Radio Shack Disappearing

[scotland171]

The internet age is a wonderful age, but every new beginning is some other beginning's end.  Gone are places like KB Toys, Ames, Funcoland, Woolworth, and others.

When you think of Radio Shack, that "The 80s called, and wants their store back" place, maybe you don't think of video games.  That was one of their things over the years - besides CB radios, and hi-fi component stereo systems and a place to buy your own phone.  Oh, not buy a cell phone, I mean buy a rotary land-line phone because people used to just rent them from ... forget it, look it up under 'Ma Bell' someday.

Anyway, once apon a time computers and video games were for hobbyists who went to radio shack.  Then they had the Tandy's TRS-80, and families went to the mall to try one out.  In later years, if you wanted to upgrade your desoldering kit, or some contact cleaner to clean up some junked up Genesis you got at the yard sale, that was the place. 

Yet, they are bleeding money, and may not survive  With them, we retro gamers should take heed.  As we become just a niche market, the facilities that serve our needs may also dwindle in number.   There will always be places to buy the new, but where are you going to go for the parts to put composite out on your 2600?

[FinalLapTwinkie1]

Sad sign of the times. The prices were high the last time I was in one. Bought an Xbox controller from one years ago. That thing was junk. So have we failed Radio Shack in not buying or has Radio Shack failed us with sub-par items over the years. As kids, I remember calling the TRS-80 the Trash 80 and that was when they were new. We knew nothing of the internet but understood that Apple, Atari and Commodore made better computers then Tandy.

So sad but not surprising.

[darkrage61]

I definitely have fond memories of KB Toys and Funcoland, as well as Circuit City, Blockbuster, Hollywood Video and Borders.

Haven't been to Radio Shack that often, I never knew they sold video games, but i'm sorry to hear that they might not last.

[Rev1]

I have never gone to Radio Shack... Literally ever... Not once in my life and I have seen a lot of them. I do agree with darkrage about the other stores though. I have much fonder memories of those stores.

[VideoGameCritic]

I'm really surprised Radio Shack has hung around this long!  It seems like not too long ago they were still using those metal credit card swipers that got an impression of your number.  Also, I hated how they always asked for your personal info (address) when you were just trying to buy a damn wire.

Still, it does come in handy on occasion.  Just last week I bought a coax switch box there to use with my new TV.  Not exactly cheap but there's something to be said about being able to get something right away.

[HardcoreSadism1]

I still think Radioshack is a place to go for hobbyists, oh well it's still about relevancy, in this case they held their own.

[Atarifever1]

My first and second computers were Tandy computers (a Coco and a Tandy 1000), and both were old and out of date by the time I got them.  I certainly was too financially limited to mind.  There was recently a book released on the TRS 80 Coco:
http://www.amazon.com/CoCo-Colorful-History-Underdog-Computer/dp/1466592478


Our Radio Shack in Marystown was inside a local hardware store (Home Hardware).  It was the reason I'd get excited if my parents wanted to go to Home Hardware.  One of my strongest memories of any shopping we did back then was the TG-16 display they had there.  They had Keith Courage in it and I thought it was just the most advanced, amazing thing I ever saw.  They also used to have computer demos there, and I remember one for an early roller coaster construction set of some kind.  They always used to have the best demos. 

Now all those places have become "The Source" stores, and "The Source" sucks.  The prices of radio shack, with little of the hobbiest supplies, and none of the nostalgia.

I think the problem for them is that the hobbyist store has little place today.  No one has real hobbies anymore.  Very few kids are trying to learn soldering, or electronics, or are building their own computer.  Add to that that their main items (electronics) are most often the victims of "showrooming" anyway, and there's little left they can do. 

I disagree with scotland17 on one point though: I'm not sure the internet age is a wonderful age.  I think we're slowly losing a lot of things that are important, and we are gaining very little back.  I like it here fine, but I'd give these boards up if that would reset technology to the level from the 70s or 80s worldwide. 

Thinking about it right now, I think I may give technology from the internet era up for the rest of Lent.  Yeah, that's a pretty good idea.  Later guys.  See you April 17th.

[velcrozombie1]

@Atarifever

Moving technology back 30 or 40 years only sounds good until you stop
to consider the strides we've made in subjects like medical technology
and artificial intelligence.

I don't fully understand your comment on "losing a lot of things...and
gaining very little back"; maybe you could elaborate?

