A goldmine of Radio Shack goodies is up for auction

Your story is practically the precise opposite of mine. Of course, my parents didn't have the money for an Apple ][. A TRS-80 Color Computer at $400 was a non-trivial purchase for a high-school teacher in rural Western Pennsylvania.

Businesswise, unfortunately, the founder Radio Shack died right before the computer revolution kicked in. Then, Radio Shack had a couple of embezzlement problems right at critical points so they missed the computer revolution and then missed the internet revolution.

And even THAT would have been recoverable had they decided to be "mom and pop" tech support in less urban areas (it took forever for Circuit City and Best Buy to enter certain areas).

The collapse of Radio Shack can be attributed to an obvious lack of sales support. And by that, I mean, for the sales people that they actually hired, what they gave them to sell, and what the operation as a whole needed to do to perform was absurd.

Radio Shack, as a job, was/is a step above fast food, and a step below clothing, in terms of status. If Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons wasn't selling comic books, he'd be a Radio Shack employee (if you were lucky). The people attracted to that job were not serious sales people, and the things they were made to sell were mostly undesirable, or worse incomprehensible without expertise. The store was filled with trash items that sold at christmas and broke by valentines day. All of this, right next to certain niche and high-end items that rarely moved.

Because Radio Shack sold a lot of cheapskate wares, everything bought from Radio Shack felt like a gamble (as the store's very name should suggest). The revolving sales associates had distractions about battery sizes mixed in with thousand dollar sales, so if there was commission to be had, they were still forced to swat flies.

Radio Shack was usually a hole in the wall. 900 square feet would probably be a large-ish Radio Shack. Without zones or departments, every Radio Shack employee was always selling everything, which means they were pulled in every direction, and their motivation landed somewhere in between selling fuzzy slippers that sing Jingle Bells in electronic chirps, and selling sub-par desktop competitors to Gateway 2000, without fully understanding or caring about the difference between an Intel 386 and an Intel 486DX.

Because Radio Shack was a high school summer job at best, or a 9 to 5 career move at worst, it's interesting that they lasted decades longer than maybe most people would have expected.

That is probably true. I hired in for Christmas at RS while at junior college as sales person, around 1980. My experience was, at the time, 6800 machine programming and electronics but not C/S or operating systems. They gave us little to no training, I recall some sales self tutorials on the TRS-80 itself, but it was made clear to us we were there to sell things - and at Christmas it was chaos and (especially non-computer) items were flying off the shelves. I lived in a quite technical town and would get questions like "how many pages of memory" or "memory pages" does this have; when I could only refer to how many bytes, one customer stomped out in a huff. But ultimately difficult questions were to be referred to the regional specialist; knowledge was rare and it was not practical even in our town to have a computer scientist or programmer on staff; but people being people, they wanted answers now. Most were reasonable and those that knew enough about computers to ask the hard questions, say from their work, realized it likely took enthusiasts or specialists to answer - not salespeople. Apparently that changed after awhile, maybe when the Radio Shacks went to "Computer Centers" or some such thing.

There may also be nostalgia about the prices. If you look at the old catalogs

http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/

and adjust the prices of hifi and other toys to modern values the products seem incredibly expensive.

E.g. the best LP player + radio + speaker package from 1968 cost around $300 - which would be around $2500 today.

Of course you can spend $25,000 (or $250,000...) on modern hifi. But Radio Shack were always aimed at the mass market and not at esoteric hifi perfectionists.

RS seem to have made a lot of money hyping mediocre products that cost maybe a couple hundred dollars to manufacture and selling them for $1000 to $2500 a go.

I'd be fascinated to know what their operating margins were in the 60s and 70s.

There are several Model 100s and 102s and even a PC-2 pocket computer. I can't say I've ever seen any of those at a thrift store.

Haha. RS customer since the early 1970s, I'm sitting on my recently refurb'ed thrift store Mach One speakers. I'm hoping you are right.

Well, it beat having nothing and in many towns RS was the only way you were going to get parts. Overpriced and way too much packaging but better than none.

What really bugged me about RS/Tandy is their pull-out from Europe. One day they were still taking in customer repairs and downpayments and the next day they were gone, everything shipped to Nanine in Belgium and sold for pennies.

Pure theft.