer had to toss dozens of boxes of catalogs into the dumpster for the first time in years. Town population was 5,500 and we were getting over 7,000 catalogs. As I was deleting the names in batches, the boss came out and asked what I was doing. I feigned innocence. He could heard the harddrive working away as I was deleting names. hehe

>>2989045
Yeah online shopping is so cheap now, you just need to pay for 11 dollars shipping and handling for a 3 dollar part or spend 35 dollars or more in eligible items to qualify for free shipping

>>2990276
As opposed to Radio Shack, where you'd spend $3 on five ten-cent parts when you only needed one, or $5 on a twenty-five cent part, and everything you needed for a project would add up fast. If they even had the parts you needed, even back in the days of swinging dividers filled with hanging parts.

Mouser and Digi-Key were a thing well before the internet era.

I still break out my 2017 Newark catalogue every once in a while. But back in the 90s, early 2000s, a radio shack was my third home.

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>>2988916

>>2990135
Some time in the early 90s the company got a copy of every address USPS considered to be valid and started validating addresses against that. The manager at the local store was so proud of it that he offered me $100 if I could bring in duplicate fliers sent to the same address.
My dad got pissed when they started charging a couple of dollars for the catalog in 1994, even if the coupons in the back more than paid him back for the cost. Don't know if we received a free copy in the mail, but they were charging to get copies from the store.

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>>2988916
Found this in my basement, brand new, even has the floppy disk for PC connection. They dont make em like they used to.

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>>2992277
I had a roommate who bought something similar in '93. I had to look at the online catalog, his was a model 22-182. The PC interface was interesting to experiment with. We used it to log the line voltage long-term and see how the voltage changed with time of day, including voltage spikes and brown-outs.

And from 1988 until he passed away in 2007, he had the lights automated in his house using his old CoCo 3 computer controlling a bunch of obsolete Radio Shack "Plug n Power" modules he scooped up on clearance. I used his afore mentioned multimeter set to frequency counting to discover the very low frequency signal the control module used to command the plug-n-power modules. After that discovery we were curious to know if other signals were being sent via powerlines and left it running with his 386DX33 computer doing the logging. As best as I can remember nothing else was detected.

>>2988987
Jaycar in Australia is still around

>>2988916
but unironically though. radio shack was rad to go to when you juts needed One Thing for a project.

normies are more into diying shit and arts n crafts post-coof and if radioshack came back it would probably do about as well as Michaels

>>2989045
iirc it was that they were in dire financial straits because or general market forces edging people away from diy shit, and their ready-made consoomer electronics were mostly junk no one wants. then they got bought by whoever owns Circuit City iirc and they made it even worse by axing the hobbyist stuff but not stocking the shelves with anything anyone wants.

they didn't adapt well to "maker" cringe even before all that and pivot from individual resistors for 1.99 to selling 3d printer filament and arduinos or whatever. when i was in yurop, there were still plenty of independent radio shack like stores that would sell that stuff and they do fine. online shopping btfo'd most retail but sometimes you just want one single part and don't want to buy 35 bucks of trash to qualify for free shipping, and paying 1.99 for 5 resistors is "worth it" for the convenience and speed of just taking them off a rack, or for certain things you might want to fingerfuck a little bit before buying.

also i was watching a youtube of "worst rebrands" and Radio Shack becoming just The Shack was on there because it sounds scuzzy and scuffed and unnecessarily suspicious, but imo that's what they should come back as now. they put it something like
>"The Shack" sounds like I'm going to uncle jim's bomb-making shed, not an electronics store
nigga EXACTLY it was genius

>>2989310
maybe it's because i was a child but i never experienced this. they pushed "warranties" a lot even when i was buying individual components but never demanded my phone number or to get the fuck out

>>2992442
Michaels could just add an electronics aisle or half aisle. That'd be pretty cool.

>>2988957
this can only work in a high trust society

>>2992445
if michaels was a one-stop-shop for hick arts n crafts instead of karen arts n crafts i would visit it every day

imagine the power you could wield if you could buy cricut sheets AND random tubing AND random electrical parts. i'd be like dilbert's dad trapped in the mall forever

>>2992445
The big box store for that today is Micro Center but there aren't a ton of locations that can support one.

>>2992452
I miss frys bro

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The last thing that I bought from Radio Shack was a VHS rewinder. This was long after other stores had stopped carrying them, but I knew I could rely on Radio Shack to keep outdated devices in stock. Now I just scavenge the local thrift stores.

>>2992453
I miss Fry's too, but Fry's electronics section even in 1999 was in many ways like a time capsule from 1981. Z-80s in DIP40! Rows of NTE parts! It was only missing the tube tester.

But they did have professional instruments and tools. I got my Tek and my Fluke there.

>>2988916
Private equity ruins everything.

RadioShack could have saved itself.
There was a trend in DIY electronics with the Maker scene. RadioShack slept on it.
They could have sold thumbdrives like Micro Center. They didn't.
They could have sold Raspberry Pis and Arduinos. They barely did.
They could have sold 3D printers...if they were at every store.
USB Adapters. USB Extension cables. You'd think this would be their bread and butter. They half-assed it with cheap shit.

The reason they didn't do anything: There private equity handlers starved it to death so they could sell it for...well, parts.

If there was some place you grew up with in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s like K-Mart, Jo Ann's, or Radio Shack, it was likely left to rot so it could be picked apart.