Where would you go if you needed some batteries? Test an 6SJ7? Buy a boom box? A 50k ohm resistor? A siren fireman’s hat for your 4 year old?
Well, not Radio Shack any longer. Radio Shack used to get people excited by demanding your name and address even if you were buying a $.20 transistor and paying cash. They would flood your mailbox with catalogs showing you all the latest cool stuff, like the TRS-80 personal computer.
Well that was then, and this is now. Radio Shack has focused its business lately on selling Sprint cell phones. Sprint is expected to take over the better stores and close the rest.
If it isn’t clear why Amazon is interested – a couple years ago they cut a deal to rent space in the now empty backrooms of radio shack stores for same day delivery service. The delivery person would enter the back room, open up the locked storage cabinet, and pull out the cute SpongeBob Squarepants toy someone ordered, close it back up and be on their way.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Amazon wants these locations to serve as localized ‘drone distribution’ bases or hubs, particularly in the smaller towns in rural areas, etc.
In my corner of the woods, Radio Shack is the -only- drop-off location for FedEx & UPS.
I visited my local Radio Shack (northern MI) in December to drop off a package for FedEx. I actually had to search the store to find the ‘components’ aisle (one)… most of the store was filled with consumer electronics, readily available online or elsewhere.
The future is already morphing to delivery using self driving autonomous vehicles. If the vehicle doesn’t need to ever have a human passenger, that means there are lots of things it doesn’t need – like seats, radio, air conditioning, airbags. It will probably more resemble a three wheel motorcycle. To deliver a pizza in a drone would require something much bigger than the quadcopters.
I could see a future where very small vehicles – probably electric powered might have their own roadways. If the only thing using the roadway is a 300 pound vehicle – it doesn’t need bridges that support 80,000 pound trucks and doesn’t need traffic lights. They might even replace schoolbuses. It’s the 1939 world’s fair again – except “freedom” is not a $400 a month car payment.
Some vehicles will need heating or cooling for local climates which require it. e.g. Delivery of perishable items (meat, food, flowers) in Phoenix during the summer, or to keep liquids or medicines from freezing in the winter, etc.
I see a lot of unused bike paths (bike lanes) which would be ideal for drones.
You are correct. Electric quadcopters do not have enough vertical thrust to carry anything except a light package for a short distance in good weather. This is what made Amazon’s drone delivery idea sound a bit absurd.
Unfortunately, the term ‘drone’ has been pigeon-holed to imply only things that fly. The common military term is UAV. Ground drones are called UGV.
A more autonomous drone is ‘Bigdog’. DARPA has officially named it the Legged Squad Support System (LS3)… and it can now hurl cinder blocks!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jvLalY6ubc#t=20
It should be able to toss your delivery over the fence with better accuracy. 😉
Ironically, that is what Radio Shack should have morphed into, Robot Shack.
Radio Shack goes the way of Heathkit. A shame. I have loved both over the years. When my Heathkit amplifier needed two new 3-500Z tubes, I went to Radio Shack to buy them (based on the prices – they should still be in business!).
I was in Radio Shacks ‘Free battery of the month’ club. They punch the card each time. It came in handy for my Radio shack ‘Flavor-radio’ (different colors) AM only. It still plays, made in Japan. Mine is the blue one.
My old man would get vacuum tubes from time to time. I have the AM transmitter kit. It was one transistor with a crystal Mic. I would hook it to the TV antenna on the roof of the house in 1976, while my parents were at work during the day. It was a flat ribbon two conductor wire up to the antenna and I would unhook the TV and put my jumper over to the wire on top the TV. Powered 9 volt batter.
I would be transmitting some star trek episode I recorded the sound off the TV with my cassette player/recorder. I think the wire and antenna were emitting signal.
Ride around on my bike and use the fringe range Channel Master AM radio and pick up the signal a mile away. I did my own news too.
So much fun, get in trouble for forgetting to hook the antenna back to the TV.
I have a Radio shack AM/FM receiver in the spare bedroom, I’ll look at the model. It has a heavy flywheel tuner knob, that thing rolls. A couple Cerwin Vega 12’s speakers.
It had a very sensitive AM radio and FM receiver.
I bet it hasn’t been on in 18 or 19 years. I will have to go fire it up. I bought it in 1980.
Mowed a lot of grass and picked up bales of hay, washed and cleaned the inside of cars that summer. I couldn’t afford the top of the top of the line 100 watt per channel model. I had to settle for the 65 watt per channel. It went on sale and I bought it.
sold the dual cassette deck years ago.
I bet there is a RS CB radio around here somewhere. Bought a lot of 5 & 1/4 floppies from radio shack, LOL I bought a lot of crap there back in the day.
yeah they wanted name and address in the late 80′-90’s if you bought anything, I quit going there.
They use to be based in Fort Worth Texas , Tandy corporation I think.
Good thing the economy is so good.
Hail obo !
parrott
I made the mistake once of helping the RS manager at Charlottetown mall do the end of month physical inventory. It’s not a mistake you would ever make twice.
This was around 1980 – at that point they stopped mailing the full catalog even if you asked them to send it. The store only had one copy and they had to guard it – if someone took it, they wouldn’t be able to look up things they had to special order.
Great police scanners as well. Some of those 1980-90’s models were still highly sought after on eBay (for modding capabilities) until just a few years ago, when digital encoding and trunking made most older scanners a bit more obsolete.
As Art mentioned, asking me for a ph# & address on the smallest cash purchase eventually drove me away. Sometime around 1980-82, I remember having to be an early bird to get a catalog at a local store, before they ran out of their ‘ration’.
When I was at our local store in November, I looked for capacitors to re-cap a Dell motherboard… the store had -one- suitable capacitor on the rack at $2.79 which makes it cost prohibitive (need 15-20 capacitors) to repair a M-board. On eBay or Digikey.com, I can get 10 or 20 capacitors for $6, with shipping.