If anything, isn't the internet a massive boon to people who still persue
hobbies? You can easily contact and connect with people sharing the
same interests from all over the world to share knowledge. You can
find a ton of technical information on any subject that would be out of
your reach in decades past, especially if you (like me) grew up in a town
of a few thousand people. You can order almost anything you could possibly
need from anywhere in the world without having to worry if your local hardware
store or Radio Shack may or may not have it. You can share your works through
pictures, videos or audio recordings with literally billions of people.

[ZetaX1]

@Velcrozombie

I can't speak for Atarifever, and it's sort of hard to explain, but today's technology can be  too convenient and too impersonal.  Some examples...

20, 30 years ago, if you had a computer and wanted to do anything "cool" with it, you pretty much had to learn whatever flavor of DOS it used.  You probably learned some BASIC programming, wrote some little programs that made random noises and drew geometric shapes, maybe saved some addresses or recipes to a cassette or floppy.  Computers didn't do as much (or as well) as today, but when they did do something neat or worthwhile, it was amazing.  It wasn't convenient (did you really want to wait 5 minutes to load a recipe off of a cassette tape?) but it seemed impressive.  It felt like...the future.

20, 30 years ago, if you wanted to learn about the newest video games or computer news, you waited for the latest edition of "Electronic Games" or "Antic" (or whatever) to come out.  If you had a subscription, you had a good idea what week (maybe even day) of the month you could expect to find it waiting for you in the mailbox.  And you'd read the dumb thing front to back, multiple times, until more news came...a month later.  You'd share information with your friends at school...in person.  It wasn't convenient, but today how often do you get excited to go on the internet and read stuff on IGN?

Final example.  I like music.  I've got quite a few CDs, but I have started buying MP3s from Amazon.  They're often cheaper, I can buy just the songs I like, they have a huge selection, and they're convenient as hell.  Plus I'm old, my ears are shot, and I can't tell that MP3s sound like crap compared to CDs...but I digress.  My son, in an anachronistic turn, decided he wanted to get into vinyl records.  So a month or so ago, we trundle up the road to one of the few "real" record stores I know of.  It wasn't overly convenient to get there, you couldn't preview any of the music on the albums, and apparently the vinyl mines are running low (prices have gone up!), but you know what?  It was fun to go to a record store.  You flip through records, seeing stuff you haven't thought of in years.  Seeing stuff you've never heard of.  Funky album art.  Things you wouldn't find on Amazon, unless you knew what you were looking for.  They had some best sellers in one area, but you weren't funneled into a listing of the top 100.  It was all right there, in front of you, you just had to poke around and see what there was.

I guess it's all perception.  20 or 30 years ago it was all new.  It was the leading edge of the "future", what we take for granted now as the "present".  We've become so blasé and cynical when it comes to tech...we don't wonder what the future will bring, we just hope someone doesn't eff it up.  We've lost a lot of the sense of wonder we once had.  We've lost a lot of the personal connection we have with people and places and things.

I've had a love-hate relationship with technology over the years.  I love what it can do, the potential that exists, the ways it can simplify menial tasks and improve lives.  I tend to dislike what people do with it, however.  You can only make the world so "efficient", so "optimized", before people start getting pushed aside.  People that like going to physical places like Radio Shack are getting pushed aside...

Sorry, got all philosophical there...carry on!

[darkrage61]

I personally think the internet is an amazing age and I believe we've gained way more then we've lost. I'm sure there's plenty of online sites out there that cater to hobbyists.

There's absolutely no way in hell I could possibly live without the internet, i'm just dependent on it for too many things(online banking, doing research for my college courses, organizing petitions, watching TV shows on Netflix, Hulu, Youtube and Amazon Instant Video, buying games off Amazon, Ebay, Steam, Gamersgate, GOG, etc).

I never bothered giving anything up for Lent(I never really got into 
Christianity the way the rest of my family did) and I don't plan to start now.

For me there's no such thing as "too convenient". Not everyone likes to build their own computer and i'm one of those people, I'd rather just pay someone else to do it as i'm simply not smart enough to do that sort of thing on my own. 

I get excited quite a bit to read about new games online(though I will IGN's games reviews are usually terrible)

I don't get how people say MP3's sound like "crap", i've bought stuff on Amazon and iTunes and I have a few CDs, and when doing a side-by-side comparison between a digitally downloaded song and a song off a CD, I honestly cannot for the life of me tell the difference between the two, they sound almost exactly the same to me. 

I don't think we've "lost" any sense of wonder or anything like that, it seems like every day I read about some new tech innovation that blows my mind, i'm more excited then ever for what the future holds.

With all that said though, I still do definitely enjoy renting movies from the video store, I was very sad when Hollywood Video and Blockbuster went away, fortunately I still have Family Video and my local library to fill the void.