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RADIO SHACK

Forget Shadio Rack....I'm jonesin for Fry's.

I only got to visit the Fry's in Phoenix one time, and I could have spent hours there, but I had to get back to Tucson. Is it still filled with racks and racks of parts?
 
awsherrill said:
Forget Shadio Rack....I'm jonesin for Fry's.

I only got to visit the Fry's in Phoenix one time, and I could have spent hours there, but I had to get back to Tucson. Is it still filled with racks and racks of parts?
Click to expand...

Yeah. Your first two or three visits to Fry's are like visiting with Alice in Wonderland. I live about 20 miles from one, and I am regularly in the neighborhood for other reasons, so I make regular visits to Frys. Yes they have TONS and TONS of stuff.... but it doesn't take long to realize that it can be Radio Shack on steroids... depending on what you are looking for.

Their computers do the same thing for them the logistics computers at The Shack do. If it ain't sellin.... they ain't stocking! Those of use who remember the good old days at the Shack tend to be folks to build things, modify things, repair things. Very few people do that anymore. Who repairs a cell phone.... an mp3 player.... a cordless phone.... just throw them away and buy a new one. I guess we are members of a dying breed.

I recently had need to install a remote keyboard, mouse and monitor about 80 feet from my computer. There are times when I want to sit in the Man Cave where I can reach over and pat the computer on the head and feed it a CD to rip or burn, and their are times when I want to be downstairs in the "Queen's Quarters" with my ailing wife. You cannot believe how many stores I have visited rounding up the components for that project. I am still needing some decorative wall plates to make it neat and tidy downstairs. Try to buy at retail a nice white wallplate with a VGA connector, a USB connector and an audio connector. Mail-order... here I come.
 
The real problem is there isn't enough money in selling electronic parts on a local basis to make a living, much less pay stock holders. I am no fan of "The Shack," but they don't stock a lot of parts for the very same reason the mom & pop electronic stores went out of business. It is much easier to buy parts on the Internet and have them delivered to your doorstep in a couple of days. That's the age we live in.
 
Chuck said:
The real problem is there isn't enough money in selling electronic parts on a local basis to make a living, much less pay stock holders. I am no fan of "The Shack," but they don't stock a lot of parts for the very same reason the mom & pop electronic stores went out of business. It is much easier to buy parts on the Internet and have them delivered to your doorstep in a couple of days. That's the age we live in.
Click to expand...

True. I'm very lucky that there is an independant store in my town that kicks the a$$ of both Fry's and Radio Shack in inventory AND prices. It sells to all the radio and TV stations as well local government. Hopefully, it will last.
 
ChiefOperator said:
I'm very lucky that there is an independant store in my town that kicks the a$$ of both Fry's and Radio Shack in inventory AND prices. It sells to all the radio and TV stations as well local government. Hopefully, it will last.
Click to expand...

Where I'm living in Germany they have Conrad's. It's huge like a Fry's, with electronic parts, computers, and electronic appliances of all kinds, but also with a well-stocked model railroad (and airplane) dept.

For me, that's one-stop shopping. ;-)

Kind Regards,
David
 
Loved Dick Smiths the year they were in Indy.

Parts are no longer sold locally for the same reason amateur radio is dead. Easier to buy than build. Lack of motivation and the spirit of building something fails to exist.

Frys is in Indy. Don't expect this to last a lot longer. First few years they were a dream. Sales help is just that, sales help. They get commission on sales at their register. The things that aren't rung up at a sales counter they don't get paid to help with.

Last trip I spent 3 hours in the store. Plenty of people at the computer parts area, they were talking rather than helping. Same in computer sales. We were looking for a video card. A stockboy finally helped us as the salespeople 10 feet away didn't want to help because they were didn't get commission on the sale.

If there is a sale they have 2 of them. Don't trust the ads. If I know where what I want is, I go. I can't ever expect to get sales help unless I stand next to a high end computer system waving cash. The once really nice facility is looking like a surplus sales warehouse in many areas. The many changes in the way the employees are paid has the employees only doing the least they can o and still get paid. Whomever designed the concept needs to re-evaluate the mess.
 
Chuck said:
The real problem is there isn't enough money in selling electronic parts on a local basis to make a living, much less pay stock holders. I am no fan of "The Shack," but they don't stock a lot of parts for the very same reason the mom & pop electronic stores went out of business. It is much easier to buy parts on the Internet and have them delivered to your doorstep in a couple of days. That's the age we live in.
Click to expand...

