For me Radio Shack was cool.
Growing up in the 1960’s I used to go with my father to Radio Shack to buy tubes for the TV (back when TVs could be repaired). It was always a magical place to go, filled with wires and electronic parts and meters and tube testers! And really good electronics.
As soon as we would go into the store I would immediately head for the tube tester. It had knobs and sockets and meters! Instant Captain Astro!
As I grew into my teens I knew that if I needed a breadboard or a resistor or transistor it would be there.
My first electronics project came from a Radio Shack kit, a little synthesizer with 8 push buttons to control the sound. It was my little red and clear plastic noise maker. And it taught me the FUNdimentals of how circuits worked.
Its parent company, Tandy also had an equally cool chain of stores devoted to crafts. It was there that I could find liquid rubber for molds and 2 part acrylic for casting parts. I made my first mass produced Phaser from Star Trek using their resources. They paid for me going to Science Fiction conventions.
When I needed leather boots for cos-play, the Tandy Craft store had the precut kits and tools to work leather.
Radio Shack itself during this time it was considered a mid to high end electronics store. They rented space from Macy’s to have their presence there next to the electronics department. Further, the Shack was staffed by people who KNEW what they were talking about. Compared to what’s out there now, most salesmen at current electronic stores couldn’t get a job due to lack of knowledge.
Radio Shack was also know for rebranding other electronic manufactures goods under their name. For example their headphones at the time were really made by Koss and sold much cheaper.
Tandy was a computer power house during this time (the 80’s through early 90’s). Their TSR line of computer brought the affordable business computing to SOHOs. The TRS-80 ran UNIX and was the cheapest solution to multi workstation environments. (as I turn around and look at one of my technical bookcases, I still have a UNIX manual from Tandy Learning Solutions sitting there).
Tandy Radio Shack was a serious player in the computer industry at this point. You could buy a system that ran UNIX or MS-DOS. It was one of the first stores to carried Windows 286 or 386. They had their own design and manufacturing facility in Fort Worth, TX.
People would tease each other when someone bought a COCO (Tandy Color Computer). But the reality was that it foreshadowed so much of where the industry went.
In 1997 Tandy Radio Shack bought in one the IBM Micro Channel architecture bus. It join the illustrious company of Apricot, Dell, Research Machines and Olivetti. These were major players during that time. They produced high powered machines for business.
During the 90’s after working for IBM for 10 years I took a buyout and eventually worked for Tandy Radio Shack Computer stores as a “real system engineer”. The computing business was so good then that Tandy had created a separate chain of stores just to sell and service computers and networks. The stores were the Computer Centers and the Widget shops.
And they used their technology. In the manager’s office at every store was a server with an inventory program. Sometime during the night it would call home to Fort Worth and report the days sales and print out what was coming in to replace the stock to the proper levels. It would spit out what was going to be on sale the following week and let us know to push the items before the sale was going to happen.
In my store we serviced various municipalities, police departments and the NY Board of Education. We would sell software to various vertical markets from restaurants to point of sale systems for retailers.
I would go government offices to work on their networks, a lens manufacturer that used the TRS-80 as a server to dumb terminals, to police departments where I would work on a criminal data base until 6:00 AM.
It was during this time that things began to change.
My first indication was when a paycheck came to me missing 20 hours of overtime. When I questioned my manager he got pissed and said to take the equivalent time off rather than paying me what I was due.
Inventory began to drop and things that we needed to sell (printer ribbons, parts for repair) were becoming in short supply.
One day the area manager came and told us that Tandy was closing the computer stores. We were offered job at the widget shops, but selling over priced radio controlled cars and cartoon based phones were just not the same.
I was lucky. I had applied to Microsoft in Redmond for a job as an IBM mainframe expert (VM / PROFS) to work on MS-MAIL (a product that would become Exchange, years latter).
And so I parted ways with Tandy Radio Shack.
What happened to them? Did they lose their way? Did they lose relevance? Was it the internet? I don’t know.
The last time I went to a Rat-Shack it was empty. Irrelevant gadgets filled the store. They seemed to be pushing cell phones. And of course batteries.