Originally posted by: Trj22487
Radio Shack seems to clearly be on its final legs of existance. The one in my town finally closed this year, the store only had a total of THREE employees in 2017.
Just about everyone I know my age or older seems to remember one point in their life where they were at Radio Shack just about every week.
I was going back through my old photos, I still have so many that I never posted (they generally aren't that interesting or are of stores that still are around)
Based on what I was reading yesterday, they're supposed to officially close all locations by the end of this month, 5/31/2017, in less than two weeks. This has hit me decently hard for several reasons, but not as hard as it would have had all of my local (within 200-miles) stores not closed during the first bankruptcy.
During my first "real" job (second job, but first one I really cared about), I worked across the hall from my local Radio Shack for ~4 years. Used to see those guys daily when they'd come over to buy lunch, shoot the breeze or I'd wander over in their direction to do the same. That store's the one that "saved" my first LCD TV--my Samsung had bad caps and I was going to either replace them that night or just buy a new set while everybody was running sales; Radio Shack had the parts in the drawer, totalling less than $4, saving me quite a bit over getting a new TV.
Once I got into electronics repair (and moreso once I was actually trained), they were my go-to spot for components and solder accessories. I still remember the shocked, blank look on an employee's face when I was out of town, my wife's car had blown a computer module, and after walking in, responded to the guy's innocent, well meaning "How can I help you" with a specific list of components and tools as long as my arm; he just pointed a shaky arm to the components in the back of the store while I zoomed off to get what I needed and my best friend's wife giggled and told him it was ok, I was like that.
Before that, I fondly remember stopping by every time I went to the mall. Even as a teenager, I'd wander through, alone or with friends, and check out all of the newest, neatest doodads and gizmos (super accurate scientific terms there, but Radio Shack afficianados will know what I'm talking about). Things definitely got more sugar coated as the years went by, with less and less of real interest showing up versus pre-packaged, ready to go items for the dumb masses. I remember being fascinated by all of the various electronics kits and "experiments," the bins of various sizes and strengths of ceramic magnets, the free comics meant to show kids what electronics was all about and how cool they could be. Remember the radiometers? The breadboard learning kits? The Armatron? The toys in those days, sometimes licensed, sometimes not, were equally awesome to me. They always had some sort of new handheld LCD game that was just as interesting and good as anything that Nintendo was putting out with the Game & Watch series. I also remember "Galactic Man," how much I played with him while my dad and brother shopped, and how my friends (back then) wouldn't believe that Radio Shack had "Shockwave" well before the Transformers ever did.
While the rest of the world was getting (back) into consoles, I remember the first real computer in our household (my brother's) coming from Radio Shack. A Tandy-1000, in all its glory. With my parents having plundered my fledgling college fund to buy a new washer & dryer they couldn't afford, my brother took note and spent his on a brand new computer, a 1MB memory/clock card (pushing it from 128k to 640k + a RAM drive!), a 300 baud modem and a handful of games, leaving less than a dollar in the account. My dad got kicked out of my brother's room and off of his computer pretty quickly (with Dad having the bad habit of playing games until the wee hours, keeping my brother up on school nights). However, even as adversarial as we were then, my brother always invited me in to watch, "help" (quotes appropriate for the earliest days) or play on the system. Thanks to that system (and the first of numerous copies of Pirates! we bought over the years), I learned to read a map, navigate via sun sight, and permanently recognize a large chunk of Florida, the Gulf region & Caribbean before most kids were willingly reading on their own.
Around the time I stopped working at the mall, a new manager had taken over my local store and shared with me the new (at that time) CEO's plans to turn Radio Shack back into the hobbyist destination that it had been in years past, bringing back the parts bins, de-emphasizing big, cheap, generic electronics (TVs, VCRs, even consoles around Christmas). Unfortunately, as I heard, stockholders and the company's board disagreed with that idea and held the company to its fast track to oblivion. I doubt it will happen, but I cross my fingers that some place will arise (nationally--I know places like Fry's exist which are similar, but are regional/non-national) to take the place of the Radio Shack of old.
