18 Replies to “Honey, I Finished The Internet”

  1. Always thought “The Customer Is Always Right” was BS slogan!
    But espouse the sentiment at your peril… (for future employment anyway). Funny tho..

  2. Radio Shack did itself in beginning about 20 years ago. It started hiring part-time high school kids because they were cheaper. The ones I dealt with often had no idea about their store’s inventory and didn’t answer my questions properly. Even if those who didn’t know didn’t have the sense to get assistance from someone who did.
    Radio Shack’s demise was mourned widely by hobbyists. But we mourned the Radio Shack that used to be, a place where one could buy all sorts of electronic components for whatever repairs or projects we worked on and, if one couldn’t find what one was looking for, the staff could locate it or come up with a reasonable substitute.
    We didn’t mourn what that outfit had become. By the time it went belly up, most of us no longer cared.
    There are lots of places where one can still buy parts, but most of the ones I know of are on-line, such as Mouser or Digi-Key. I’m not pleased about that, though, because I prefer to look at what I’m buying. I hate having to ship back something that I bought because it won’t fit or is the wrong capacity.
    Sadly, places where one can actually look at such merchandise in person are becoming rare.

  3. A perfect example of a company run by MBA graduates.
    Doing all the “right” things, but still failing because they just fail to realize that its customers want what they want, not what the company insists that they want.
    Refusing to sell things with a smaller margin, unable to grasp that a small margin is better than a shop full of high margin garbage that no-one will buy.
    What they were 30 years ago will be missed.
    They died then. No-one will miss the empty shell that has been in place since.

  4. While I’m at it, Radio Shack’s successor here in Canada, The Source, is even worse. It’s become nothing more than a boutique which sells phones, flat-screen TVs, and batteries.

  5. I loved Radio Shack products made in Japan and Taiwan, but then they began sourcing China, and that stuff was flimsy. Further, they always wanted your ‘phone number and zip code – uncomfortably nosy. I think Philip is right; the alligator-shoe boys just didn’t get it.
    Sure wish I could replace my Radio Shack wireless indoor / outdoor thermometer. After thirty years the outside sensor finally packed it in. I keep the indoor unit on my desk for its now funky aesthetic, and it still reports the temp.

  6. Sayal, active surplus, and a number of other places still have stores where you can buy components off the shelf if you know where to look.

  7. … you forgot r/c toys and battery plans that pimple faced jerkoffs decline to honor if they don’t feel like it.

  8. Active Electronics used to have an outlet here in Edmonton going back to at least the late 1980s. It closed 2 years ago, so I need to go on-line if I want to buy components from them.
    That leaves only two places here in the city that I’m aware of where I might be able to get parts, neither of which is open on Saturdays.

  10. I only buy batteries at The Source if I can’t get them anywhere else, like the coin cells my watch uses (which don’t last all that long, BTW).
    A while back, I was looking for rechargeable batteries. I compared their price at The Source with what another outfit in my end of the city charged. I bought them at the second place and got them for 20% less.

  11. Some of the Radio Shack labelled stuff was pretty good. I have an analog multimeter which I bought in the early 1980s. During that time, it only needed a minor repair because I accidentally fried an internal resistor or something.

  12. I believe that Radio Shack was doomed when the transistor was invented, launching a never ending miniaturization of what used to be “serviceable” electronics. Now, everything is disposable, and nothing is serviceable. All those little electronic odds and ends that Radio Shack used to sell, gave way to off-brand RC Cars and “Beats” headphones. In short, there was rarely a reason for me to visit my local RadioShack for things I could purchase at MONOPRICE for a fraction of retail. And when I DID go, the HS kid behind the counter had never heard of a Capacitor, Resistor, or flux. And don’t bother asking for a potentiometer. Instead it was … “hey look at this hat with a built-in cooling fan for those hot summer days”. …

