"Hey guys, let’s put a live fish in the drop slot at the video store." I imagine that came at the "tail"-end of a wild night out… Glad you got it on video!
I’m from the UK, but worked in Philly for 9 months in the early 90s…going round the electonic shops after work and at weekends was mind blowing! I bought a Sharp Zaurus ZR-5000 from Radio Shack, and my work colleagues in London were amazed I could send a fax from any phone socket with it! Science fiction 🙂
My dad actually used to work at service merchandise…I hear his story all the time 🤣.
The manager was telling my dad that they were not able to get rid of a speaker they were trying to sell…so the manager looked over at my dad and said "would be a shame if something happened to them"….well my dad took that as a sign and went out back and threw them all in the trash lol…the next day my dad goes back into work and the gm says where did all the speakers go…my dad says he took care of it like the manager wanted….the manager swore he didn’t tell my dad to throw them all out…and they fired my dad 🤣.
Anyways that’s my story about service merchandise…this would be the one next to the Westland mall. In Westland, Michigan back in the 80s.
Unfortunately they demolished about 10 years back…but it did stand with the service merchandise still out front for much of my childhood.
I miss Fry’s most of all, but as a kid in the 70s we had a couple of smaller electronic stores, where you could buy individual components or complete items. I specifically remember $100 rotary dial telephones, this being at a time when virtually the only way to get a phone was from the phone company, and you paid a monthly price for it on your phone bill. Also, they had a really cool B&W 5" tv originally priced at $99, but in every new catalog the price would drop by $10, but by the time it was cheap enough for me to consider, my parents bought me a very nice 12" GE tv, which was probably far better that the 5" one, for nearly the same price.
Its the same here in the UK. all the cool stores from the 80’s where there was more of a proliferation of electronics products and great places as a hub for enthusiasts are all gone. same with the departments stores. in the same way sears is gone in the states – the big dept stores in uk gone too ; some real big names. everything from smaller independents to large staple names are all gone. Malls in UK now are just activity and food emporiums now…. no "real" shops.
There is no room for locally owned retail businesses in the United States. We don’t like to do business with humans so we turned that awful movie The Net into a documentary.
BizAndProductReviewson February 15, 2022 at 2:29 pm
I used to love those days in the 1980’s and 1990’s, when you could have fun shopping for tech and also experience arcades. I hadn’t thought out why it had happened. Thanks for clarifying why it did. So many things have changed about how society does things and experiences life.
Attention attention go to B&H NY I am so disappointed I have not been there yet. I’ve seen some video of the inside of the store and it seems like it is exactly what you would expect.
There’s also still some privately owned RadioShack they’re just all more than an hour and a half away from me.
Like this video. It reminds me myself in mid 80-s, being a kid hanging out in Moscow’s local electronics/records supermarket. There were a lot of various customer electronics made in USSR selling there, and the interesting thing was that sails person typically was checking device in front of customer prior he purchased it. Some times after switching on, the unit it was burned out with beautiful tail of smoke!
I was born in the late 80’s… I hate that RadioShack is gone. The fact that there was at least a 95% chance they had the random transistor, diode, cap, or whatever you needed. I still have the RadioShack battery charger I had as kid, as well as my 30 Watt soldering iron.
How about this for your answer “it’s private property and they don’t want you walking around filming. No explanation required.” Who the hell wants to shop why people are walking around filming? That doesn’t make sense to you?
Back when the physical world shopping experience was at its peak. What do we have to go to today now? It’s just banks and restaurants… pretty soon movie theaters are next mark my word. They just want to keep you in the house streaming and ordering online..
It’s so sad we don’t have many anymore. I watch videos from Japan and there’s lots of little shops with all kinds of electronic components. Maybe instead of giving our school kids iPads we should be giving them Raspberry Pis and maker kits.
Fry’s while having a large selection was just so poorly managed. Placing those aggressive security twits at the doors demanding to see receipts and then, right before their demise, they had implemented the cash grab of _mandatory_ delivery charges of any TV larger than 55". Meh… they won’t be missed.
Just came across this, wow, Fry’s is gone!?! I live outside the USA but have been going to California for around 34 years (on and off) and ALWAYS stopped by Fry’s to check out the latest stuff. I recall going to the very first store in SJ, then many times to the Fremont store when it was just a small store on the corner of Warm Springs and Mission Blvd (between 680 and 880), before moving to a larger store on Osgood Road some years ago. Visited others around the Bay Area as and when. Started going down hill when Zorba’s Deli closed just around the corner, followed by Lucky’s being taken over! Oh, well., I guess California will never be the same again!
When Steve Jobs introduced the I-Phone, thereby kicking off the Invasion of the Smart Phones, it was in actuality another huge step in the decline of Western (and Eastern) Civilization. A new branch of the human race was created — The Twiddlers. Both one’s fingers and their attention span are hopelessly hooked on these little whatchamathingies.
