Radio Shack: an elegy

OK, so I've been using Radio Shack since I was a kid. Sure, there are more fully stocked electronics places, but if you need a dipole switch or an LED or a DC connector or a cheap audio or video adapter on a Sunday night, where else are you gonna go? Having all that stuff from 9am-9pm, more or less 7 days a week, never more than a half mile away, has saved my gadget happy ass on more than one occasion.

So I have a kind of fondness for the old girl, with their odd mix of down market A/V products and DIY gear. They always seemed to manage to hit this middle ground between hobbyists, enthusiasts, and bargain hunters, with the occasional genre busting wildcard, ala the venerable TRS 80 or any number of head scratching audio offerings (for instance, they started putting Lineaum ribbon tweeters into cheap bookshelf speakers for no apparent reason, other than someone in the company though it was cool and got to do it). And then there was the portable CD player that had the audio press in fits of rapture, but only if you ran it off the batteries. I have no idea. But then that's the wonder of the thing.

But as far as I can make out, Radio Shack has entered a period (or has been in a period for a while) of complete cluelessness as to how to proceed. Like, falling apart before our eyes.

I don't have any figures on this, but my guess is that the Radio Shack empire was built on a post-war golden age of tinkering and the first big wave of "Hi Fi" hobbyists. That was always the main part of the mix: parts and audio gear. Ok, batteries and cheap RF junk.

I always had the feeling that the people running Radio Shack were sort of like that. Tinkerers at heart. Possibly a tad insane. So: a very eccentric product mix, with some stuff that only an engineer could love. Amazingly hit and miss managerial styles, franchise to franchise, as if, when you sign on, they give you a key to the front door and tell you to just wing it, as long as you can sell some shit. If that means piling stock in the middle of aisles and hiring spooky oddballs, so be it. Really, not another store like it, for better or worse.

But nowadays when I walk into a Radio Shack I never know what store I'm going to enter. Seems like they feel like the old, low margin "I think I'll buy a cheap RF thing and a cheap PA thing and a cheap LCD thing and some wire and see what I can make" isn't cutting it anymore, so they're moving into Sharper Image lifestyle electronics n' gifts territory.

Like, hideously overpriced, insanely over-packaged "robotics" sets. Or entire walls of their take on the little battery powered car craze of a few years ago, but with a whole line of "modding" parts for far too much money. Fucking ionizers. Fucking iPods. I'm sorry, Radio Shack cannot have iPods. It's like running into a big Sonoma Williams display at the corner liquor store. Just conceptually wrong.

And, of course, cell phones, which sometimes seem like what's keeping the doors open.

I think they've cleaned house and gotten rid of the weirdoes and are endeavoring to become some kind of proper, well lit, expensive toy store.

And I think it's a shame. The Radio Shack of my youth was always a slightly scurrilous place, patronized by people who either didn't know any better or knew perfectly well.

There are plenty of nice stores to buy nice things. Radio Shack, bravely, was a half-assed store to buy cobbled together things, in the company of the like minded. I'll miss it.

Right, that's another thing. I want a 50 foot RCA cable for $4.95. I don't care if it's shit brown and has really crappy little molded connectors and comes in a little polyethylene bag that somebody ripped open and they stapled the cardboard back on, I need to get this signal over there and I'm not going to pay $75 for the privilege.

Once, Radio Shack had my answer, but no more. Now, they want to outdo Monster in the "Just how much can we charge for dirt cheap coax with gold plating and big hex shaped lumps of plastic at the connector ends?" sweepstakes.

High definition digital pro my ass. Shit brown dirt cheap 50 foot RCA cables get the job done every time, and if they short out, as they will presently, you can use them to lash shit together.

Did you know that at one time Radio Shack sold a $50 video RF transmitter and it worked? You could run the output of a camcorder into the thing and get a perfectly usable image 100' away. Freakin' awsome.

I heart useful junk.

Yeah, but 2, 3, and 4 ain't happen every few blocks and on weekends. That's the genius of it. Somehow a completely pointless little electronics knick-knack place achieved the franchising might of McDonalds. It actually makes no sense whatsoever.

Sure, in the Bay Area we have a number of sprawling electronics emporia (although, tellingly, most of the really cool surplus places have gone away in the last 10 years).

