There are many beloved major retailers that have closed their stores in recent years—Toys "R" Us, Blockbuster Video, Zellers—But there's one retailer that doesn't get as much love as the others. A store with so much to tell that yet most people ignore, A store which I say is the most innovative yet misunderstood companies in the history of American business. With over 8000 stores across across several countries, it was once the biggest electronic store in the world. That chain was Radio Shack.
Yeah, A lot of those points in that introduction may seem hard to believe now, As Radio Shack was one of those stores that you knew about and maybe had one in your town, but never went to. And when you did go into one, you weren't greeted by rows of TVs stereos, or any other electronics like in most electronics stores, You were greeted with phones, RC toys and electronic components. But there was a time when the chain really thrived, gained a dedicated fanbase, and made several contributions to the tech world along the way.
And that's exactly what I'm going to talk about as this month I'm making my own version of #SepTandy, A celebration of all things Tandy through the month of September.
There was already a collective YouTube celebration of SepTandy 2 years ago and a month long series of videos by Mr Lurch's Things before that, But as they have not done one since then, I decided to take up the torch and make my own series of blogs I'll be posting throughout September to show my appreciation for their contributions they've made to the tech world.
But in order to do that, we need to take a little trip back to the beginning. Way back in 1921, two English brothers, Theodore and Milton Deutschmann, founded a store in Boston Massachusetts called Radio Shack which sold parts for amateur radio market.
The name Radio Shack came from the term for a small, wooden structure that housed radio equipment onboard a Navy ship. The new store opened in downtown Boston and was pretty successful selling various parts most of which were left over from World War I. The chain grew even more, opening in a cluster around the northeast United States.
The inside of the first Radio Shack store
They introduced their first mail order catalog in 1939 to expand their market even more and in 1954 introduced to music based high fidelity sound equipment. However, by the late 50s, the company began to lose money due to a lawsuit by Stereo Realist over their private label Realist, (Changing the brand name to Realistic), and overall efficiency problems. As their debt escalated so much, the company was almost close to filing chapter seven bankruptcy.
The brand was already facing the end of its life, But all hope was not lost. Meanwhile, 1500 miles away in the city of Fort Worth, Texas, The Hinckley-Tandy Leather Company had been growing considerably. Founded in 1919 by two friends, Norton Hinckley and Dave L. Tandy, the company began to diversify outside of the modest profits coming in from the retail and leather mail order businesses after coming out of the Great Depression, and entered the consumer hobby markets. By 1961, the company changed it's name to Tandy Corporation, And Dave Tandy's son, Charles D. Tandy became the president and chairman of the board. Tandy was operating 125 stores in 105 cities throughout the United States and Canada.
In 1962 Charles Tandy had learned about the small chain of Radio Shack stores and when he went to the original store in Boston, he saw great potential in the store. Charles was already very interested in consumer electronics, and when he saw the company's financial struggles, he saw an opportunity. So he bought the company for $300,000 which would equal $2,943,139.07 in today’s money. Once in control, Charles came up with a radical new store plan. The idea was to update the chain and primarily target to electronic hobbyists and employ people who were highly educated on the products being sold.
This strategy ended up working well as the company gained $20 million dollars in annual sales within just 2 years, and by 1969, there were more than 300 Radio Shack stores throughout the United States. The timing for the turnaround could not have been better. Because as the 60's became the 70's, A new era for various prebuilt and do it yourself electronics would arrive that would contribute to big sales such as CB radio, early video game systems, and pocket calculators.
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But the biggest new emerging technology market that Radio Shack was able to make a huge profit off of, was the hobbyist computer market. In 1973, former Goodyear Aerospace engineer Don Lancaster designed a device called The TV Typewriter, which was a low cost video terminal that could hook up to a standard tv set. The TV Typewriter first appeared in the September 1973 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine in a six-page article explaining how the device worked, as well as an offer to ship out a larger 16-page version with complete layout plans for a mail-in fee of $2.
The September 1973 issue of Radio-Electronics featuring The TV typewriter
By 1976, Don Lancaster had made many design improvements to the original design and published them in a book called the TV Typewriter Cookbook. The book was a guide on how to not only design design a video computer terminal, but also add various features such as serial interfaces, upper and lowercase character generation, and even color graphics. Naturally, a later edition of the book was sold in Radio Shack stores and since most of the components to build a TV Typewriter could also be purchased at a Radio Shack store, Selling the TV Typewriter Cookbook was Radio Shack's first dive into the computer industry.
The Radio Shack edition of The TV Typewriter Cookbook.
By the next year, Radio Shack introduced a computer of their own. A fully preassembled, all in one unit that was aimed at the average consumer instead of hobbyists much like the recently launched Apple II computer. The result was the TRS-80 computer, Launching on August 3, 1977, for $599.95. it proved to by a massive success selling 500,000 units in just 3 years.
The Radio Shack TRS80 Model 1 (1977).
By the 1980's Radio Shack had become the go to store for home electronics offering them at a reasonable prices as well as having a variaty of stock with new emerging products like early cell phones, RCA's ill fated CED videodisc format, and even more computers such as the IBM compatible Tandy 1000.
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In 1986, they formed Intertan to expand into other markets around the world such as Canada, the UK, Australia, France, Germany, and even Asia and Mexico. In 1990 alone, there were 1400 Radio Shack brands around the world.
As 1996 rolled around, there were over 65,000 stores in the US alone, And with solid in store growth, as well as more stock and services, they were really at their peak.
So if Radio Shack was so successful in the 70s 80s and 90s, Why did they end up going bankrupt in the 21st century? Well, for quite a few reasons. In the late 90s, competing electronics retailers were popping up everywhere from big box stores such as Best Buy and Circuit City, to discount retailers such as Walmart and Kmart which made Radio Shacks once niche market incredibly competitive. Another problem was that Radio Shack had put a large emphasize on cellphones, perhaps a little too much, as they partnered with Sprint and by now almost resembled a phone carrier than an electronics store. And the final big problem was the internet, online retailers like Amazon ate what little remained of Radio Shacks market. Aside from the few enthusiasts that contiued to buy componets for hobby projects, it was just not enough to keep the chain afloat and as a result of all of this, On March 8th, 2017, Radio Shack filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.
With hundreds of thousands of stores left abandoned and thousands of employees laid off, the brand seemed dead. Until July 2018, when the holdings firm that owned the RadioShack name partnered up with HobbyTown USA to open up stores under the brand and in 2020, The RadioShack brand was bought by Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV), a Florida-based company that also purchased other defunct retailers such as Pier 1 Imports, Dress Barn, Modell's Sporting Goods, and Linens 'n Things, who continue to operate the website to this day.
So this concludes the first entry of my SepTandy Spectacular, Tune in next time where we rewind back to 1977 and talk more about the TRS80.
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