Leon lcb11211@swbelldotnet writes:
On 1/12/2017 5:06 AM, Ed Pawlowski wrote:
On 1/11/2017 9:47 PM, wrote:


Yes, hindsight is always 20/20. And it would be just as accurate to
say Radio Shack should be exactly where Best Buy and Dell combined are
today. In the 1970s and 1980s Radio Shack was the computer store.
Everything electronic was at Radio Shack. Radio Shack was in every
mall back then so they had presence everywhere in the country. All
the new computer buyers of the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s should
have bought from Radio Shack. But the Shack is now about gone. Why
didn't the people at Radio Shack predict the prevalence of computers
and online everything that came 30 years later? Probably the same
reason Sears did not see everyone ordering everything in the mail
(FedEx and UPS are a big part) fifty years later.


Radio Shack did predict it and figured they would be selling computers
to the world. They thought they could sell them at full retail price
while others were selling them for 30% less.

RS was a good place if you need a diode or resistor, but not for equipment.


Exactly, IIRC theiy assembled equipment was terrible.

The Tandy and Realistic brands were actually reasonably good
in quality and performance. Particularly their radio
gear. I still use three Radio Shack scanners on a daily
basis, and the oldest is about thirty years on at this point.

We have a lot of Fry's electronics superstores in the area
which still carry components and sell computers. They've
been significantly undercut by Amazon and NewEgg for computers,
so they've cut way back on computer stuff (although they still
support the build-it-yourself crowd reasonably well); they've
expanded into home appliances, but still the stores aren't
what they used to be.