The Last RadioShack In Maryland Is Closing Its Doors

After over 40 years in operation, the last RadioShack store in Maryland is closing. Store manager Cindy Henning, who worked there for three decades, reflected on the joy of helping customers and the legacy left by late owner Michael King: Henning told WTOP she's going to miss it dearly. She's worked there for three decades. "We would have a lot of fun. That was half of our day was to have fun with people and show them how electronics work," Henning said. It was owned and operated by longtime local resident Michael King, who passed away at the end of January at the age of 79. His son Edward has taken over as owner. "It's the end of an era," he said.

King said his grandfather owned a TV repair shop in the '50s and then his dad worked with him. They started carrying RadioShack products and grew to franchise three stores in Maryland. The RadioShack franchise first declared bankruptcy in 2015. King said they used the RadioShack name, but they don't have a warehouse in the U.S., so they were buying product from other wholesalers and selling it. "It was fun while it lasted, but it's not the same anymore," King said. "I know my dad realized that." The store's last day is Saturday, April 26.

I didn't know there were any more RSs

[Anonymous Coward]

In Maryland or anywhere else.

Re:

[Valgrus Thunderaxe]

I put RadioShack [google.com] into Google maps and I'm surprised how many there are just in my area.

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[Tablizer]

Most of those are marked "permanently closed". Maybe those that are not marked are simply not updated?

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[DarkOx]

Did you notice most of those have 'permanently closed' written under them?

I don't know if the fact that they are in Google maps still means many exist, or exist as more then vacant store fronts with signage that nobody bothered to remove.

Re:

[Narcocide]

I'm surprised too, but I know that with these types of franchises there's an option for the individual owners to keep the store open at their own expense after the parent company of the chain goes out of business.

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[Tablizer]

Me either, I thought they were long gone. I loved going to RS as a kid, and browsing their catalog of gizmos and kits.

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[JaredOfEuropa]

Same. They were called Tandy over here, but they carried much the same stuff as in the US. A treasure trove for a kid discovering the world of electronics. Was a card-carrying member of the Free Battery Club.
A couple of years ago I visited a RS in the US, it wasn't at all the same. But then again, the hobby has changed as well.

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[Tablizer]

I remember that their hobbyist angle gradually drifted away, starting roughly in the late 80's, instead selling semi-educational toys and cellphones.

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[sysrammer]

Yeah. I remember the first time I went in and asked where the RCA cables were, and the associate didn't know what I was talking about.

Then I remember them being sort of on the cutting edge w/ PCs. (I also remember them being POSs.)

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[Tablizer]

They were the central hub of TRS-80 computers. TRS-80's were one of the Big 3 of the early 80's: TRS, Apple, and PET.

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[sysrammer]

We had a computer lab at college entirely of Trash-80s. They often worked long enough to type in a program before losing it trying to save it to a cassette. Fun daze.

One day I was introduced to the operator's room for the college's Univac. I started hanging there and never looked back.

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[Tablizer]

I used to save copies 3 times on cassettes. Once none of the 3 worked.

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[JaredOfEuropa]

My dad had a TRS-80, but we had dual floppy disks. Never had an issue with reliability at all.

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[Going_Digital]

Tandy was resurrected in the UK as a small scale electronics hobby online retailer by a former employee that acquired the assets from carphone warehouse when they closed all the stores. www.tandyonline.com

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[mrclevesque]

> I loved going to RS as a kid, and browsing their catalog of gizmos and kits.

Me too.

I stumbled on this link a few months ago:

https://www.radioshackcatalogs... [radioshackcatalogs.com]

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[cstacy]

In Maryland or anywhere else.

Radio Shack stopped selling electronics components a very long time (40 years) ago. They moved on to consumer devices and toys. Then they turned into a cell phone store.

Around here, I mostly went to Arcade Electronics.
I lived down the street from that Annandale store.

Re:

[The Grim Reefer]

Radio Shack stopped selling electronics components a very long time (40 years) ago. They moved on to consumer devices and toys.

That's not entirely true. They were still selling electronics components 20 years ago. They were just in the back corner of the store hidden away in dozens of metal drawers. The employees knew nothing about any of that stuff by that point.

Basically the employees were glorified cell phone salesmen and the smile would fade from their face if you asked them where the resistors or capacitors were. The last time I was in a Rat Shack I remember the guy at the register asked me why I would even want that stuff

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[Waffle Iron]

Back in its glory days, Radio Shack was really educational because even then they always had a really spotty inventory of resistors and caps.

