geekhack
geekhack Community => Off Topic => Topic started by: SCTony on Sat, 14 November 2009, 20:46:25
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I have a long-standing passionate dislike for all things Tandy, and this just reinforces my opinion. I have a digital timer that I purchased from Radio Shack some years ago and I have always had difficulty with the day/hour/minute set buttons. I took it apart today to see about cleaning the contacts and this is what I found -
-- the contact buttons are held on with packing tape. There must be a better way. I have not bought anything from R/S in a long time as I have never been satisfied with anything that I have purchased there. Arrrgh. LOL
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I have a mild dislike for radioshack in the sense that the employees think they know what they are talking about, and they suggest the wrong product to you. Also, I bought an A/C adapter for my PocketPC there, and it broke within a week of use. Lesson learned: buy from ebay.
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day before breadboard project is due, find out radioshack sells pre-cut wire lengths, watching all the suckers cut it themselves in the final hours
not the most efficient use of money but time was very important
and the colors helped organization
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One of the problems with Radio Shack is the pressure from management to sell wireless phones. The employees that actually know the stuff inside the store get weeded out in favor of the salespeople who just push wireless constantly.
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Radio folks have been dubbing RS "Cellphone Shack" for years. Seems they don't sell that many radios these days (and even if they do, chances are employees are clueless about them). That used to be quite different (http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/).
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Radio Shack- You've got questions, we've got blank stares.
Or in the case of my local Shack, I walk in and they ask me the questions!
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I used to love my local Tandy/RS shop as a kid, we had many happy hours messing about with the TRS-80s until they would throw us out.
Sounds like they abandoned the enthusiast market in favour of more consumer-product focus around the time they shut down (most of) their UK stores. Maplin went the same way but they are still good places to shop.
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Radio folks have been dubbing RS "Cellphone Shack" for years. Seems they don't sell that many radios these days (and even if they do, chances are employees are clueless about them). That used to be quite different (http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/).
That site is great! I spent much of my down time while working at RS perusing old catalogs we had in the back of the store.
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I worked there as a high school kid a long time ago. Then it was a pretty cool place and everybody actually knew something. They sold a lot more wall parts than appliances in those days and if somebody asked you for a resistor you better have asked him carbon or metal film...I had a lot of fun working on the first Trash 80s when they came out.
I haven't been in one of their stores in probably 20 years now.
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Radio folks have been dubbing RS "Cellphone Shack" for years. Seems they don't sell that many radios these days (and even if they do, chances are employees are clueless about them). That used to be quite different (http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/).
I worked at Radio Shack for a year back in the 90's. I was an amateur radio enthusiast, and back then you could still find some 2 meter ham radios in their stores and special order the rest. These days you can't find any, they told me to check a truck stop to see if they had any when I asked a few years ago.
It was pretty bad as far as pay if you couldn't make commissions from selling cellphones and computers, and the asking people for their contact information was completely idiotic which thank god they've stopped that now. It's slowly gotten even more consumer appliance oriented, and as radio has been replaced by the internet/cell phones they've stopped selling basically any radio equipment. That's why they're trying tried to change their name to "the Shack" now. lol Even their parts bins have been wittled down to practically nothing now. When their stores around here threw out the majority of their bins they had like a 75% off sale, so I basically bought their entire stock of everything they had so I have a supply for a long time of junk. lol
America really needs a national Fry's. An electronic super store. I really miss them since I moved away from California.
That said, Radio Shack keeps me in little yellow wire connectors, and basic soldering supplies, and for that alone, if that's all they had, they're still a handy utility. lol
They also have a good thing going with the website, and their local stores, they're basically a place to pick up orders from the web. You can ship things from their website to a local store with free shipping. I've bought a lot of parts for computers from them that way. They have really good deals occasionally on things like power supplies and hard drives on their website, although I would never buy a graphics card or memory from them.
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I've got a calculator from Radio Shack and 35 years later, it still works!
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there's a lot of crapola at the 'Shack, for sure, but still a few half-decent things -- I picked up a decent Yagi antenna there for $25 and it's been on my roof for three years now faithfully giving me HD TV... not that network TV is really worth watching.
My main use for RS is as an emergency source for random electronic needs -- need a USB cable in a hurry? You can get one at RS cheaper and with far less hassle than at Worst Buy. I'd never buy any gadget at RS that I needed to be reliable, however.
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A friend of mine is a long time Radio Shack employee. She's worked her way from entry level to managing a few stores. The key is, as was mentioned, her ability to push cell phones on people.
She just keeps pushing, and we are all interested to see how many stores they'll let her manage before they realize she lied on her application and never even graduated from high school or used a computer, lol.
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Well, I don't like RS at all, but I do have a few Tandy products which I simply adore. Mainly my Tandy 102 and 200 computers, and a Tandy Portable Disk Drive II which works with them. Stellar little machines. Of course, they were designed for Tandy by Kyocera...
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Another Radio Shack Fail :smile: I hooked up an old speaker-level to line-level converter to record some albums and wouldn't you know it - Radio Shack had wired one of the leads backwards, so the left and right channels were out of phase. Radio Shack never fails to fail.
