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Growing up in the 1970s, it seemed like no strip mall or indoor mall was complete without a Radio Shack. Walking into one as a 14-year-old boy was like walking into a candy store. All those transistor radios, the shortwave sets, the "build-it-yourself" electronic sets, cassette recorders, walkie-talkies, breadboards and those tiny plastic drawers crammed with electronic components of all kinds: resisters, capacitors, diodes, transistors, etc. I used to spend hours thumbing through their extensive catalogs and wishing I had money to burn.

During the 1980s, they started to lose their way. I think it started when they started requiring your name and mailing address everytime you bought something - even if it was just batteries. They would make you write it out on those carbon paper forms and then they would tear off the pink and yellow copies and file them who knows where and hand you back the top white copy.

Turns out they were putting your information on lists and then selling those lists to other companies. Not cool.

Still they had a great business going. They were among the first of the big chains to sell personal computers, VCR players, dual cassette decks (so you could dub), many of the products under their "Realistic" brand, which used to be known for being a quality product.

But as technology raced on, they had difficulty keeping up. Big-box electronic retailer upstarts like Circuit City and CompUSA ate their lunch - though even those chains eventually went under because they didn't move fast enough.

I think Radio Shack hung on so long because they were just so massive. I think they had 5,000 stores in the U.S. alone at one point.

Over the past 10-15 years, it's just been so sad to walk into one. Hardly anybody was ever in there and the 19-year-old kids at the counter were so desperate for you to buy something because that's how they made most of their money. Then the company decided to make cell phones their main business. Now the employees were pressured to sell "x" number of cell phone contracts a month in order to make their bonus. But towards the end, people would walk in there, have them give demos on every single one, and then walk out of the store to go buy the phone they wanted somewhere else. A sad ending to what used to be an iconic electronics retailer.