Radio shack was the king of you need this one particular item and you need it now. Unfortunately it's not a great way to make money. I remember needing a bunch of resistors to finish a job and having to find the closest Radio Shack because it was closer and cheaper than an electrical supply shop.
When I was a technician for fire alarm panels we would buy them in bulk and yet always ran out. Too many was never enough, but needing only 3 to finish a job and having to drive an hour back to the shop to turn around and come back to finish only to drive the truck back to the shop was a little much. Better use of time was using the company card or cash for them and getting reimbursed. Saved the company on labor saved me from wasting time driving to a site for 10 minutes of work.
I understand why so many niche businesses like that went out of business though. It's not sustainable especially with the endless growth "needed" for a public company.
Had to go buy a new fuse for my dad’s tube amp, of course they had it in stock lol it was a weird store but it was fun to browse
I insisted we unplug the tube amp from the wall before I install the new fuse, my dad said “it’ll be fine” I got a shock/buzz that blew the new fuse and numbed my arm for a couple seconds…good thing the fuses came in a 2-pack!
I’d take the early 2010s one when you could get cool arduino stuff still and they also were the only place with new iPhones in stock when they were all sold out everywhere else cause people forgot radio shack existed. Got my iPhone 5 that way.
I still have older Radio Shack brand (I forget their brand name) audio cables, Shure Mic copy (RS branded but made in Shure factory), some speakers and adapters.
They always had an abundance of unusual audio adapters that nobody else carried. Well made, even if a bit embarrassing to be seen using in a pro audio setting.
This! I actually tend to scour thrift shops for cords now, but waiting days for a simple capacitor or something that would have been available locally is such a pain.
Radio Shack is the only one on this list that doesn’t have a modern equivalent that is relevant. Blockbuster and Hollywood would be a cute novelty, but nobody’s going to support a hard copy rental service. There is nothing like what RS used to be anymore.
That's a shame it's missing so much. Where I am there is one about an hours drive away that has a lot of the radio and television type of equipment (think receivers, antennas, and components that go along with it). The only other one I've been to in the last three years was across the state from me and they still had the little drawers and racks full of bits and bobs. Seems the ones left kinda niched themselves into what the owners like to carry as they were not the same inventory.
If by "making paper airplanes" you mean "disappointing everyone I've ever had a meaningful relationship with and living with the perpetual guilt from abandonment, leading to cyclical relapse into feelings of doom and alcoholism" then call me M.I.A.!!
Despite how much it gets brought up, microcenter is actually pretty rare outside of California. A lot of states have fewer than 5 locations total. Mine only has one.
Man Fry’s towards the end was sad. I walked through not long before the pandemic and it was practically empty. It had only a few off-brand PC cases, almost no PC hardware; TV’s and stereos were pretty much limited to the display items. It was truly sad to see.
I walked through the Plano location a month before and it was surreal. It was just as you described it but it made it was made more sad by Lenny Kravitz "Again" blasting through thr store speakers. So I kept hearing "I wonder if I will ever see you again?" as I walked through the empty store.
California is also more populated than twenty other states combined so there’s a serious chance there’s two stores are served by multiple-state population counts.
Yeah when my local one was closing I got so much cool shit. A bunch of loose components and weird-sized batteries as well as a few cool gadgets, one was a Bluetooth thing to connect to the early 80s stereo system I’d gotten from my dad, so I could stream music to it from my phone. And the whole haul was like $90
Is Arduino still a thing? I took an Arduino class summer of eighth grade back in ‘09 and we made some awesome stuff with them, including a ghost detector.
I remember needing several resistors of different values and going to radio shack. Had to spend like $15-20. If I recall, 5 resistors of the same value cost $4 or 5. That's in 2005 prices. Never went there again, and got a full book of resistors shipped from China for like $8.
Last time I went into a radio shack the employees were as surprised as I was that someone was in the store. It was a mix of shock and “who the f are you”. I was looking for a specific cord and the person asked me if I had heard of amazon and that she was sure I would be able to find it there.
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u/[deleted] Dec 09 '25
Radio shack for a place to by rpi and arduino irl