I used to go to Best Buy weekly to look for new movies and games, but since they eliminated movies and scaled back games, I’ve been doing all that shopping on Amazon instead… I guess it shows who wants my money and who doesn’t.
Best Buy is going to end up being just another “Hey, remember Fry’s? Circuit City? CompUSA? Good Guys? Tower? Computer City?”
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.
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.
And the infuriating thing is you get to cross of CompUSA twice from your list, because after they tanked the first time they got bought by TigerDirect, the brand was resurrected, and then they tanked again.
The only time that I ended up going into Best Buy over just ordering something off of Amazon was when I found that they would price match an online Amazon retailer and was capable of buying something at nearly 65 to 70% off. But I was capable of having it directly delivered to a store where I didn’t have to worry about some porch pirate taking off with something that had a general MSRP of like 1,500 bucks and was capable of walking in looking at an inspecting it and deciding whether or not I was actually going to take delivery of it cuz if it was damaged for the Box had been dropped or anything like that I was going to refuse it on the spot and tell them to get me another one which isn’t something you can do when you order off of Amazon.
I also used them to price match a TV that was on Amazon that they still had sitting on the shop floor got it Hefty $50 off on that one but it wasn’t anywhere near what I got off for the new amp/source that I ended up buying.
I used to go to Best Buy weekly to look for new movies and games, but since they eliminated movies and scaled back games, I’ve been doing all that shopping on Amazon instead… I guess it shows who wants my money and who doesn’t.
Best Buy is going to end up being just another “Hey, remember
Fry’s?Circuit City?CompUSA?Good Guys?Tower?Computer City?”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.
And the infuriating thing is you get to cross of CompUSA twice from your list, because after they tanked the first time they got bought by TigerDirect, the brand was resurrected, and then they tanked again.
At least we still have MicroCenter. For now.
The only time that I ended up going into Best Buy over just ordering something off of Amazon was when I found that they would price match an online Amazon retailer and was capable of buying something at nearly 65 to 70% off. But I was capable of having it directly delivered to a store where I didn’t have to worry about some porch pirate taking off with something that had a general MSRP of like 1,500 bucks and was capable of walking in looking at an inspecting it and deciding whether or not I was actually going to take delivery of it cuz if it was damaged for the Box had been dropped or anything like that I was going to refuse it on the spot and tell them to get me another one which isn’t something you can do when you order off of Amazon.
I also used them to price match a TV that was on Amazon that they still had sitting on the shop floor got it Hefty $50 off on that one but it wasn’t anywhere near what I got off for the new amp/source that I ended up buying.
I miss full-power circuit city, when it was dying a slow death it was kinda hard to watch.
That said, nothing I miss more than radioshack.