But they're still going to be a fair ways away (unless you just happen to live next to one) and they all have shorter hours, so if I need some simple little bits on short notice, Radio Shack it is.

On a side note, did any other areas besides Berkeley have a very brief flirtation with Dick Smith electronics? My understanding was that it was sort of the Australian Radio Shack and they were dabbling with the idea of setting up shop in America.

Very cool place, sort of like the old time RS (perhaps funky Aussie DIY gusto lives on) , and with, yes, open parts bins! Heaven.

Didn't last but a few months, though...

Now you're talking! Heathkit, absolutely! Their catalogues were tech-porn before tech-porn was cool! Breadboards and blinky things, absolutely! Get you a power supply and a 555 timer IC and some caps and some LEDs and blink up a storm!

You're right, RS still has a wall full of cheap audio adapters, although I fear their days may be numbered. Already the cheap RCA to BNC video adapters have been supplanted by gold plated only, at twice the price.

On the blinky thing front, anybody see this? Instruction from random people on how to make random stuff. Ranges from the sublime to the ridiculous.

But most importantly, blinky things! With magnets! So you can toss them at ferrous surfaces and make them stick, just because it's cool. OK, they don't actually blink, but they could!

Pointless tech. Gentlemen, I submit that this is the Radio Shack life-style.

I think the idea is yesterday's tech becomes today's pipe cleaners and glitter. That way, average joes of average means can make blinky things and toss them about, willy nilly, like scribbled notes on match book covers.

Radio modules that can avail themselves of rudimentary mesh networks get to be that in 5-10 years; but for now it's too esoteric and pricey for the "ubiquity" factor.

Bergermeister,

Just say your link to the still living Heathkit! Fantastic!

And the great thing is they still have the semi-grim, "electronics ain't pretty" sense of style. Too bad, it looks like they no longer offer the "HiFi" and radio kits, though not surprising since most of what they made now exists on a chip or in trivial software.

The Heathkit museum site really took me back. Great big moving needle read-out, we hardly knew ye.....

Now? You have questions, they have batteries.

Oh yeah, I think it was some kind of "battery club" kind of thing. They kept track of your battery purchases and you got free ones every so often? Can't quite remember. Still, carrying around a "Radio Shack Battery Club" card in your wallet must count as some kind of all time nerd badge of honor.

I also remember a brief, dumbfoundingly irritating program of gathering customer data, manually, every time you bought something. Name, street address, phone number, zip code, every time.

So you would end up standing in a line wherein every person in front of you would go through this "What? Why do you need to know that?" thing, which on top of the time it took to ask the questions in the first place made all transactions proceed very, very slowly.

That, combined with the eight foot long receipt that got churned out by a dot matrix printer, no matter how trivial the purchase, gave the proceedings a slightly surreal tinge.

Irritating, but entertaining, I thought, since only a company run by insane people would do any of this, and there just aren't that many national chains run by insane people.

That's the central mystery.

I think they have managed so far on a loose coalition of wire-heads, garage bands, battery enthusiasts, and, just lately, cell phone subscribers. Maybe the odd stoner mesmerized by cheap radio control toys.

However, as they attempt to morph into an upscale electronic toy emporium, I predict they are doomed. My impression is that RS management also doesn't know how they've managed to live on and their efforts to "focus" the brand will just break it.

I fear there is just no room in this relentlessly market tested, focus grouped, PR managed business planned world for such an endearingly odd duck as the Shack.

Ah, my peoples.

I once watched an amazing altercation between a woman in a wheel chair and a Radio Shack manager.

You guessed it, crap all over the floor, blocking aisles, hell, it was hard for the able bodied to navigate the place. I can't imagine it would have passed inspection with any number of licensing bodies.

Bizarrely, the manager's contention was that the woman in the wheel chair didn't really need to get at the stuff that wasn't accessible to her and she was just trying to cause trouble, and why didn't she just get the hell out.

The woman in the wheel chair was speechless with disbelief. I actually gave her my phone number in case she needed a witness for her civil suit which I urged her to file.

I'm not a big wheel chair accessible nazi or anything, but this was ridiculous.

sniff..... Sounds like the old "Electronics Etc." in Berkeley. Everything plus random surplus weirdness. Alas, she is no more.