Sadly, among one of many now gone, but with poor replacement (trying to find what I need online when a simple single visit could give me the answer in the past. I get my $$ worth, if not my time with sending the wrong adaptors, batteries, mislabeled electronic accessories back to Amazon, I guess)...

All the places I used to buy parts are gone now.

There used to be a Mallory Capacitor Company factory here in town, in a wonderful old Art Deco building. It's gone too.

What happened to RS is sort of what happened to Bausch & Lomb -- once a major player in all manner of optics, they sold all their glass factories and formulas and specialized in (high profit margin) contact lenses. Now they only make contact lens solutions, because that's where the profit margins are. B&L helped the US Army in WWI by developing quality optical glass for binoculars when it became impossible to get from European makers. A lot of history forgotten now.

The old Mallory building was on the corner at Bob Wallace and the Parkway for many years.

Tubes,Transistors,all kinds of spare parts.
Ham & CB Radio gear. Stereo/HiFi gear.aTheir own & name brand. Reel to Reel tape recorders. Their own line of electric guitars & amplifiers & a great selection of Guitar & Bass speakers(JBL,Jensen,Goodman of England & more). And probably the largest selection of microphones.
I miss them both but strongly preferred Lafayette!

without even knowing its correct name, and get one. To search for something online, you have to have the exact correct name to order it, or you waste days waiting for the wrong part to show up, then more days on an alternative.

do an image search. the struggle is real.

left and started the playback chain of hifi stores. they had a good selection of parts and cables.
didnt last long. started in 69, gone by 82.

1 of my 1st jobs. worked w the ceo’s son. we had an manager that was robbing us blind. took them forever to catch on. rt in front of the boss’s son.

They spent 10 minutes trying to get me on a cellphone plan, then wanted to charge me $27.95 for a modular cord system because, they said, it was impossible to buy just the cord for a radio like that.

The radio cost $24.95 new.


Whatever the Shack might have been In its heyday, it was greatly diminished by the time it folded.

... that it is a cancer that, sooner or later, kills its host.
It also pays to remember that Mussolini preferred to call his form of government, "Corporatism". The mindset of today's fascists is the same as it was in Il Duce's day; they just have better tailors.

Was a junior in high school. My Summer job savings bought the two Heath kits plus a pair of KLH speakers, a Garrard turntable and 5 record albums. Bought the speakers and turntable at Pacific stereo in Berkeley.

Good times.

... and checking the Sunday SF Chron, to see what would on sale there, the stacks of turntables on the sales floor, etc...

Who financed bezos?

Society will be very helpless in 30 years.
In 30 years of home ownership, other than a new HVAC install I've not had a repairman enter my home. I say that with a complete sense of pride.

and torn jeans to fixing lamps, old electric small appliances and and power tools.

Run by volunteers.

There's even a non-profit not far from me that fixes computers, refurbishes electronics for sale or giving to poor people and more.

This was years before computers had hard drives but I was impressed.

His store actually topped $1 mil one year because he knew what his customers in the region needed; he talked to the local schools and base techs to bag up the bits and pieces repair components they were always running out of. He'd always order lots of a lot of TV and TV hookup (DVD players and gaming console) adapters, metal detectors, electric telescopes, remote sensors and cameras, Ham Radio sets, receivers, scanners, cable, RC kits...
Stuff people couldn't get at Walmart or the local hardware store.
And batteries, lots of batteries and battery chargers.
He saw the writing on the wall in the late 90's corporate started selling computer internet and cell phone services - Sprint, Version, MSN, AOL - for the residuals.
The store didn't get anything, except the salesperson got a $20 commission for the contract. The transaction revenue, including the item package covered under the service contract (the phone or the computer) went to corporate, not the store, making it look as if the store was losing money.