Best Buy stores still exist, but walking thru their electronics sections is like visiting an alien world, much different than around the year 2000 and before.
Pity that Fiber Optic technology wasn’t developed much sooner and more advanced way back when. Video, Audio and Data can go over Fiber Lines in ways that wi-fi can’t always match. Unless someone can say otherwise, over-the-air transmissions do have their limits.
Technically, Babbage’s merged with Funcoland to make GameStop which later also bought out Electronics Boutique (which had shorted their name to EB Games at some point). Yes, their future is grim…but they are TECHNICALLY the only remaining company from your list.
I miss the 90’s video game section in Best Buy the most. The gigantic hanging Mario and Sonic in the center of the store, and several demo machines. Man, the death of demo machines in stores in general sucks. At least Best Buy still exists at all. My most convenient location closed last year due to greedy mall management trying to hike rent too high though.
I remember BEST. I got my first CD player there. It’s getting to the point where most brick and mortar stores will be closed, and virtually everything will be ordered online.
Michael Micole Lee LeCroyon February 15, 2022 at 3:04 pm
I’m 27 and I feel like I’m the last generation to experience this. I loved getting physical CDs from Hastings and CD Warehouse when I was a kid. I havent done that in probably 13 years and I miss it dearly. There was something special about having the CD booklet, talking to the person behind the register about the CD. Ah, im not old, but I feel it lol
in the uk radio shack was called Tandy, we also had maplin. i used both to buy electronic components and i really miss their kits to build radios and clocks etc. i learned to solder and basic faulting techniques building them. They just couldnt compete on price with online component stores. if i cant wait then i use Amazon who deliver to me same day for free. But if i’m in no rush i can buy on ebay direct from china and it never fails to surprise me how cheap components have become. for example 100 leds for £2 delivered.
Brian Miller & Sylviaon February 15, 2022 at 3:08 pm
Yeah man. I remember seeing the box for Ultima IV in my locally owned, Alaska small business computer store back in 1986? Parents buying it for me? Taking it home, on my old school Apple IIe, monochrome green screen? Oh man. priceless memories.
Unfortunately there was one thing you kind of had going for you if you went to a store and that was you can get something reasonable quality now it doesn’t really matter is in-store or online half the stuff on Amazon is from China and not even the good stuff from China. They can make some good things but everything’s getting drowned out by these really cheap cheap cheap cheap products.
I so totally miss Ritz camera or just about any place that did one hour in place development of film.
Something you probably should mention as one of the reasons why the mall’s are dying is the completely crazy nuts cost per square foot to lease or rent space. At one time I had a good idea of what the smaller store tenants were paying and it just makes a person scratch their head and go who would get into an agreement like that. Whats worse is some of these stores could likely make it if the lease cost was reduced but mall owners and managements would rather have an empty space than lease it out for less than what they consider the "going rate". Welcome to dead mall america.
I have very fond memories in the late 1980’s when I was in high school of going to Radio Shack at the mall on Saturday and literally spending 2 to 3 hours sitting in the isles while shuffling through individually-wrapped diodes, resisters, capacitors, potentiometers, timer chips, and endless spools of different sizes and types of wire when I was building my own specialized shortwave radio antennas, signal boosters for my HAM Rig, and for building crystal radios and other gadgets. I built a 750,000-Volt stun gun as a school science project without anyone ever giving it a second thought back then. It was likely easily lethal, but no one cared. And all the parts – and even the instructions to build it – were easily obtained at Radio Shack! Ah, the good old days. Now that I think of it, I think I got my first bootleg copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook from an employee at that Radio Shack for a couple dollars…
Hey why not revive it ! Open up an 80’s-90’s style electronics store/museum ? Charge a small entrance fee and even sell some neat stuff ? I think there is a market for that. 😉
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"Hey guys, let’s put a live fish in the drop slot at the video store." I imagine that came at the "tail"-end of a wild night out… Glad you got it on video!
Our Electronics Boutique got bought by GameStop, became GameStop, and one of the business last year.
Vintage Stock and Best Buy are all I have in my area.
I’m from the UK, but worked in Philly for 9 months in the early 90s…going round the electonic shops after work and at weekends was mind blowing! I bought a Sharp Zaurus ZR-5000 from Radio Shack, and my work colleagues in London were amazed I could send a fax from any phone socket with it! Science fiction 🙂
My dad actually used to work at service merchandise…I hear his story all the time 🤣.
