[Brett_Riverboat]

Radio shack is at least indirectly responsible for me disassembling ( and sometimes successfully reassembling) most of the electronics in the house growing up. The tools and DIY gear they carried enabled me to learn and build electronics.

I'm still salty about the bafflingly stupid decision to become little more than a cellphone store.

[ravenstine]

Same! I took apart so many electronics when I was a kid. In retrospect, I really have to appreciate my parents putting up with this. Fortunately, I didn't permanently destroy anything... most of the time. Radio Shack was paradise for me in terms of being able to fix stuff and also build my own electronics. I built an AM radio transmitter from scratch using Radio Shack parts. That made my 11 year old self feel like I had discovered fire.

What happened to Radio Shack is pretty sad. I get that the business simply wasn't going to sustain at that scale as consumer tech evolved, but RS caused their own decline way sooner than it should have happened. Becoming a high pressure cellphone retailer was a stupid idea, and I remember their selection not even being that good to begin with. And, like Kramer from Seinfeld said, Radio Shack really wanted your phone number for purchasing something as simple as batteries. Today, phone numbers are asked for all the time when purchasing something like groceries, but I remember Radio Shack being overly aggressive in getting your phone number. Meanwhile, their electronics component inventory kept dwindling.

At least with Fry's Electronics, they still had a lot of components on the shelf right until the very end, as ridiculously overpriced as they were, whereas Radio Shack seemed to dismiss its core audience.

[hi-v-rocknroll]

> Fry's Electronics

Silicon Valley's convenience store when JDR Microdevices, Graybar, and such weren't open... such a tiny addressable market that vanished to zero and failed to keep up with the advent of the internet. Other regional shops in other regions like B & H Photo at least figured out how to sell to a national audience and keep parity with their brick & mortar to complement each other (MicroCenter and Central Computer Systems also managed to survive). Fry's carried overpriced oddball inventory and failed to focus as Amazon, eBay, and Best Buy grew while even CompUSA (the long-time tech hypermart) died.

[snakeyjake]

>I'm still salty about the bafflingly stupid decision to become little more than a cellphone store.

That was a little after my time, but back in the 90s my second job after I got tired of being a dishwasher was at Radio Shack.

During the brief time I worked there if I sold a single Tandy Sensation! (had to say it with the exclamation mark) the profit on that sale would exceed, by a lot, every single component we sold the entire month, and as an awkward teen I sold a lot of Tandy Sensation!s per month.

At my store, when I worked there, electronics parts took up about a quarter of the square footage of the store but was practically none of our revenue.

The only people buying electronics parts were church AV guys trying to fix a worn out 1/4" jack or blown capacitor in an amplifier.

Can't pay rent on those guys.

As an outsider I watched the parts shelves go from most of the back of the store to a single set of drawers to nothing and I can't say I blame Radio Shack. A lot of time was spent inventorying a mindboggling array of components, none of which sold in volumes great enough to justify the expense or the space.

[phatskat]

The ability to have those parts was lost without the access and distribution enabled by widespread internet.

I would walk to to my local radio shack at least once a week for different parts for a few years as my friend and I were constantly modding our consoles, breaking our computers, and making little gadgets.

I’d love a place I could walk into now and get a breadboard kit or a potentiometer, and it’s just not there.

[hellotheretoday]

Microcenter still does but it costs 50% more for worse quality parts and the selection is still not great. Handy if you need flux or solder in a pinch though

[phatskat]

My nearest Microcenter is about 200 miles away, but maps did return a similar local shop I’ll have to check out!

[imglorp]

They didn't quite hit the right tone in their other markets either. It's hard to pay rent selling $2 packs of components. Computers were ok for a while, especially at the beginning, but not selling. They didn't want to compete on TVs. Hifi gear seemed a shrinking market. I'm not sure what I would have done differently in their place.

[snozolli]

I'm not sure what I would have done differently in their place.

I remember some buzz around carrying Arduino not long before they went out of business. They drifted away from the DIY scene into cellphone kiosk territory. Maybe if they shuttered a bunch of stores and leaned into the new era of DIY (Arduino, 3D printing, drone parts) they might have survived.

[imglorp]

Yeah ours had an Arduino branded section for a year or two at the end. Some starter kits, proto boards, a few relays and servos, that kind of thing. Not enough to pay the rent obv but fine for jumpstarting hackers.

[epcoa]

> I'm not sure what I would have done differently in their place.

Microcenter. Granted much larger and fewer store model, not a slot next to Orange Julius.

But RadioShack was famously cluelessly managed for years.

[buescher]

Right plus that was the transformation that was happening that they didn't follow - electronics and gadgets out of the mall and into big box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City.

Tough too to get by on small parts for minor repairs when things break rarely and then aren't worth fixing. Time was grocery stores had little tube tester kiosks, you know. That said, Batteries Plus seems to have a business.

[buildsjets]

Radioshack did try to create electronics megacenters.

Incredible Universe was very similar to Frys and catered mostly to consumer electronics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incredible_Universe

[mc32]

I love the The Onion’s parody interview of Radio Shack’s CEO. It was an epic rant.

https://theonion.com/even-ceo-cant-figure-out-how-radioshack...

[luckman212]

> "Even the name ’RadioShack’—can you imagine two less appealing words placed next to one another?”

This made me chuckle.

[buescher]

My recollection is that they got out of the computer business after a very serious embezzlement case left them kind of broke around 1990, and that was the beginning of the long tailspin, but I can't find a reference to the exact story.

[hi-v-rocknroll]

I was told I managed to disassemble most clocks and electronics in my parent's and grandparents' homes before kindergarten age. I don't even remember most of it.

[virtue3]

The real problem here is that all the devices they used to sell got replaced by cellphones pretty quickly.

So what choice did they have to sell the item that replaced most of the store?