this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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I only ever remember RadioShack selling prepaid phones, RC cars, and other consumer electronics, but apparently at one point in time they sold small-scale electronic components for hobbyists.
lol yeah, in the 90s you could go in there and buy a couple resistors, a couple capacitors, and a couple (expensive, crappy) LEDs
I can see how that didn’t work out for them though
They did indeed, and the Radio Shack in my town was one the last ones I ever saw to still sell individual components although the selection did shrink rapidly in the final years. The other locations around and about seemingly all turned into basically exclusively cell phone stores, right around the time the cell phone boom was happening. The problem with that: So was every other retailer on Earth, but most of those other retailers also had other product lines to fall back on. The inevitable tanking happened shortly thereafter.
There are somehow apparently still around 500 Radio Shack stores still operating, I believe all of which are privately owned. I have seen a couple in my travels, all of them located far out into the sticks in Appalachia and the Midwest, presumably all locations that are not served well by larger competitors or the internet.
I've been in one of the ones in the sticks in the Midwest that, at least five years ago, was still there and still sold some hobbyist electronics kits. I should have bought a couple, I need the soldering practice.
As well as the tools to go with them.
And almost every product or device you bought there had a schematic of the internal circuits printed in the manual that came in the box.
At one point it was a mecca for electronics tinkerers and hobbyists.
I still have a soldering iron and a couple spools on solder that I bought there way back in history.