Posted on 02/04/2014 12:52:54 PM PST by illiac
Edited on 02/04/2014 12:54:41 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
<;-)
Excellent! Yup, PopSci! What a shadow it is now.
When we were kids, that kind of interest and skills were so widespread. Now not so much.
I was a Radio Shack manager in the mid-80’s. I had a small store and could only justify a part-time employee. Part timers weren’t allowed to open, close or be in the store alone for more than an hour. The store was open from 9:00am to 9:00pm, Monday to Saturday.
As a manager I was expected to be in the store half an hour before opening and half an hour after closing, which meant I put in 13 hour days for a total of 78 hours. Problem was they would only pay up to 56 hours a week. I was told to “get creative” with scheduling, which basically meant I had to work off the books. All for $5 an hour (just over minimum wage at the time) and a percentage of the profit.
I took the store from 27th (of 27 stores) in the district to 17th, had large sales gains, made it profitable for the first time in 7 years and remodeled it by myself. Back then you had to be the manager of the store at the end of the fiscal year (June 30th) to get the percentage of the profit you earned. In April they transferred me to the store that was the worst in the district and told me to do it again. The girl that had run that store into the ground was given my store and my bonus. She also happened to be dating the District Manager’s son.
I will laugh and piss on Radio Shack’s grave.
I don’t think wings and rainbows are going to see them through....
Scrooge Alert: Boycott Radio Shack this Christmas
November 25, 2013
AFA is calling for a limited one-month boycott of Radio Shack over the company’s censorship of the word “Christmas.”
For years, Radio Shack has refused to use the word Christmas on its website, in television commercials, newspaper ads and in-store promotions, despite tens of thousands of consumer requests to recognize Christmas and in spite of repeated requests from AFA to do the same.
http://www.afa.net/Detail.aspx?id=2147541490
They have to cut some costs somewhere. That Super Bowl add was expensive.
If I remember correctly, and I’m getting old so I don’t remember correctly a lot, Radio Shack hit the market when CB Radios were the craze. They stocked all brands and accessories. That may have been the “radio” in Radio Shack.
Here is a site on the internet where you can look at all the old radio shack catalogs. Back when there catalogs(which they no longer publish) were like a wishlist of dreams. Back when radio shack was cool!
http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/
Sounds a lot like my niece’s bad deal.
No surprise they are going down the tubes.
>> Dx = Short wave radio - LONG distance transmitting and/or reveiving <<
A bit misleading. The term “DX” is nothing but a shorthand term for “distance.” And the DXing hobby is not just for radio, and it’s not just for shortwave.
In fact, the DXing hobby is still alive and well for TV, for medium-wave radio (AM broadcast band), for FM radio — and even for long-wave radio.
On the other hand, shortwave radio DXing certainly isn’t what it used to be, since so many international shortwave radio broadcasters have left the air over the last 20 years.
The decline of shortwave has been due both to the end of the Cold War and to the rise of the Internet.
As to the former reason, there’s no longer a need for the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and the BBC to beam the true story of the Free World to the enslaved people of Europe behind the Iron Curtain.
Moreover, thanks to the Internet, almost no matter where you live on Planet Earth, you can get non-fading and crystal clear programming from thousands of stations — whereas during the prime days of shortwave broadcasting, you were lucky to find more than a dozen reliable, listenable signals in a language you could understand.
Last but maybe not least, for up-to-date info on FM radio DXing and TV DXing, check out this site:
“I have a place in fullerton Ford Radio that has lots of stuff”
I’m fortunate to own a HUGE lab stock with tens of thousands of components. Diodes, transistors, FETs, ICs, resistors, capacitors, connectors etc... Bought it all on the cheap for $100 when a company went out of business. Probably would cost $15K if you ordered it on the internet. And probably double that in shipping unless you ordered it in a batch.
Very cool
I know Bill Moyer real well. He is the only person I know that has every RCA part in his memory. I bought parts in Sunbury at least twice a week back in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
“Very cool”
It is... I supply my son out of it to (he’s into robots and Quads) along with my grand kids.
The big appeal for Radio Shack was for “do it yourselfers”. When high schools still had electronics clubs, it created lots of customers for them.
The way they could have kept up with this was to move into educating their customers. There are tons of DIY electronics books out there. Imagine if they had just a single computer and printer. They choose from a list of maybe 1000 projects they could build at home, and get a printout of all the parts they need and how to assemble them.
Instead of getting the parts themselves, they could get a kit delivered to that branch of RS. The whole kit would have a set price. They could build themselves their own computer, which you could actually do back in the 1980s.
There was a Lafayette store on the corner where I grew up. I still have some of their branded cassette tapes. I had a big clunky “portable” radio from them in the early 1970s.
A good part of the problem is that Radio Shack started out for hobby types, the build it themselves and fix it themselves. But now, computers are so complex, one does not replace parts, but rather entire boards.
At my company, we had a tech dept who used to fix our computers. Now we just contract it all out via extended warranties.
There are now far fewer radio/pc hobby types around.
Other than the gamers who mostly just do plug&play.
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