You had to learn to quickly use the parallel and series formulas in your head to try to cobble together the values you needed from what was actually available on the pegboard in front of you.

I did eventually figure out that it was much cheaper to order huge bags of random components from those mail order surplus catalog outfits, and I could maintain a spotty inventory

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[dsgrntlxmply]

I have specific memory of being surprised and fortunate to locate a surface mount resistor assortment at a Radio Shack in 1989. We were in a field test situation with scarce prototype equipment, where some boards had not been adequately tested before being shipped. I was able to repair the defective board, allowing the full intended configuration to be tested. The 1989 date is verified by record of a movie production that happened to be on location there at the same time.

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[kackle]

Contrary to that, I was in the field decades ago and a coworker screwed up to where we needed some RS232 parts but were a hour away from our shop. We used the new Internet feature on our cell phone to find a local RadioShack. When we got there, it had a RadioShack sign but was just an empty store front. :(

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[registrations_suck]

Not true. I bought some resistors from RS not more than 5 years ago.

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[Tony Isaac]

Apparently, there are still over 500 locations open. https://www.radioshack.com/loc... [radioshack.com] I'm just as shocked as you!

I don't know

[commodore73]

I don't know whether to be sad. It was my favorite store when I was a child, but I fear their real goal was to sell cheap disposable batteries. They really had no competitors until online shopping happened. Maybe they could have focused on building hobbyist community, but...profit. Over time (and especially towards the end), it became more like a Best Buy or something. It's sad that there were not enough technology hobbyists to keep the original model in business.

Re: I don't know

[Ghostworks]

Wherever I went with my dad, it was to get A/V equipment, RCA cables, connector for 1/8" audio jacks, that sort of thing. I think Best Buy, Circuit City et al took that business, which didn't leave much to actually keep the lights on. After that I feel like it was all RC cars, and later cell phones (which ny then you could find anywhere).

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[VanGarrett]

Circuit City fell apart before Radio Shack, though. Best Buy is almost certainly Circuit City's spiritual successor. Circuit City and Radio Shack both started focusing on selling cellphones before they fell apart. I may have the causal relationship backward, but it seems like making a deal to front for a wireless carrier just kills electronics retails.

The Best Buy in my town had a great location across the street from Walmart, right next to Lowe's. It came time to re-negotiate their lease, and couldn't come

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[registrations_suck]

Worth pointing out that one of the major reasons CC went under is that their locations sucked.

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[Fly Swatter]

But land in the middle of nowhere is cheap!

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[jbengt]

I believe that Circuit City was a sort of pyramid scheme. As long as they were building new stores, they showed revenue growth and their stock was valuable. When they ran out of viable places to build new, investors bailed because revenue was flat and profits nil. Still, Carmax survived.

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[Rinnon]

Technology hobbyist meant something different 40 years on. Yeah, it used to be breadboards and designing circuits, but later it meant MP3 players, and later still it meant being the first to have an Apple Watch. If you're still selling breadboards, at most you can really upgrade to selling Arduinos and Raspberry Pi's, but it's going to be more "niche" than "cutting edge" at that point. It's going to be tough to keep the lights on with that.

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[tlhIngan]

I don't know whether to be sad. It was my favorite store when I was a child, but I fear their real goal was to sell cheap disposable batteries. They really had no competitors until online shopping happened. Maybe they could have focused on building hobbyist community, but...profit. Over time (and especially towards the end), it became more like a Best Buy or something. It's sad that there were not enough technology hobbyists to keep the original model in business.

No the reason was online shopping. More spec

Re: I don't know

[commodore73]

Oh man, Fry's! I'm definitely more sad about that loss. Maybe I'm one of the rare living dinosaurs that prefers walking while browsing items, such as in a bookstore, though it does lead to impulse buys. The good thing is that it's very easy for me to avoid shopping online.

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[Fly Swatter]

The battery of the month card was a thing, one free cheap battery per month.

For a time they were giving out coupons for a free 4-C cell flashlight, of about 4 I had they all eventually cracked from the stress of the overly strong spring that served as the battery contact. That spring was something, drop flashlight and it would pop the yellow screw-on lens cover clear off the body and across the room.

