Phil Patton worries: The Shack seems to be getting awfully fancy.
We love it and hate it, the dependable vendor of cables and connectors, odd parts and whole systems, with its notoriously ugly logo and store design. But the Shack has played a valuable role for at least 30 years: a WalMart of high tech, it has dispensed the glue that holds together popular electronics. It is the plastic pocket protector of stores. But however often snickered at, Radio Shack has done more than any company - more than Apple or IBM - to bring the computer to your home and office.
Radio Shack's very image - mundane, unpretentious - has helped demystify, in succession, each new technology that comes along. It has combined great American traditions - a do-it-yourself attitude, gadget- ophilia, and a disregard for overrefined nicety - in the process. The Shack is a little temple of the quick and dirty, the extemporaneous and expedient. And every Radio Shack is a kind of neat module, like a fast food outlet - like a piece of its own equipment, plugged into the local infrastructure.
Its very name inspires an instant vision of both clerk and customer: heavy enough to have a second chin, badly shaven, bespectacled, in a light-blue, short-sleeve polyester shirt and two randomly deployed pimples. In fact, I am that customer, you are that customer, a third of us each year are that customer. It's a $5 billion company - the McDonald's of electronics.
There are items in the case I never see anyone buy, but someone must: the electronic guitar tuners and lighted hand microscopes, the auto- ignition noise suppressors and pillow speakers, the vibrating alarm clock, and the metal detectors old men car-speak as a "treasure recovery system."
A more recent addition to the inventory is a $14.95 bargain called Tandy's Money Machine: How Charles Tandy Built Radio Shack into the World's Largest Electronics Chain, by Irvin Farman, sold the way Colonel Sanders used to sell his autobiography - right beside the biscuits and gravy.
On the cover is Tandy, his head topped by either a cheap toupee or coiffeur that provides an amazingly convincing simulacrum thereof. Tandy's official story is well worth perusal for all students of American culture and technology; its overriding theme seems to be the shortsightedness of Wall Street, which failed to share Charles Tandy's vision. We read of Tandy's never-ending thirst for coffee and champagne, his chewing of cheap Panatellas, his refusal to let a heart attack slow him down until he died in 1978.
I always associated our local Radio Shack, out on the highway strip in the same sort of cinderblock building as the local barbecue shack, with the 1963 tune Sugar Shack by the Fireballs. The truth, as we learn from Farman's book, is that the name was borrowed from the "radio shacks" set up aboard ships in the first days of wireless.
In 1921, a London-born Bostonian by the name of Theodore Deutschmann opened his first radio store, a block from the site of the Boston Massacre. William Halligan, one of Deutschmann's first employees and later the founder of Hallicrafters, suggested the name. Back then, Radio Shack catered to hams and radio buffs - selling batteries and tubes by mail and retail.
By the 1950s, the stores had multiplied and gone into the high-fidelity business, touting a device called the "Audio Comparator," a then-novel switching system that allowed the customer to mix and match components and speakers in the listening room. But management made a mistake: The stores began selling on credit and soon had a pile of uncollected receivables. The bank pulled the plug.
Enter Charles Tandy, whom company literature regularly describes as a cigar-chomping maverick. Tandy started out in his family's leather parts business in Ft. Worth, Texas. Restless and acquisitive, he had dabbled in electronics and sensed its potential. He bought the ailing chain of nine Radio Shack stores in 1962 and proclaimed a vision of the electronics boom that astounded contemporaries: a thousand stores around the country. He outdid himself: Today there are 6,637 Radio Shacks around the world.
Tandy reduced the product line, simplified the sales process to cash and carry, and expanded into manufacturing. Radio Shack rode to prosperity on the succession of technological waves that gave us modern electronics. Besides Hi-Fi, Radio Shack sold CB radios (the company pitched the gadget as a "survival tool for the energy crunch of the '70s"). Tandy's own handle was "Mr. Lucky."
Yet nothing was as surprising and now characteristic of the way Radio Shack took on new technologies than its approach to personal computers. The TRS-80, creation of a 24-year-old engineer named Steve Leininger, made Radio Shack as important as Apple or IBM in the popularization of the microcomputer. Introduced in 1978 with cassette tape storage, the legendary "Trash 80" sold for $600.
Soon Radio Shack had a two-month waiting list and was selling more computers than IBM. Bill Gates, then a programming hack with an operating system for sale, gave BASIC to the Shack for a flat fee. That was one of the last times Gates was soundly beaten in a deal.