  13. It was about 20 years ago that the 5 stores near me mysteriously lost their experienced managers who were replaced by gormless youths.
    As the dwindling stock of actual electronics parts was first relegated to a back corner of each store, and then a single cabinet of drawers in the back corner, I generally knew exactly where I was going.
    I found in each store that a pair of gormless youths were determined to block me from getting there until I answered their “what are you looking for” and “can’t I interest you in X” questions (where X was something like a phone contract, toy, bluetooth accessory, etc.).
    My responses always garnered blank looks or the assertion that they didn’t have such a thing, to which I was always able to reply “I looked it up on your online stock system, and it says you have three” while I attempted an end run around displays to get to my goal, all the while asserting that I was happy with my phone plan and did not need any remote control toys. Occasionally another hapless customer happened to be in a spot where the store drone could not block my path without knocking them over, so I was able to get to the parts cabinet quickly.
    Since my work often takes me to west podunk to work in places with electricaly powered equipment that should be working but no one has bothered to mention is not working, I’m often in immediate need of a few components that are “close enough” –– and got to know what I could reliably find in Radio Shack and auto-parts stores. Generally by the fifth time an employee saw me they had worked out that it would be a quick and pleasant transaction if they stayed out of my way and were ready at the register for me to pay for my overpriced 20%-tolerance component and GTFO of the store. That was generally because I had already told them so in my 4 previous visits, which tended to last roughly the length of the time that they hassled me with questions and physically impeded my access to the electronics cabinet, plus the time it took to pay.
    Lately, they have disabled their online stock system, so if one needs 5 diodes it may require trips to 3 stores, as the first two stores will invariably have one or two, while the last store you visit has 20. I really think that this change is in response to their workers complaining that customers such as me knew more about their stock and stock levels than they did in store.

  14. I believe that Radio Shack was doomed when the transistor was invented, launching a never ending miniaturization of what used to be “serviceable” electronics.
    There was always going to be a market for discrete components and commonly-used integrated circuits as hobbyists, such as hams, were always building or repairing something. But doing something with one’s hands and a set of tools largely fell out of fashion as the Internet and cell phones became popular.
    Radio Shack decided that those of us who were builders and tinkerers, who used to be a mainstay of the company’s business, were no longer worth bothering about. Instead, like many other retailers, it catered largely to the younger generation, thereby alienating those customers who used to spend money there in the past.

  15. It was about 20 years ago that the 5 stores near me mysteriously lost their experienced managers who were replaced by gormless youths.
    That’s pretty much what happened here in Edmonton. I bought my stereo, my last TV, and my first DVD player at RS more than 15 years ago. Back then, the managers were older and were able to answer my questions. By about 2005, they were replaced by clueless high school kids.
    Your experiences in looking for parts were similar to mine. The stock slowly dwindled from several racks of all sorts of items such as coax cable to knobs and switches to, maybe, one or two. When The Source took over RS here in Canada, that eventually became, maybe, half an aisle’s worth of components.
    Ask any of the staff about, say, a solderless BNC connector, and all I got was blank looks. None of them seemed to know what any of those terms meant, let alone what one of those items actually was.
    About a dozen years ago, Radio Shack tried a comeback here in Canada. I was looking for a set of M-type connectors as I wanted to make a coax cable for my ham station. The selection at the store I went to was lousy and the staff as clueless as before. Those RS outlets soon disappeared.

  17. my love-hate relationship with radio shack consisted of appreciating the reliability of their desktop systems whilst cringing like root canal work at the exorbitant pricing. later when my tech skills got really good, I noted they were pioneers in dropping the 9th parity bit from their RAM chips. (nickel and dime time!!) and then started looking elsewhere and cautioning acquaintances, students, etc AWAY from their products because of serious compatibility issues, like their trick of splitting the RGB signal into 3 wires and then recombining it inside *their* grossly expensive monitor. the day I priced an EGA monitor ‘on sale’ more than the better and cheaper VGA at a competitor was the day I gave up entirely.
    radio shack sacrificed customer loyalty and the vital repeat business by focusing on the quarterly stock price instead. or whatever.
    it’s a story repeated often. remember the claim about how superior Betamax was? the one the mfg REFUSED to license to other manufacturers in order to ‘corner the market’?
    remember WANG printers? the ones that came with absolutely NO technical info and you had to hire one if *their* technicians to show up and install it?
    etc etc.

  18. my love-hate relationship with radio shack consisted of appreciating the reliability of their desktop systems whilst cringing like root canal work at the exorbitant pricing. later when my tech skills got really good, I noted they were pioneers in dropping the 9th parity bit from their RAM chips. (nickel and dime time!!) and then started looking elsewhere and cautioning acquaintances, students, etc AWAY from their products because of serious compatibility issues, like their trick of splitting the RGB signal into 3 wires and then recombining it inside *their* grossly expensive monitor. the day I priced an EGA monitor ‘on sale’ more than the better and cheaper VGA at a competitor was the day I gave up entirely.
    radio shack sacrificed customer loyalty and the vital repeat business by focusing on the quarterly stock price instead. or whatever.
    it’s a story repeated often. remember the claim about how superior Betamax was? the one the mfg REFUSED to license to other manufacturers in order to ‘corner the market’?
    remember WANG printers? the ones that came with absolutely NO technical info and you had to hire one if *their* technicians to show up and install it?
    etc etc.

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