All authors should be required to view http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/html/1984/ http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/html/1984/ before making conclusions. I

All authors should be required to view http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/html/1984/ http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/html/1984/ before making conclusions. I arbitrarily selected 1984 because my dad was occasionally working part time at RS between programming contracts and it was before the arrival of Best Buy and Walmart decimated consumer electronics sales. True, there were maybe one quarter of the pages of the catalog devoted to parts. However, consider the difference in commission between a 59 cent small signal NPN transistor, vs the commission on a $349.95 police scanner or a $279.99 dual cassette deck or even a $47.95 alarm clock radio. All that stuff came from Radio Shack before Best Buy or Walmart. I think we bought a TV from Sears once when I was a kid. I grew up with a Model 3 and Coco 1, 2, and 3 with microware OS-9 and the weird pre ansi early K+R C language compiler and all that. Radio shack scanners, even some ham radio gear. The highest profit margin in the store was parts. The problem is nobody buys parts. So you make more money off one clock radio per week than 5 transistors per month. Youngsters in the HN readership don't understand that Radio Shack used to sell consumer electronics, so they think RS never did and it always lived entirely off 59 cent transistor sales. Not so. (edited to add business advice that when you have a main line and a side line and the main line goes away, that doesn't automatically mean you've always been a leader in the side line, and comically younger people are accusing RS of trying to become a best buy, when RS WAS the best buy before BB existed...) Basically RS lost consumer electronics in the 80s to 90s with the arrival of the big box stores and then it was all down hill till this year. It just took them longer to die than the typical victim of the big box stores.