Radio shack was the original re-badge operation, just about everything not under the Tandy brand was fr

sears

[hawk]

I think Sears beat them to rebadging mastery by a matter of decades . . .

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[kackle]

Eh, I disagree with the take that "on-line" killed it.

First off, they moved a lot of their electronic components (still shown in their catalog) to "on-line purchase only" at one point, so they weren't adverse to the Internet.

Secondly, the electronics hobby changed from what it used to be. I think of it like the automotive hobby where multiple people would have their car hoods open on the weekends in the 1970s, fixing this or that. The complexity has put an end to that kind of casual tinkering.

#oldman

[cstacy]

I preferred going to Arcade Electronics for most things.

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[Tablizer]

There is zero reason to mention the orange being for this story. As a penalty, I'm having you disappeared to an undisclosed El Salvador prison. And that teddy-bear tattoo on your ass looks gang-y.

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[sysrammer]

Nah, just a casual response to another shitpost.

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[registrations_suck]

Why are you looking at his ass?

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[Tablizer]

We found DEI in it.

A long, long time ago... TRS-80s

[zephvark]

My first computer was a TRS-80, Model I, Level II, starting out with all of 16K RAM and a cassette player for storage. I would follow the latest Radio Shack catalogs with wide eyes.

They started losing my interest when their first floppy drives only had 35 tracks, instead of a normal 40, and somehow still cost much more. At that, I think my aftermarket floppy drive and operating system ran around $500 anyway. But, you know, fast random-access storage! Maybe 160k of it! And you didn't have to keep fiddling with the volume control to get your programs to load!

It was spectacular, at the time. The expansion unit allowed a full 48K of RAM and room to install a serial port card, so I could add a 300-bps modem.

I last shopped there in the early 80's

[Hans Lehmann]

Back when it was the convenient place for a hobbyist to go for common electronic components. Needed a 555 timer, or a LM7805 voltage regulator, or maybe some random 1/4 watt resistor? That's where you went. About that time they also branched out into electronic toys, they kind you might have seen in the early 80's. Eventually they were just cell phones and batteries (remember the Radio Shack Battery Club cards?) Many years before that Radio Shack was owned by Tandy Leather, who sold, well, leather stuff

Radio Shack 46th Street NYC

[QuietLagoon]

Yeah, I remember traveling to the Radio Shack on 46th Street in mid-town Manhattan back when the Radio Shack stores were few and far between, At the time, there were stores I knew of in Boston area and Dallas-Ft Worth area, and the NYC store I visited.

Run into the ground by stupidity and arrogance

[az-saguaro]

For me, it was in the early 90's that I could see a demoralizing change in Radio Shack.
They had more and more of toys and telephones, and less and less of parts, knowledgeable employees and - customers.

Had anyone in the corporation asked me then, I would have told them that by ignoring their traditional business and customers, the very same ones who made them wealthy, successful, and beloved, with thousands of stores, they were committing suicide. They in turn, as all corporate MBA bureaucrats, would have

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[DarkOx]

The trouble is their old customers are not there; were not there, at least not in the numbers need to keep the lights on.

The value RS offered the radio or electronics enthusiast was you get one right now, the flip side is they did not actually have the value of part you really wanted, just some collection of things that would work, and the asking price was 10x what mail order guys wanted for it sometimes 100x before shipping. Honestly what really killed them is the hobbyist era of electronics did rather co

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[JustNiz]

This, totally, I knew Radio Shack was done the moment the store near me got rid of all the shelves of components and replaced them with crappy plastic chinese toys and rows and rows of phone accessories and 58 versions of the same USB adaptors.

I very much resonate with your comment about being elbow-deep in a project and just needing a common chip or capacitor or something.
Here in Phoenix we did also have Frys, which was bigger so had better range of stock than Radio Shack, but they closed a few years ago t

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[ISoldat53]

My GF worked for Dell in the early years. I worked for Tandy. Dell could sell the same computers we were bidding on at half the price. It got so bad Dell had to make an unspoken agreement not to hire any more people from Tandy.

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[NX-0064]

I can tell you exactly why they failed. I used to work there a few years before they went under as a Corp. Most of the toys and other electronics were cheap and overpriced. They only had 3 metal drawer cabinets with components in them and even then didn't stock all the common components or even common resistor values. Their whole business was about PHONES!!! Because all employees worked on commission there that is what paid the most. Our store manager would only hire kids from the local tech college w