For those of us with some experience, those of us with some training, ordering some items from the internet works. But sometimes I decide to venture into some area I have never explored before. And whatever I am doing, I have this urge to.... as we once said about one of the owners where I worked.... "he needs to go out to a construction site, walk around, bend over and pick up a handful of dirt, squeeze it and sift it in his hand, and then he is ready to make a decision." (If you grew up on a farm, that sentence may be more understandable.)

How do beginners just trying to do their first or second d-i-y project know what to order. Yes, I understand the reality that some businesses cannot be viable today that we once took for granted. I have been trying to do some on-line purchases lately, and I am deeply disappointed with the lack of details, the lack of illustrations found on the web pages of so many on-line stores. If I tried to run a store on main street that was as helpful as some of the on-line stores, I would surely go broke in a hurry.

On my recent project to mount a small flat-screen monitor, a keyboard and a mouse down in the carefully decorated and color co-ordinated "Queen's Lair" part of my house, I had to buy some items I had never purchased before... little converters to go on either end of a lengthy run of CAT5 which turned it into a working extension cord for USB to drive the mouse and keyboard. I needed to see the little rascals and know that they would meet the "decor police" codes. Fortunately, I rolled the dice on a bubble-packed items at Fry's that worked..... barely! I had to go through two or three USB splitters on the keyboard/mouse end before I found one that was compatible.
 
Back in the late 90s, Radio Shack experimented with a full-line electronics supply concept called TechAmerica. It was GREAT! A store the size of a supermarket carried everything an electronics hobbyist, audio/video engineer, or researcher could ever want. Components, tools, test gear, wire and cable, connectors, heat shrink tubing -- and they carried the REAL STUFF. Xcelite tools, Weller soldering gear, Fluke meters, Tek and B&K scopes.

It started as a mail order business, but they eventually built a few stores. One, in the Atlanta area, was in Doraville right next door to the Buford Highway Farmer's Market.

Like any good decision Radio Shack makes, they eventually thought better of it. First the stores, and then the mail order business closed down, and Radio Shack went back to "You've got questions? We've got batteries."

Fry's is a great place to find some things, and it was great having two stores in the Atlanta area when I lived there. The one thing they never quite got right was audio, though. They carried no decent bulk audio or microphone cable, and just TRY to find an XLR connector in that place. No such animal.

The place I miss more than any other place I ever shopped is Skycraft Surplus in Orlando. They had EVERYTHING!
 
ScottJ said:
Fry's is a great place to find some things, and it was great having two stores in the Atlanta area when I lived there. The one thing they never quite got right was audio, though. They carried no decent bulk audio or microphone cable, and just TRY to find an XLR connector in that place. No such animal.
Click to expand...

In the last year I have come to realize what an "orphan" audio is.... at least audio as those of use who own a soldering iron think of audio.

Go to Barnes and Noble. Where are the books on audio? There are books on computer programming. There are books on photography. Books on movie editing. And now it appears to me that the entire committee, the entire team that designs and build Adobe Audition assumes that the only people buying Audition are people editing movies.

If Atlanta loses ACK Electronics one of these days, we will indeed be living in the desert wastelands.
 
Nobody want to build/repair electronic gear anymore except us few on here.Electronic are so cheap now because of Walmart and those box stores like Best Buy and P.C. Richard.Except for the overpriced Radio shack.The public
rather buy the device build and plug it in.
 
WPPCProductions said:
Nobody want to build/repair electronic gear anymore except us few on here.Electronic are so cheap now because of Walmart and those box stores like Best Buy and P.C. Richard.Except for the overpriced Radio shack.The public
rather buy the device build and plug it in.
Click to expand...

But only unacceptable crud is available.
Audio has disappeared in the same way as anything alse so commodified that we forget there was ever a time when
it was a item of much more broad-based attention.

Supposing you like any given thing in this world, there's someone out there trying to subvert (capture) that product/method.
They always find some way to market a new wrinkle.
One of the best ever is CDs. Here's a great way to make sure people will pay to repurchase something.
Sell a brittle product, very easy to damage completely and permanently.

Glad I bought up stockof components for myself years ago. Lots of parts to paw through right here at home.