When Radio Shack looked for a maker of monitors, its first order was for a mere thousand, and only RCA took the bid, offering a discontinued TV set stripped of tuner and sound. RCA gave the Shack two design esthetics: simulated wood grain or "Mercedes gray." Radio Shack opted for the latter, and so was born a fateful tradition: the notorious silver-gray color scheme.
The breakup of AT&T added do-it-yourself phone wiring to the mix - another whole bank of jacks, wires, and such - in their little plastic bags, alongside the capacitors and resistors, auto-sound tweeters and controls, TV-antenna clamps and 8-ohm switchers.
Always, Radio Shack had a sort of low-rent aura to it. As high tech associated with high style, Radio Shack persisted in gray plastics. Its computer monitors always showed a certain lack of sharpness and when the company produced graphics for its software, there was a quick-and-dirty look to the icons and fonts.
With its bullet-hole lettering (some '60s vision of futuristic writing), based, if you had to make a guess, on the imagery of the printed circuit board - the Radio Shack logo was a sign of dweebdom. The Shack's signage still sports a generic typeface in red, white, and blue - a sort of Perotesque approach to providing information about products and prices. But the Shack is still the place to go to find the device to switch your dish, your VCR, your cable, and get the right picture on the screen.
As Hi-Fi performance crept down in price and the buffs were forced to quibble over the last two percent of performance, the Shack's Realistic components and speakers were reviewed in the stereo magazines with a mixture of surprise and disdain.
Radio Shack stereo equipment took on a certain anti-chic chic. "Whacha got in your system?" a buff might ask. You could pronounce the brands Denon and Hafler and Cerwin-Vega, then casually add "and the tuner, uh, Realistic." (A stereophile friend owns huge exotic Scandinavian speakers but knows that Radio Shack Minimus speakers are the ideal second pair. Exactly 71/16-inches high, the Minimus is regularly $49.95, but Shack fans know they go on sale twice a year for $29.95.)
It is a badly kept secret that the Shack is also a great toy store, where you can pick up a kid's radio with Mickey Mouse-shaped ears for controls, a fireman's hat with siren and light on top, and a whole range of remote-control cars, trucks, and monsters. When I try to compile a mental list of the things I've bought there over the years, the Space Patrol kids' walkie-talkie set is at the top, right above the TV wire- crimping tool, and, most recently, a cable for a PC Jr./ Epson interface (three tries, with a very smooth exchange policy).
Appreciation of Radio Shack extends far beyond the polyester shirt set. A friend who served in Strategic Air Command in the days of B-58s and vacuum tubes once found himself without a vital piece of equipment after a tube failed. The Air Force spec book listed the replacement part at $10,000. A mound of requisition paperwork loomed before him until a sharp-eyed enlisted man took a look at the broken piece. Forty-five minutes later, he was back from Radio Shack with the replacement part, having saved the taxpayers about $9,990.
Once, nursing an automobile whose electrical system suffered from an elusive short, I had to make my way up Interstate 95 feeding it new fuses every few miles. What struck me was how the highway landscape made the location of the next Radio Shack up the road, in the strip mall, by the grocery store, as predictable to me as a big bass feeding ground is to the experienced fisherman.
Today, many of us Radio Shack fans are made uneasy by the new Radio Shack super stores and the arrival of, yes, name brands. To see Sony and Panasonic sharing shelf space with Tandy and Realistic is jarring. Now that Radio Shack owns Grid, a slick portable computer company, and has opened Disney-like superstores (called Incredible Universe, each several acres in size), we worry that the Shack seems to be getting awfully fancy.
Just this May, Tandy Corp. announced four new types of stores - Radio Shack Express, Computer City Express, Famous Brand Electronics, and Energy Express Plus. Shack Express stores will be smaller versions of the original, which sounds fine to me (Shack Lite?). But Computer City and Famous Brands, well, you can guess where they're heading. And Energy Express, which will take the form of unmanned kiosks in major malls, will specialize in "name-brand, high-impulse, hard-to-find batteries," according to the company. I guess this is progress.
A recent Radio Shack TV commercial featured flowers, low light, and a general ambiance worthy of a cosmetics ad. When the familiar old logo came on, it seemed like an embarrassed afterthought. Pretty soon they'll be hiring some high-power outfit to come up with a sleek new logo. But it would be a shame to lose the grungy old Shack. When the next generation of new technologies arrive, I want to be able to say, "Oh, the holovision? That ol' matter transporter? Yeah, picked it up at the Radio Shack out on Route 23."