The manager was telling my dad that they were not able to get rid of a speaker they were trying to sell…so the manager looked over at my dad and said "would be a shame if something happened to them"….well my dad took that as a sign and went out back and threw them all in the trash lol…the next day my dad goes back into work and the gm says where did all the speakers go…my dad says he took care of it like the manager wanted….the manager swore he didn’t tell my dad to throw them all out…and they fired my dad 🤣.
Anyways that’s my story about service merchandise…this would be the one next to the Westland mall. In Westland, Michigan back in the 80s.
Unfortunately they demolished about 10 years back…but it did stand with the service merchandise still out front for much of my childhood.
I miss all the "maker" focused stores
I miss Fry’s most of all, but as a kid in the 70s we had a couple of smaller electronic stores, where you could buy individual components or complete items. I specifically remember $100 rotary dial telephones, this being at a time when virtually the only way to get a phone was from the phone company, and you paid a monthly price for it on your phone bill. Also, they had a really cool B&W 5" tv originally priced at $99, but in every new catalog the price would drop by $10, but by the time it was cheap enough for me to consider, my parents bought me a very nice 12" GE tv, which was probably far better that the 5" one, for nearly the same price.
Its the same here in the UK. all the cool stores from the 80’s where there was more of a proliferation of electronics products and great places as a hub for enthusiasts are all gone. same with the departments stores. in the same way sears is gone in the states – the big dept stores in uk gone too ; some real big names. everything from smaller independents to large staple names are all gone. Malls in UK now are just activity and food emporiums now…. no "real" shops.
There is no room for locally owned retail businesses in the United States. We don’t like to do business with humans so we turned that awful movie The Net into a documentary.
I used to love those days in the 1980’s and 1990’s, when you could have fun shopping for tech and also experience arcades. I hadn’t thought out why it had happened. Thanks for clarifying why it did. So many things have changed about how society does things and experiences life.
Attention attention go to B&H NY I am so disappointed I have not been there yet. I’ve seen some video of the inside of the store and it seems like it is exactly what you would expect.
There’s also still some privately owned RadioShack they’re just all more than an hour and a half away from me.
Like this video. It reminds me myself in mid 80-s, being a kid hanging out in Moscow’s local electronics/records supermarket. There were a lot of various customer electronics made in USSR selling there, and the interesting thing was that sails person typically was checking device in front of customer prior he purchased it. Some times after switching on, the unit it was burned out with beautiful tail of smoke!
I’m glad to actually have a Microcenter that sells actual electrical components near me.
I know I do get gouged on the price a bit, but when you are just doing weekend hobby stuff, it’s nice to not have to wait on certain specific stuff.
I was born in the late 80’s… I hate that RadioShack is gone. The fact that there was at least a 95% chance they had the random transistor, diode, cap, or whatever you needed. I still have the RadioShack battery charger I had as kid, as well as my 30 Watt soldering iron.
Here is a commercial showing the AT&T store https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vI7768Sdu8M
Easy, but because if YouTube itself, I cannot give an answer.
coming to the realization that tech has become boring because everything is on one thing now and everything is compatible with each other.
How about this for your answer “it’s private property and they don’t want you walking around filming. No explanation required.” Who the hell wants to shop why people are walking around filming? That doesn’t make sense to you?
Back when the physical world shopping experience was at its peak. What do we have to go to today now? It’s just banks and restaurants… pretty soon movie theaters are next mark my word. They just want to keep you in the house streaming and ordering online..
Rayne Louisiana probably still has theirs
Most of electronic stores now replaced by restaurants, cafes, and beverage stalls because they’re tend more profitable due to "social media era"
Also that fish in the blockbuster return slot made me roll laughing
It’s so sad we don’t have many anymore. I watch videos from Japan and there’s lots of little shops with all kinds of electronic components. Maybe instead of giving our school kids iPads we should be giving them Raspberry Pis and maker kits.
Fry’s while having a large selection was just so poorly managed. Placing those aggressive security twits at the doors demanding to see receipts and then, right before their demise, they had implemented the cash grab of _mandatory_ delivery charges of any TV larger than 55". Meh… they won’t be missed.
Now Radio Shack was awesome.
I wish I could’ve been alive in the 90’s so I could have the experience of shopping at some of these stores.
Just came across this, wow, Fry’s is gone!?! I live outside the USA but have been going to California for around 34 years (on and off) and ALWAYS stopped by Fry’s to check out the latest stuff. I recall going to the very first store in SJ, then many times to the Fremont store when it was just a small store on the corner of Warm Springs and Mission Blvd (between 680 and 880), before moving to a larger store on Osgood Road some years ago. Visited others around the Bay Area as and when. Started going down hill when Zorba’s Deli closed just around the corner, followed by Lucky’s being taken over! Oh, well., I guess California will never be the same again!
Some observations ….