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The PS/2 adapters at RS are the best I have found. (I'm talking about the $15 one that has the oval plastic thing with a wire coming out either end, not the real cheap ones) I still own the first one I bought years ago. It's now at work on my M4 but before that I've used it for every Model M / Northgate / SMK85 and any other PS/2 keyboard and it has yet to fail.
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Well I decided to give RS another try today. I needed a transistor- here's how it went when I called them up: Me- Hello, do you sell transistors? RS- Yes we do! (cheerfully). Me- OK. I have a part number... RS- Let me get someone to help you [hands the phone to co-worker and I hear "...Look up this guy's transistor. (snickers)" RS- Hi, can I help you? Me- Yes, I am looking for a transistor. My part number is IRF 3205... RS- Uh...we don't have any way to look it up. Me- OK... RS- Uh...have you checked our website? Me- No....Thank you.
Radio Shack- America's Tekolnogy Store (or something like that). LOL I am done with RS (again). I tried.
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Well I decided to give RS another try today. I needed a transistor- here's how it went when I called them up: Me- Hello, do you sell transistors? RS- Yes we do! (cheerfully). Me- OK. I have a part number... RS- Let me get someone to help you [hands the phone to co-worker and I hear "...Look up this guy's transistor. (snickers)" RS- Hi, can I help you? Me- Yes, I am looking for a transistor. My part number is IRF 3205... RS- Uh...we don't have any way to look it up. Me- OK... RS- Uh...have you checked our website? Me- No....Thank you.
Radio Shack- America's Tekolnogy Store (or something like that). LOL I am done with RS (again). I tried.
Like I was saying, radio shack is just a shipping depot for their website mostly these days.
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Never ever buy a cell phone from Radio Shack with service from another provider(is there any other way). My HTC inspire started dialing everyone spontaneaously and after going to two Radio Shack Store, including dwhere I bought it and 2 Att stores, none would honor any warranty and replace my phone even though I had ATT insurance. They sent me back and forth to each other untill I had enough. Finally called Texas for corporate customer service only to be screwed over again by mother Tandy.. Then ATT refused to honor their warranty because I quit using the nightmare and put my sim card in a dollar store phone I had for years, so I could make calls. I was polite, I was right and there is no take care of the customer mentallity in Texas. Never buy another battery from them in a hurricane.
josh tanner
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I used to work at RS. I remember fondly the "force feed" replenishment process, and the wonderful items we'd get. My all time favorite has to be a watch. It was in very plain blister packaging, with "EL TIEMPO" across the top in a sort of blue/red gradient. The watch was of the "5 token" Chuck. E. Cheese variety, and said the time in Spanish when you pressed a button. Not sure who the target market was.
There were other gems as well... "Doggy Doorbell", "Massaging Bath Pillow" (literally a removable vibrator inside of a memory foam pillow), etc...
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who goes to the shack(the name they want to be branded as now) other than to buy the odd transistor? oddly the shack is the only place now that i can find 30awg wire for my mods, so i have to pay 6 bucks in shipping for lots of crappy thin wire.
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The only time I've ever set foot into a Radioshack was when I needed some Artic Silver 5 and didn't want to pay/wait for shipping.
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I remember when I was a kid not only did they sell useful stuff there but they had a tube tester right there in the store so you could bring in your tubes from your radio or TV and test them all..
I realized that the store bore no resemblance to the one I remembered when I was in one a few years ago and actually had the sales droid ask me "what's a diode?"
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I went to Radioshack to find some deoxit for my reciever to clean out all the pots. The guy at the counter told me that I should order it online because that is not something you are going to find at an electronics store. Drove for another 15 minutes to a Hi-Fi store I had never been to and the first thing I saw was a whole shelf devoted to deoxit and vintage audio gear care. That was really the only time I have ever been in a Radioshack so I cant really judge them all. But thinking about it Radio-"Shack." why would you want to buy electronics from a store that calls itself a shack.
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RS actually does sell their own house brand tuner cleaner, but it's not as good as real Deoxit.
As for the name, it does sound a little dopey, but ages and ages ago they were a real store, kind of like a Fry's or something. It's only maybe in the past 30 years they've devolved into the bowl of suck that they are today.
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RS actually does sell their own house brand tuner cleaner, but it's not as good as real Deoxit.
As for the name, it does sound a little dopey, but ages and ages ago they were a real store, kind of like a Fry's or something. It's only maybe in the past 30 years they've devolved into the bowl of suck that they are today.
The one I went into did not even carry any kind of tuner cleaner. It was not that small of a location either it was pretty big. Although I have used some of the audio equipment that radioshack used to manufacture (they are actually manufactured by radioshack) and they were actually pretty decent. It was not Marantz or Pioneer but still decent nonetheless.
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But thinking about it Radio-"Shack." why would you want to buy electronics from a store that calls itself a shack.
A “radio shack” was the place you worked on your radio gear, because your wife wouldn't let you keep it on the kitchen table. c.f. ham shack (http://www.google.com/search?q=ham+shack)
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A “radio shack” was the place you worked on your radio gear, because your wife wouldn't let you keep it on the kitchen table. c.f. ham shack (http://www.google.com/search?q=ham+shack)
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hmm the more you know I guess.