It's getting very hard to find parts in stock in Chicago.
Tri-State Electronics in Mount Prospect is still going, but has drastically reduced component selection and followed the
"official invetnory control" advisors that decided we don't need zeners anymore, coupling transformers, or rf connectors, or
double cotton covered wire, or multi-deck bandswitches, or 450v electrolytics, or a semiconductor cross reference manual, or...
 
Tom Wells said:
But only unacceptable crud is available.
Click to expand...

True, but the public accepts it that way. They move on to another product in short order.

Tom Wells said:
One of the best ever is CDs. Here's a great way to make sure people will pay to repurchase something.
Sell a brittle product, very easy to damage completely and permanently.
Click to expand...

Anyone remember vinyl? ;D

Tom Wells said:
It's getting very hard to find parts in stock in Chicago.
Tri-State Electronics in Mount Prospect is still going, but has drastically reduced component selection and followed the
"official invetnory control" advisors that decided we don't need zeners anymore, coupling transformers, or rf connectors, or
double cotton covered wire, or multi-deck bandswitches, or 450v electrolytics, or a semiconductor cross reference manual, or...
Click to expand...

No wonder these days. From a business standpoint, it isn't worth keeping thousands of dollars of inventory for the off-chance that one person may walk in and need it. If its a moving item then it makes sense, but in electronic repair world, unless there is a steady customer next door there is a good chance its a poor investment. It is far better to source things from a warehouse someplace centrally and let them bear the brunt of the costs of housing and organizing all that stuff. It may result in a day or two wait, but that is todays' world.
 
Re: RADIO SHACK - Story with HAPPY Ending

I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or shout obscenities at them!

I was looking for one of those little audio isolation transformers that RS has sold for several years. Looks like a black D-cell battery with a wire coming out each end and at the end of each wire a pair of "phono plugs". I hunted high and low. Maybe 4 different stores. Asked the person on duty for help. "Naw. We don't have anything like that. Maybe you can order it on line from our catalog division."

Nobody offered to look it up on line to see if they still sell them there.

To appreciate this story you have to understand I have this personality flaw. I like face-to-face transactions. If I'm looking for a quick burger from McDonalds or maybe a soft drink or coffee, I don't do drive up. I park the car, go inside, get what I want... including the ratio of ice-to-liquid that I like. I don't do drive-up squawk-boxes. I do on-line orders as a last resort.

Today I need to make the 20+ mile trek to town so I go to the Radio Shack on-line inventory and find my little device. IT IS AVAILABLE! And every store that I have been to shows up on-line as having one or more in inventory. So I do a screen-dump to printer to take it with me. Before I get to the first store I have figured out the problem. I have been asking for an "audio isolation transformer". So when I walk in, before I show them the printed page, I ask about the item in THEIR terminology. I ask for an "audio GROUND LOOP ISOLATOR". (note the absence of the word transformer.

The same young lady who waited on me previously says: "Sure. Right there." In plain view from the cashier position. Just inches from where we had the conversation a couple of days ago.

Life Lesson Number 4,362: "Do not speak a foreign language when you enter another person's country."
 
Re: RADIO SHACK - Story with HAPPY Ending

Goat Rodeo Cowboy said:
I didn't know whether to laugh, cry or shout obscenities at them!

I was looking for one of those little audio isolation transformers that RS has sold for several years. Looks like a black D-cell battery with a wire coming out each end and at the end of each wire a pair of "phono plugs". I hunted high and low. Maybe 4 different stores. Asked the person on duty for help. "Naw. We don't have anything like that. Maybe you can order it on line from our catalog division."

Nobody offered to look it up on line to see if they still sell them there.

To appreciate this story you have to understand I have this personality flaw. I like face-to-face transactions. If I'm looking for a quick burger from McDonalds or maybe a soft drink or coffee, I don't do drive up. I park the car, go inside, get what I want... including the ratio of ice-to-liquid that I like. I don't do drive-up squawk-boxes. I do on-line orders as a last resort.

Today I need to make the 20+ mile trek to town so I go to the Radio Shack on-line inventory and find my little device. IT IS AVAILABLE! And every store that I have been to shows up on-line as having one or more in inventory. So I do a screen-dump to printer to take it with me. Before I get to the first store I have figured out the problem. I have been asking for an "audio isolation transformer". So when I walk in, before I show them the printed page, I ask about the item in THEIR terminology. I ask for an "audio GROUND LOOP ISOLATOR". (note the absence of the word transformer.

The same young lady who waited on me previously says: "Sure. Right there." In plain view from the cashier position. Just inches from where we had the conversation a couple of days ago.

