Friday, March 7, 2014

Shed a tear for Radio Shack

They are hurting.  They just announced they will be closing 1000 stores.  And it may get worse.  I remember when they started up, a single store on Washington St in Boston.  That was before Tandy bought them.  In those days the store was filled with electronic parts, mostly surplus, TV antennas, hifi equipment, and ham radio stuff.  If you were building or fixing electronic stuff Radio Shack is where you went for parts.  They carried their own brand of hifi, Realistic, which never had the cache associated with Harman Kardon or Bogen or McIntosh, but the price was right and it sounded OK to my ear.  Once they even carried British Army surplus rifles for $19.95 each.  It used to be a fun place to shop, even if you didn't need any parts or rifles.
   That was a long time ago.  They are still around but the stock is less interesting, cell phones and point-n-shoot cameras, and toys.  They still have some parts and wire and connectors, but this is all little stuff, couple of dollars apiece, and you gotta sell an awful lot of it to keep the lights on.  I still buy parts for my home projects at the Shack, but that's about it.  Although Radio Shack pioneered home computers, remember the TRS-80, they seem to have faded out of that business.  They still have a few cables and connectors, but you don't see laptops or printers in the store. 
   Without a high value or a high volume product, they will continue to hurt.  When they go,  most of us will have to go Internet for electronic parts and stuff. 

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