Shame about that Radio Shack, eh Americans? I only knew it from TV and the internet, but I read somewhere that they were good for batteries. Share your Radio Shack memories, please.

In 2006 during my trip to NYC, I was in need of need batteries for my camera so I went to some small store owned by some Indian guy and bought some from there (and got a really weird receipt in return, if I remember correctly the guy was even surprised that I asked for one).

Later on I discovered that I could have got those for much much cheaper from a RadioShack near our hostel. Oh well.

NEVER FORGET.

They weren't good for batteries imo, they were more known for carrying hobby electronic parts. I get all the breadboards, components, wires, so forth from places not-Radioshack for half the price and less. They've been dying a slow death since 2000, arguably even before. Staff tended not to be knowledgeable of their own merchandise. Really, I don't think there was anything that could have been done.

When I could no longer buy capacitors and such at radio shack, I lost interest.

Yeah, components was the only reason I go there. They weren't good for batteries, they just tried to push them regardless of what you were buying.

same

last time i went some guy tried to sell me one of those sets of overpriced crap speakers

One time I went to Radio Shack and looked for an electronic part. I searched the entire store but I couldn't find even a single electronic part, let alone the one I wanted! I asked the clerk where the electronic parts were. He sneered at me and said they didn't do that anymore.

I'm honestly not sure how they stayed in business so long selling nothing but RC cars and TV remotes to people too dumb to look for an anchor store, but here we are.

I was in there about 6 months ago trying to get some wire and solder. I got treated like an ******* for even asking.

Then the guy asked me if I was happy with my cell service. I said "No, not really" and walked off.

Yeah, they became this weird front for selling phones (mainly Sprint I think). And this is despite the fact that the major carriers had stores of their own for selling their own phones. I guess RS should get an award for existing as long as they did. Congrats

I guess now they can join Sam Goody, The Wiz, Circuit City, CompUSA, the World Trade Center, etc.

Maybe the same reason H & R Block still exists. And thriving.

Now we have to find a way Target can get back up in Canada again without vomiting everywhere and dying roadside. Then you will experience all the corporate amenities of being an average American.

Dude...

Yeah now I feel bad

so olds who think they're still good. Gotcha

Target? Back up in Canada?

Target was never in Canada. You must be thinking of empty Zellers painted red.

The Radio Shack of my youth has long been dead. Good riddance to the empty shell that was left. I'm sure their employees will have no difficult in finding similar positions at Best Buy & Walmart.

The thing I really hated about Target in Canada was how their whole business strategy was "Canadians are retarded lol".

I mean, they're right. Except Canadians are also snobbish as hell. There were an awful lot of things wrong with Target Canada*, but they probably still could have turned a profit if they had tried to position themselves as a middle class Wal-Mart like they did in the United States. Instead, they entered the market by taking over the retail space of Zellers, a discount department store chain. Poor selection and outrageous prices are one thing, but asking richer Canadians to go to shopping in the poor neighborhoods is another.


(* as an Actual Internet Canadian, here's what Target did wrong in Canada from my actual experiences: no selection and/or poorly stocked, standard 2x Canadian markup, poor locations, poor staffing, a website you couldn't use to look up products, advertising promotions in Canada which were US-only. I mean, the whole reason they came to Canada was to gouge all the Canadians who went across the border to shop at Target, but what they didn't realize was that they made going to Target Canada more unpleasant than the scrutiny of crossing the border twice in one day.)

Fortunately internet suppliers have a better selection and ****. They probably closed that down because everyone who actively buys components is competent enough to use the internet

Deciding to become Best Buy Mini after Circuit City closed and Best Buy is bleeding money was pretty much the worst decision someone could make

Yada Yada Yada, corporate idiots, detached from reality, etc

Their electronics parts section was winding down well before DigiKey started selling online.

Radio Shack in 1995 selling solder cup DB25 but no fine-tipped irons, and solder-free DB25 but no crimping tools or dies. lmao, butts. By the time you could buy parts and equipment from actual humans with functioning brains here my interest in electronics had long since died.

Yeah corporations are awful, but usually their failures aren't so spectacular. In the past two years Target's internal business practices have resulted in two very public flame-outs to the totals of $150m+ and $2bn+. Again, not because they're uncompetitive, but because they have poisonous internal policies. For a publicly traded corporation it's quite unusual.

What exactly happened?

Radioshack has the components I need, like, >10% of the time... I wish we had a Fry's Electronics in southern Illinois.

$150m+ for the data breach. Target's not exactly making the cause public but I've heard rumors it's because they give contractor randos root. Board apparently decided it was a leadership/culture issue instead of a technical problem too, because they canned the CEO over it.

$2bn+ for Target Canada. Leadership/culture issue because they didn't trust local stores to adjust planos or customize inventory for their regions, bad planning because they didn't understand the Canadian market and went in whole hog with over a hundred stores before they had a supply chain or even a functioning website set up. So their stores were understocked, stores weren't able to face shelving to look professional, a lot of stores were stocking items that nobody in the area would buy, like stocking sports team merchandise for the wrong city and stuff like that.


I mean, I'm not pretending to know exactly what's going on inside Target, but I know enough about retail to recognize a lot of these signs. Like, meltdown-level culture and leadership problems here.

[SUP][/SUP]Amazing they lasted this long. Can't say I'll miss them however, everytime I walked into the store there was absolutely nothing there that I needed, and whatever they had (TV's and remote controls) was insanely overpriced. You'd think they would have eventually fixed their management issues with all the years they had of steady failures. Its almost as if they intentionally destroyed the company.

So I went into radio shack yesterday. It was a sad sight. It was always more convenient than driving 30m to microcenter for something small and it beat going to bestbuy for electronic stuff.

My local Radioshack is having a going out of business sale. I picked up 4 Arduinos for less than $10 each.

...I suddenly don't remember any of the things that I wanted to use them for.

Oh yeah, my parents had to get new cards from that breach. Or maybe it was stolen from Home Depot. In either case, it makes me increasingly uncomfortable to use anything but cash when I hear about the average security measures at retailers


yeah that's par for the course in american business. hamfisted execution of a bad plan. the people who survive in business environments are very good at not taking blame, and as businesses go on they become saturated with these people and not enough who actually steer the company

yeah it's really not good financial sense to buy something unless if you have an explicit plan for that item's future.. and also have good followup. it's amazing how fast loads of crap will accumulate if you're not cautious about it

He could easily turn around and sell those and make twice his money back. We're talking less than $40 here. If that is 1% of in income, who ****ing cares if it's not "good financial sense" lol. I dunno that line cracked me up. We're talking about a very small electronic that he got a very good discount on. He could sell two of them and it would pay for the other two. IMHO it's a fine financial decision. But this coming from the guy who defines accumulated crap. My point is, I don't think it's very good social sense to go around telling people how to spend their finances

Back to the topic at hand. Went back to radio shack. They are literally selling everything. I got like 200ft of cat5 for like $5 and a display shelf for like $10. They are even selling the POS systems!