an "insiders" perspective:
my biggest regret when I sold my Radio Shack franchise in my home town was that I did not keep the last 8 inch floppy disk I had, someone smarter than me wanted it for a wall decoration. So Troutsqueezer, I may have sent your repair center an item or two. Most Tandy computers were built solidly, few problems. But I could sell a more powerful Acer for much less, and I did. The world changed and IBM took over as Tandy faded away. Along with the Compaq "lunchboxes" and the first hard drives they sold, external ten megabyte ones. For over six hundred dollars. Back then, in the 80's, that was serious money. Every week I sold one or two Panasonic transportable cell phones, the big ones like Motorola that were made for the job site and bouncing around on a truck seat. But I don't remember ever having one break either, unless it took a hard or wet landing. Those phones cost $1600 apiece and this was long before every pre-teen had a smartphone attached to their ear. If you had a phone, you needed a phone for business. And then that changed of course.
I had owned a home town independent insurance agency for many years. Got to dislike the insurance industry, not the people in it or my clients. The industry keeps raising and lowering its rates,
so one is constantly trying to explain nonsensical increases or short lived decreases because that's the marketing campaign that company was on. Then when they attracted too many new customers with their too low
rates, their loss ratios would skyrocket, and the underwriting departments would react with draconian reductions and basically jerking people around for their own purposes. I had worked at Travelers home office in Hartford, and I knew
the company side, even taught insurance to rookies in a corporate classroom. What a cake job that was. But after coming home to my small town and our farm along the banks of the Delaware River, I found out that one can come home, and thrive. But since i never had kids, I could say "I'm outta here" if necessary. So I took five years off from insurance and owned a Radio Shack store. What fun. An adult toy store. Half Radio Shack, half Panasonic/Sony/etc. consumer electronics. I even had a stereo corner where I resold Infinity speakers that I bought from another dealer who was willing to "wholesale" them to me. This was no metallic grey and glass decor, this was all natural oak slatwall and nice thick carpeting to quiet things down.
Yes, in the back were all those what were called by RS "parts and pieces", and while they had good markup, they didn't move too often. And keeping inventory was a real chore. But I stocked every single component in the catalog, well most, and there were a gazillion little plastic packets on those swinging doors. Number of serious electronics guys who would stop in on their way back from the Route 1 corridor in NJ, north of Princeton, where there were/are all kinds of
technology businesses and corp headquarters. These guys loved to root around in the back, sometimes for hours. And when I finally went to sell the store, after five years inside those walls, I had to get outside again, I took most of the outdated parts, which were all still perfectly good, and put them in discount boxes in the back. It was like women shopping for two dollar shoes. They had great fun after work and the word spread.
I had taken a business that grossed 116K and in five years grown it to a hair under one million gross, which many Radio Shack company stores don't even do any more. But then cell phones aren't sixteen hundred bucks today.
Good memories, I got out just in time, before Walmart and the Internet. Didn't make much money, plowed it back into inventory, but had a great time.
Now to really digress...My home town is well known for its tolerant approach to non-hetero relationships. One way of putting it. In both my insurance agency and my electronics business, my non-hetero clients were usually among the most educated and successful, and who came out of Philadelphia and NYC for many weekend homes in New Hope. I treated everyone nicely. And the response was interesting; the gays were so appreciative of being treated professionally and pleasantly that they were wonderfully appreciative clients and customers. Normal human nature, to want to be appreciated and not sneered at. Particularly if you weren't a "flamer" and kept your business to yourself. Most of these customers were single guys, older, lots of money, and liked finding something different in the shop. I always tried to have something new, some new technology if I could. This was back when things were changing in a hurry,for example when R/C toys really started to come in.
Speaking of which, and then I'll stop, which I'm sure will be appreciated..., is that when I sold the store, I brought a lot of scratch and dent stuff home. Including many boxes of mostly inexpensive R/C toys, including some nice 4x4 trucks.
they'd have broken transmitters or had some issues, and some I could repair. They went up to my friends Catskills cabin for a few years, and one of the best times four guys who had known each other since high school had was
using the R/C toys, trucks, even one little tethered airplane, as target practice. The cabin was on a mountain side, and the land sloped up steeply behind the cabin, so we had a good place to blast away, since that was State land anyway and no one went there. When one is primarily shooting with 22's, you can get a few hits in before the little trucks stops. Until someone decides enough was enough and the shotgun was used. Poor little truck.
I know, pretty stupid, well it was harmless and we didn't even mind picking up all the bits of plastic. Oh mighty hunters...none of us did btw.
Radio Shack used to have good deals on alkaline batteries, in larger quantities,but that went away. They have good phones and even company stores today carry non RS brands, thank goodness.
I sold more Panasonic than anything else, then Sony, then RS. Panasonic was one of the few companies that could make a vcr that would work for a reasonable time before conking out.
Thank goodness for digital. No more reel to reel tape decks, no autoreversing cassette decks, not even micro cassettes in voice recorders. Everyone/every thing has gone to the memory chip.
The retail electronics business is struggling. Losing Circuit City when discretionary spending disappeared really reduced the options one now has. I guess everyone has just gone to the Apple store.