Life Lesson Number 4,362: "Do not speak a foreign language when you enter another person's country."
Click to expand...
That was a great story.I remember back in the early 1990's I stoped to get some lubriplate for my turntables.The sales clerk said you dont use that on turntables.I said Hah.What do you use.I ask him.He had no anwser.i yes you do use the stuff on the linkage mech.with a attitude.Any went into the corner and got a tube.
 
We are doing this to ourselves. Know why no US company carries inventory? It is taxed. Cheap junk in another part of the world doesn't carry the tax we do. Same for all the things we buy. Tax it many times and see why we are in the shape we are in.
 
It is true that inventory is taxed. If you have unsold inventory on your shelves at year's end, the IRS says that's the same as cash, so you can't afford to have slow selling stuff in your stores. If you do, then it has to be sold at insane margins because you have to make up for both the time value of money and the tax liability. The current tax code is pretty bad for this type of business.


Another reason that electronic parts are fading is the trend towards miniaturization. The initial shift to SMD drove most hobbiests out of the field 15 years ago. Very few new semiconductors are made in a through-hole package anymore. Anything really cool is in a SMD package and many of the new SMD parts are so tiny that one needs a magnifier to read them, if they are even marked. The result is that there just isn't enough demand for parts to support retail sales anymore. The handful of mail order companies that exist are adequate to satisfy the demand.
 
Please, please, please! Do not turn this thread into one of those political shouting matches. Both of you are probably GREAT engineers, but I wouldn't hire either one of you to advise me on tax policy for my company... (if I had one. ;D )

I remember a cousin of mine gathering together the parts to assemble a simple receiver decades ago. He assembled that thing with loving care. I don't know if it worked well as a receiver, but it was something his children could display today in their living room it was so beautifully done. Through the years I have wondered why he did this, how he knew he could do it. I lived in the same community and nothing in the water or in the air caused me to say: "I bet I could assemble something electronic and it would shape my future." That is a puzzle that haunts me to this day.

(I made up for it through the years. Today I assemble things for the fun of it. I learned to make computers sing and dance. He had a career herding computers and now he tells me trying to herd a personal computer at home gives him ulcers. Go figure.)

I never taught my son to assemble things. His mother and I joke about the fact that he taught himself to dis-assemble things, and he became very good at it.

I guess I have assembled one very simple project in the last couple of years. Radio Shack can't make a living off that. But this trend goes much further. I also buy components assembled in factories. But I am then left with the task of inter-connecting those components. Think of my quest for the "Ground Loop Isolator". I bought a new factory-built computer. It has an allergy to power interruptions so I bought APC UPS device that was assembled in a factory. That resulted in my powered monitors beginning to buzz ever so lightly.

Forget about assembling devices. I am totally frustrated with the quest to find connecting cables in the size and length I want... in the color I want.
 
Some companies, indeed some industries, seem to specialise in particular names for things.
I know a little about plumbing - have done a bit of it in my time, but I still get blank looks from the people at the supply outlet
when I go in and ask for 'one of those little round things to join two copper pipes'.

You can tell that the salesperson is thinking "Oh heck, got a right wally here!" They know immediately that you aren't a registered plumber or trades-person. For that reason I've tried to learn the right names for things, before I go in to purchase.

Either that, or I'll go to a supplier where you can walk around the shelves and bins on your own without needing to ask a sales-person for the piece you need.

I too have been fortunate to have kept stocks of parts from many years ago. I bought up a lot of things in the early 80s from our local electronics supplier - and stashed them away in drawers and boxes.
It is great to pull them out of their spaces and marvel at the quality, in comparison to the china junk being sold now.
If I see those NOS parts being sold online now (usually private sales, often estate) I'll generally snap them up.

I understand and appreciate that it is no longer economically possible for someone to have a shop full of parts that will mostly never sell, or that someone will only come in and want one of in any given month.
It used to be nice to go into such places and wander around the aisles, peering into the trays on the shelves knowing I could physically hold and see any part I wanted.
Those days have all but gone, and I am simply thankful now that there are still people selling good parts on Ebay and the like.

As for SMD - I have as yet avoided it. Conceptually it is a brilliant system. Small, power-efficient and a lot of ability in a small packaged.
From a constructional or repair point of view however, totally impractical. I just can't justify having to outlay thousands of dollars on specialist re-work tools just to fit or replace the damn things. Many of which are impossible to identify anyway!
 
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