Maybe you were never an engineering student scrambling to get a senior project done and needing a handful of resistors/caps/ICs that you didn't have to complete a key circuit. Waiting a week for a part to be shipped is not an option, going to radio shack to go get them was the only viable choice.
It's too bad there won't be a place to get components easily and quickly anymore.
Most major cities have shops that sell parts at a fraction of the RS price. Resistors, caps and LEDs for a nickel or less, high-intensity LEDs for fifty cents, semiconductors for a couple of bucks. I know of about half a dozen such shops in Toronto, most of which are located near university or college campuses.
Agreed. I & other local DIY geeks & local professionals are fortunate that a local chain has a couple of stores on the interstate corridor carrying a full line of NTE parts, misc cables/connectors, fuses, caps, Arduino/Adafruit components, even so-called ‘3D-printing’ stuff. What they don’t have is available rather quickly without having to go cross-ref & find it myself. They’ve always been a link to licensing for Ham and have classes periodically on robotics, electronics etc where people with similar interests get together and bang ideas off each other and get help/share skills to help get projects done.
Try getting all that from Amazon (/s intended to some).
Yes, I’ve uses Mouser/Amazon & others for ‘builds’, but when you’re needing to repair something critical, the choice is wait a couple days or replace it; not a pleasant decision in many cases. Let alone when you’re repairing for for-hire, telling the customer they have to wait for a couple days for it to get here is a fast way to lose clients in many cases.
Quite frankly, their supply of small pieces and parts has been very limited for several years.
And if you went in there to get a resistor, the clerk would gaze at you with wonderment, as if you were a time traveler from a distant past...and once he figured out what a resistor looked like, he would one by one shove them in your face and say ‘is this it’.
And after you gave up and decided to walk past the RC cars to leave, the clerk would dutifully harangue you about changing cell phone plans.
Radio Shack got ‘weird’....and my ‘hit rate’ on finding things I need right away started to drop around a decade ago. The internet killed them, and they didn’t react in any way, other than switch to minimum wage teenagers to save costs. Oh, and decided to sell cell phones.
Spot on. We had to build a power supply/signal generator to use in the labs. The build of the unit was graded; had to function, clean looking solder joints, workmanship etc. One of my roomies jumped right on it and built his the 1st night, he thought he was all that when it came to electronics. The only problem was he didn’t have a firm grasp on the difference between an electrolytic capacitor and a standard cap. When he put the power to it there was a real cool pop followed by smoke. Radio Shack saved his butt, only problem was the replacement they sold was a different color and the professor new right away what happened.