When Steve Jobs introduced the I-Phone, thereby kicking off the Invasion of the Smart Phones, it was in actuality another huge step in the decline of Western (and Eastern) Civilization. A new branch of the human race was created — The Twiddlers. Both one’s fingers and their attention span are hopelessly hooked on these little whatchamathingies.
Best Buy stores still exist, but walking thru their electronics sections is like visiting an alien world, much different than around the year 2000 and before.
Pity that Fiber Optic technology wasn’t developed much sooner and more advanced way back when. Video, Audio and Data can go over Fiber Lines in ways that wi-fi can’t always match. Unless someone can say otherwise, over-the-air transmissions do have their limits.
Technically, Babbage’s merged with Funcoland to make GameStop which later also bought out Electronics Boutique (which had shorted their name to EB Games at some point). Yes, their future is grim…but they are TECHNICALLY the only remaining company from your list.
I miss the 90’s video game section in Best Buy the most. The gigantic hanging Mario and Sonic in the center of the store, and several demo machines. Man, the death of demo machines in stores in general sucks. At least Best Buy still exists at all. My most convenient location closed last year due to greedy mall management trying to hike rent too high though.
I am one of the very little young people that loves old stuff
I remember BEST. I got my first CD player there. It’s getting to the point where most brick and mortar stores will be closed, and virtually everything will be ordered online.
Circuit City omg!
Felectronics Fry’s
So you are still laughing at two counts of extreme animal cruelty you did as a teenager? How sad!
Fun fact: We still have Toys R Us in Canada!
Where was this taken again exactly? I own the store in Chicago that hosted the Robot Date Night event on those flyers shown at 3:26. Just curious…
I really miss Frys Electronics here in the Bay Area. Really sad to see them overgrown and abandoned now.
I’m 27 and I feel like I’m the last generation to experience this. I loved getting physical CDs from Hastings and CD Warehouse when I was a kid. I havent done that in probably 13 years and I miss it dearly. There was something special about having the CD booklet, talking to the person behind the register about the CD. Ah, im not old, but I feel it lol
At least we still have best buy. Why have they remained in business when all others have failed?
Ironically it’s the resurgence of LPs keeping some of the music stores alive now.
in the uk radio shack was called Tandy, we also had maplin. i used both to buy electronic components and i really miss their kits to build radios and clocks etc. i learned to solder and basic faulting techniques building them. They just couldnt compete on price with online component stores. if i cant wait then i use Amazon who deliver to me same day for free. But if i’m in no rush i can buy on ebay direct from china and it never fails to surprise me how cheap components have become. for example 100 leds for £2 delivered.
Yeah man. I remember seeing the box for Ultima IV in my locally owned, Alaska small business computer store back in 1986? Parents buying it for me? Taking it home, on my old school Apple IIe, monochrome green screen? Oh man. priceless memories.
Unfortunately there was one thing you kind of had going for you if you went to a store and that was you can get something reasonable quality now it doesn’t really matter is in-store or online half the stuff on Amazon is from China and not even the good stuff from China. They can make some good things but everything’s getting drowned out by these really cheap cheap cheap cheap products.
I so totally miss Ritz camera or just about any place that did one hour in place development of film.
Internet killed the retail stars
HeathKit was another electronics store and national catalog that was around in the 50’s through the early 70’s and seemed to disappear.
The internet happened
I googled 1980 at&t store and found 1 or 2 so I’d look again David might be more available now
Something you probably should mention as one of the reasons why the mall’s are dying is the completely crazy nuts cost per square foot to lease or rent space. At one time I had a good idea of what the smaller store tenants were paying and it just makes a person scratch their head and go who would get into an agreement like that. Whats worse is some of these stores could likely make it if the lease cost was reduced but mall owners and managements would rather have an empty space than lease it out for less than what they consider the "going rate". Welcome to dead mall america.
I have very fond memories in the late 1980’s when I was in high school of going to Radio Shack at the mall on Saturday and literally spending 2 to 3 hours sitting in the isles while shuffling through individually-wrapped diodes, resisters, capacitors, potentiometers, timer chips, and endless spools of different sizes and types of wire when I was building my own specialized shortwave radio antennas, signal boosters for my HAM Rig, and for building crystal radios and other gadgets. I built a 750,000-Volt stun gun as a school science project without anyone ever giving it a second thought back then. It was likely easily lethal, but no one cared. And all the parts – and even the instructions to build it – were easily obtained at Radio Shack! Ah, the good old days. Now that I think of it, I think I got my first bootleg copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook from an employee at that Radio Shack for a couple dollars…
My blind grandmother had the same exact talking clock that she used for decades, all the way into September 2021
Hey why not revive it ! Open up an 80’s-90’s style electronics store/museum ? Charge a small entrance fee and even sell some neat stuff ? I think there is a market for that. 😉