I miss this lil nigga like you would not believe.
>>2988916Same. 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.
poured 1 out for the loss of dis hommie
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.
>>2988916Pretty 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.
>>2988916There 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 baseBoomer 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.
>>2989045Eh, 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.
>>2989060Cell 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
>>2988916They 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 takeincorrect. 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.
>>2989065They 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.
