Not to be a dick, but there was a time in distant past where we cared about electronics parts and how they worked. People who played with electronics were on the cutting edge back then and radio was the common factor that drew them together, being a hundred years old but still relatively young in its development. Electronics passed the hobbyist by at the speed of light in a decade or so. I have no financial excuse for Radio Shack, but I have a lot of nostalgia. They are Blockbuster, writ in electrons.
Ahem. Stuff like Raspberry Pi ring bell?
Go make one. You’re confusing electronics with premade circuit boards.
Yeah, fitting a CPU onto a board is not exactly working with electronics.
So maybe the average RS clerk doesn’t really need to know that putting two batteries in series adds voltage (in fact they don’t, as I found out.) However, there’s still some slight value in having that basic electrical knowledge somewhere in the company.
I recently wanted to buy a battery pack for a project and I didn’t want to wait for it to arrive by mail order so I went down to the local RS. They sell a pack for 4 AA batteries at a mere 500-1000% markup. I would have bought it anyway, except there was no way to tell from the packaging if it was delivering 1.5, 3, or 6 volts, and it could plausibly have been any of those possibilities. No way to see how it was wired. No way even in their online records to determine it either. What’s the point of even carrying an item like that if neither the clerk nor the people responsible for packaging and for the corporate catalog even know what the item is? Seriously: an electrical component with no specs. When their purchasing agents and production people can stock items like that which cannot possibly be sold, you know there’s something wrong with the company.
In all fairness, I think most people waltzing in there just want, some, you know, batteries mannnnn.
I’m 27 and a lifelong geek; I had no idea standard AAs came in different voltages or that one wasn’t so overwhelmingly common that it could be assumed to be the de-facto standard barring any marking.
Well standard AAs do all come in 1.5 volts (I suppose some rare types are 3 volts, but you’d never buy those accidentally), but my point was that a battery pack holding 4 of them in a cluster could have been wired in series or in parallel or both ways, and the damn thing didn’t say which, so you’d have to actually buy it and test with a multimeter to find out what the product actually was.
Get with the times, old man. There’s more to electronics than wire-wrapping discrete components.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3010032/tech-forecast/can-the-maker-movement-save-radioshack
Anyway the answer to the article’s question is “no”. You’d have to be crazy to pay RS retail markups on maker components when the same items can usually be had for less elsewhere. I bet Tiger or Dino Direct will beat Radio Shack’s price on comparable components, almost every time. The sources will be the same Chinese factories, but there will be one fewer markup stage along the way, plus those vendors will naturally be more efficient, being Chinese themselves, with lower labor costs and fewer managers to feed, and no lame brick-and-mortar franchises to prop up.
The last time I saw a Radio Shack carry plain electronic components has to be back in the 90s. Since then it’s been nothing but cell phones, very generic computer shit, and R/C toys. I have not been able to fathom how they could continue to exist with Best Buy selling everything they do, plus ten times more selection.
I assume it’s because their stores are smaller and so in some communities they are easier to get to. Can’t think of any other reason. And since Best Buy is pretty horrible, the fact they are obviously better than Radio Shack does make for a certain amount of puzzlement.
To be fair to Radio Shack, they stock a fair number of little connectors and whatnot that Best Buy doesn’t. You can get these same connectors for 10% of what Radio Shack charges at Monoprice, but let’s not go there…
Radio Shack’s saving grace is that the people often tinkering suddenly realize they need a part, and since they’re hip deep in the project, it’s just way faster to go to the local Radio Shack than wait 3-4 days for Monoprice.
Indeed. Your kid tells you at 2:30 on Sunday that they are supposed to have something for the science fair the next day: you’re not going to go up on Monoprice to try and get the LED light you need to illuminate the volcano.
I’m surprised they even still carry LEDs. Last time I was looking for components in a Radio Shack was nearly a decade ago, and nearly every component they had was shoved in a single cabinet in the back of the store.
It may vary per store, because they still do have a fairly large catalog which does have components. Probably the manager has the option to stock some things. My local shop has almost nothing. The closest to a component would be something like a battery pack or a cable plug adaptor.
The closest Radio Shack near my home has nothing but phones and phone accessories. I went in there looking for a cable splitter, but they didn’t have anything like that.
It’s especially comical because the strip mall the Radio Shack is in, also has Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile stores! I couldn’t figure out why anyone would purposefully go in the Radio Shack looking for phone stuff.
My RadioShack has 2 cabinets of components (and some very basic arduino kits too) and we’re in middle of nowhere Arkansas (but there’s a uni nearby). Admittedly, if I have lead time I order electronics parts from DigiKey. Radio Shack also had the N-size batteries I needed once.
My first computers were CoCos and an 8088 as well.
I bet there’s still an active community writing shit for Tandy CoCo.
My local store might be better stocked with electronic parts than others I guess. I had a need for a motion-activated device to repel cats (long story) and I was able to go in there, pick up a motion sensor, a buzzer and a couple other components I needed. I could have gotten the chipboard and microprocessor there too, if I had needed them.
You’re lucky. The couple of Shacks around me don’t carry any parts anymore, only phones, accessories and RC toys along with way overpriced TVs, universal remotes and home theater sound systems. I haven’t been able to get a same day electronics part in my city since CompUSA closed years ago.
I heard Radio Shack sent out the news of the closing to all effected employees yesterday…on their pagers. <rimshot>