A Eulogy for RadioShack

Radio Shack at this point is a sad caricature of itself. I remember being able to buy all sorts of ICs, analog parts, interesting radios and kits. Now it peddles cell phones and overly prices things -- I recall needing a battery for my cordless phone recently, they wanted $23 for a battery for a $50 phone? Uh, no.

Two other bay area places that have changed a lot are Frys and the now closed Quement Electronics. Fry's still has a few components, but nothing like the 80s and 90s.

RIP.

I still have a cuecat!!! I never intended to use it for it's intended purpose,but thought it was great to get a free bar code reader.

My Dad worked there in the 80s between contracts for a couple months. "Well this contract ends this month, and I've got an awesome database migration contract starting in 6 months, so I've gotta find something to do meanwhile (decades before FOSS type stuff), and I've spent tons of money at RS since it was allied radio and I was a kid ..." This was before they turned into Cell Phone Shack. About half the time they got well over minimum wage back then, even on low sales stores. Sounds like they earn even less now than in the 80s, not adjusted for inflation! One thing that didn't change was the Shack expanding to own your life, so it starts as part time and somehow 3 months later you're an asst mgr (why?) and "working" 90 hours and then a couple months later you're all WTF am I doing here at 100 hrs a week, my contract job starts next week, bye!

The article had a lot of weird stuff about not understanding why people wouldn't leave a crappy job. Well, perhaps 90% of the time the only crappy part was the paycheck, you just hung out and screwed around and occasionally sold stuff to people. So I'd take the city bus to his store after school and we'd play video/computer games for HOURS during the slow times. We had kind of a game on betting when the last customer would come in, maybe 6pm or so most days, then we had the store to ourselves till 10 or so, literally a kid in a toy store. It honestly was a lot of fun almost all the time, just not much pay. You could make a ton of money at lunch and after work rush, and saturdays, like $40/hr (which in the 80s was a lot), but you had to hang out all night long at minimum wage if you wanted the plum hours. Sales were extremely uneven over time. I still don't understand why they ever opened before noon or were open after 6pm or so.

I can prove he worked there... in the mid 80s each shipment contained a hopeless VCR tape of sales blather not for public consumption. Sell Sell Sell!

While it's glib to say that Radio Shack was lost for the want of a space, the change in their corporate identity from "Radio Shack" to "RadioShack" -- 1995 -- coincides with their slide to irrelevance nicely enough to seem kind of symbolic. We don't really know what the Internet is, but we've noticed that cool companies are using CamelCase.

I suspect it's hard for people who are under 30, maybe even 40, to believe how different RS once was from the sad sack we have today. I don't think they were ever really cool -- that air you now get from their '70s and '80s catalog of old white dudes trying to be hip is an air you got from those catalogs even when they were brand new, trust me -- but they had big selections of really interesting stuff, most of which was exclusive to them, and frequently had salespeople who were genuinely enthusiastic about electronics and computers. And the importance of the TRS-80 in the early computer scene seems to be vastly underestimated today, I suspect in part because of that perpetual lack of cool. You might dimly remember "Trash-80" jokes, but you may not remember that for a few years it was the best-selling computer in the world. And unless you followed the company, you almost certainly don't remember that they had separate "Tandy Computer Center" stores, or that they sold an IBM PCjr "clone" called the Tandy 1000 that fixed all of the PCjr's problems and became so popular that big name games had exclusive Tandy 1000 features, or that they actually shipped a frikkin' Xenix workstation (The TRS-80 Model 16) years before most people had any idea what that was or why they should care.

And, really, that last one sums up Radio Shack in a nutshell, especially with computers: always either a few years ahead of their time, or a few years behind it. As someone who grew up with the TRS-80 Model I and later Model 4 (and who did a lot of strange mad science stuff with it up even into the early '90s), I'll miss RS -- but the RS that I have fond memories of has been gone a long time.

Let me demonstrate the problem to you, I have two tabs open on my browser

Radioshack.com 10 foot HDMI cable $29.99 "marked down" to $15.99 plus sales tax

amazon.com 3 meter HDMI cable $7.49 plus... plus nothing, free prime shipping

So I can order from amazon right now and have it in two days, or wait days/hours until I have time to visit a legacy brick and mortar and pay twice as much.

So without even looking at the radioshack price, amazon will ship me a rasp pi B bare board for $37.69 prime. I'm guessing $75 at the shack. I go to radioshack.com $119.20 Reg Price $129.99 Pi starter kit. Well, thats got a case, a protoboard, some parts, a flash card, figure maybe $20 worth of stuff.

I'm just not seeing it.

I assure you that in the 80s comparing Radio Shack to a place like Jameco mail order the prices were vaguely competitive by the time you added shipping and handling and there were minimum orders. RS wasn't a bad deal decades ago, believe it or not! I'm not sure how/why they lost that. From personal experience/gossip and OPs article its not labor costs seeing as paychecks apparently haven't changed much nominally since the 80s. Maybe building rents have exploded? Bad corporate financial deals?