The focus on getting a salesperson to spend time selling a 2 -4 year contract for "a penny cell phone" or "a $150 Windows computer and printer bundle" that provided residual revenue to corporate, instead of selling 5 to 10 other items - RC cars, home theater cables, cartons of batteries, a couple radio repair kits and an HF amplifier was killing smaller franchised stores, and slowly strangling the corporate stores.

It was a learning tool because it basically had no programs. You could buy books with programs which you had to type into the computer. My son became a computer whiz because of this computer.

Some in Montana. I was going to them to buy cell phones and pay my cellphone minutes and other electronics, they are the only stores in those little towns where you can buy electronics, still.

It's a lesson many need to learn.

Great memories!

I worked through college and after, until I moved to my "career job." (In the IT field)

I was there through the transition to sales-driven employees. The things they did to push employees to sell more more more was insane. They paid us like we were waiters, below minimum with commission (supposed to) make up the difference. But the commission was so low, it rarely did. Plus, during the 4th quarter (xmas season) they cut commission in half because "you sell more then, because of xmas shopping."

Everything had a commission, even those $0.50 fuses!

It was insane.

But, there were occasional benefits. I became top salesperson in my region one quarter because a customer came in who was opening a new store in the shopping center where we were located and bought an entire POS system from me, and a security system, and everything else his store would need (phones, stereo system, etc). That won me a spot on the annual top performers cruise that RS had every year.

Then a week after the cruise I was fired because on night near closing, when I was alone in the store (a no-no according to policy, but my then-manager was a dick.) a group of kids came in and part of them kept me busy on on side while the rest stole a bunch of scanners on the other side of the store.

Before most people had ever heard of LED therapy he came home from work one day with some light emitting diodes. A doctor had been in the store to buy some to make LED therapy devices. He told my son about it. So my son built some small ones for family members. The devices were amazing and helped me with a neck issue I had suffered with for months when nothing else I tried worked. It helped my mom with a shoulder injury that had prevented her from raising her arm to even reach into the kitchen cupboards. Ahhh the good old days of RadioShack.

But Radio Shack did themselves no favours with that silly Tandy PC with its hard-wired OS. It was like a toy compared even to Wang. 😅. Also the employees were rude to women and girl builders. I held my nose dealing with the dopes who worked there because they DID have all the good stuff. Also their battery club!

plus a few hundred Globe Patrol radio kits.

There’s something that just feels better about walking around a store and finding what you need, or, something good enough. I wasn’t old enough to have appreciated RadioShack or electronics stores. Microcenter is the last store like it, and, I love that place. I wish one was closer.

I can’t stand Amazon. I can’t stand Walmart either, but, will probably even miss that one day, because, at least it isn’t an online slop factory of subpar, barely functional merchandise.

Online isn’t always better. It’s faster and cheaper, and more convenient, and, that always wins sadly. I want to exist in a society and go shopping amongst other people, but, society seems to be trending more and more towards turning everyone into hermits.

It’s sad. I know they weren’t always convenient, but, 90s stores will always be nostalgic to me.

I used to order everything by mail and wait a week or two to get it. If I discovered at the last minute I'd left something out of my order I'd ride my bike to the local Radio Shack to get it. But a single transistor there, for example, might cost five or ten times what a mail order transistor did.

It was not a place where I could get any questions about electronics answered. It seemed to me the employees hardly knew anything about electronics or computers and it irked me when they tried to "help."

When I got my drivers license I could drive to the city where there were several much larger electronics shops I could choose from, some with knowledgeable staff and interesting customers -- lot's of retired guys who were happy to talk about their radio and electronics hobbies. One shop had a stack of old radio and electronics magazines they sold for ten cents each. Sometimes they'd just give them to me.

My grandpa was a good source of information too but he wasn't much interested in transistors or integrated circuits. He was still building stuff with vacuum tubes. Foolish youth that I was, I assumed much of his knowledge was obsolete. It wasn't until I was taking physics in college that I realized my grandfather knew all that stuff and that I'd been an idiot. It didn't matter that he preferred vacuum tubes to transistors or slide rules to calculators.