Staff quality at Radio Shack

Wed Nov 4 16:42:32 CST 2015

Yeah Martin, that too!  I forgot all about the quad balloon deflating!  I was in charge of the repair shop when that happened I think.  

I still have my LR-1500T receiver, and Rectilinear Mini-3 speakers (and two Garrard 90 turntables) from when I sold stereos in the little noisy room.  I got the Rectilinears because I hated the mushy bass coming from Advent and other bookshelf speakers.

I still remember some part numbers even these years later, such as a 1/8 inch stereo mini plug being 99-62101.  Were you there before they added the last digit as a checksum?  When that came out, we had a great time manually calculating the last digit!  And oh, those OCR receipts!  My years in drafting (lettering) paid off when that happened!
Terry (LRE store #22, employee #9 or 19?)

From: Martin 
Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2015 4:47 PM
To: Terry N4TLF 
Cc: lstoskopf at cox.net ; Tacos ; Iain McFadyen 
Subject: Re: Staff quality at Radio Shack

Terry, 

Small world.  I worked in the Hyattsville Lafayette Radio in Hyattsville in the early '70s.

I thought it was their overinvestment in quadraphonic audio gear that did them in.

Martin

On Wed, Nov 4, 2015 at 12:53 PM, Terry N4TLF <n4tlf at wb4jfi.com> wrote:

  Hey guys,
  RS has always been rather poor in general when it comes to the "help".  It got much worse after Tandy purchased them.  I worked at the Lafayette Radio store at Seven Corners back in the late 60s & early 70s, and even then RS was known to be less helpful, according to our customers coming in.  (I worked every position in the store except cashier and manager).  Even then, in general RS stores did not treat their employees very well, which led to lots of employee turnover.  I've heard horror stories over the years about their policies.  So, it's no wonder that virtually nobody sticks around, unless they have a stake in a particular store.  Of course, there are outlier employees who just love the job as well.  Some smart people, including hams, worked at those stores.  Most, not for very long, however.

  Lafayette got killed by over-investing in the CB craze.  RS did similar with the cell phone market and computers, plus their propensity to overcharge for most of what they sell.  Plus, the Internet, with ALL its virtual stores. Why pay a marked-up price at a RS store, when you can get it for MUCH LESS within a day or two elsewhere (and maybe better quality).

  I was sad to see RS go (for the most part), but they mostly did it to themselves.
  73, Terry, N4TLF

  -----Original Message----- From: lstoskopf at cox.net
  Sent: Wednesday, November 04, 2015 3:15 PM
  To: tacos at amrad.org ; Iain McFadyen
  Subject: Re: Staff quality at Radio Shack 

  Ian:  You aren't old enough to remember the old RS.  A lot of those employees were somewhat trained or already knew about electronics.  And they had a good stock of supplies.  Since their near death/near bankruptcy experience and down sizing there are no long term careers there.  Our two have a total of one guy who has been there a long time and knows whats what. Sad that one side of the store has a lonely Sprint sales girl and the other an almost as lonely RS guy.  Most of the computer stuff is gone and they have cheap discounted electronic toys that are still cheaper direct from China on Banggood and the parts cabinets.  And I wonder who in Salina needs a SMA to BNC connector with fake gold....I've go plenty.

  Now Amazon carries their own branded cables, etc. and if you have Amazon Prime you can get them in 2 days post paid.

  Times changed a long time ago...

  Speaking of changes: at coffee today we were discussing the movie: Bridge of Spies, which everyone needs to see.  Powers got shot down by a salvo of nearby missile explosions which stalled the engine.  The Ruskies finally had ones that could get high enough, but no accurate enough for a hit.  Which led to one of the group talking about one of his relatives working on our WW2 project on proximity fuses....the batteries available had a max shelf life or 4 months...supposedly a farm boy told the PhD guys that they needed wet/dry batteries like they bought for the farm.   Was told...ridiculous...how do you charge in a projectile....spin down the barrel would break the liquid container and activate.  Good story anyway.

  Which led to our discussion of the recent Russian plane.....heard yesterday that our guys reluctantly admitted that they saw two heat sources surrounding the affair:  one when the plane blew up and the other when it hit the earth.  I'm sure they didn't want to reveal too much that we could in real time pinpoint an isolated, unscheduled incident in a vast space on a fairly continuous basis.

  And our Ham SDR guys are happy to be up to a couple of dozen SDR receivers on a PC +.  Barry was at Bletchley.  How many gals were there copying CW signals that now could be replaced by a good Skimmer app?

  RS aside,  these are great tech times.

  N0UU

  _______________________________________________
  Tacos mailing list
  Tacos at amrad.org
  https://lists.amrad.org/mailman/listinfo/tacos 
  _______________________________________________
  Tacos mailing list
  Tacos at amrad.org
  https://lists.amrad.org/mailman/listinfo/tacos

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.amrad.org/pipermail/tacos/attachments/20151104/7364ed0e/attachment-0001.html>