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Back in the stone age when I was a teenager, there were no personal computers, no phones smart enough to do much of anything except ring. We depended entirely on local stores for most things. There were a lot of things you just could not get locally. If you wanted something out of the ordinary, or a good deal on something you turned to a catalog or a great long-listing ad in a specialist magazine, and unless you were one of the very few with a new fangled credit card, you mailed in an order with an old fashioned bank check.
I used to by lots of things by mail, and I'd have my favorite places to buy things that specialized in one type of thing or another. For what passed for electronics in those days one of the best places was Allied Radio. You could get anything from a package of resistors, to turntables, shortwave transmitters, high end complete sound systems of many brands, electronic kits of all kinds and more. About the time personal computers were beginning to exist, a boom in sound systems was happening, you easily could buy a decent music set up locally, and Allied Radio that stocked everything just couldn't compete. Sadly they went out of business fairly quickly. Their competitor Radio Shack hung on for many years selling their own brand of very cheaply made equipment, and some of the bits and pieces that used to be in the back of the Allied Radio catalog.
The computer era has been hard on a lot of businesses, that made money briefly and faded away. In the St. Louis area there was a bottom-of-the-barrel department store chain (the original store had dirt floors!) called Grandpa Pidgeon's that catered to blue collar folks especially, with surplus household items of all kinds, often near bottom-of-the-barrel quality on many items, but rugged clothing for workers and farmers and often a bit of a discount on brand name items you could also get at other stores. It was a low price, big box store before Walmart made that a thing across the country. They made tons of money. Expanded from one store to a dozen. Put a concrete floor in their original store and so on. Then computers came along. A computer store looked like easy money in those days. Obviously the owners of Grandpa's didn't think quality computers belonged in their low-rent department store so they opened their own chain of computer stores with a different jazzy name, mostly selling Apples and their accessories. It was a bad gamble. They lost just about everything extra they'd made in the decades before. Then Walmart came along with slightly nicer stores. About the time I left St. Louis, Grampa's money troubles caused them to sell out completely.
When the computer boom was in full flight, my brother and I gravitated to the ads of a California outfit called Fry's Electronics. My brother's older son lived close to one of their brick-and-mortar stores and just raved about it. My brother and I never ordered anything from them, but we kind of drooled over their stock. When I moved to Phoenix there was a Fry's at the far end of town. I happily made the 60 mile round trip a few times to shop and buy things there I knew they'd have. It was within months when Fry's opened a second Phoenix store and the round trip dropped to about 7 miles. I loved going there when I was bored. I spent good money there on TV's, computers, monitors, software of all kinds even bought a washer and a dryer there. The 2008 recession seemed to hit them hard but far from fatally, then they bet heavily on 3D home TVs and that seemed to be more than they could deal with. When that fad fizzled, they stopped stocking as many TVs as they once had. They stopped stocking the latest software and I stopped going. There were never any of their stores in Tucson. Yesterday, I heard they were closing all their stores. It's sad to see these businesses go bad then die altogether.
I used to by lots of things by mail, and I'd have my favorite places to buy things that specialized in one type of thing or another. For what passed for electronics in those days one of the best places was Allied Radio. You could get anything from a package of resistors, to turntables, shortwave transmitters, high end complete sound systems of many brands, electronic kits of all kinds and more. About the time personal computers were beginning to exist, a boom in sound systems was happening, you easily could buy a decent music set up locally, and Allied Radio that stocked everything just couldn't compete. Sadly they went out of business fairly quickly. Their competitor Radio Shack hung on for many years selling their own brand of very cheaply made equipment, and some of the bits and pieces that used to be in the back of the Allied Radio catalog.
The computer era has been hard on a lot of businesses, that made money briefly and faded away. In the St. Louis area there was a bottom-of-the-barrel department store chain (the original store had dirt floors!) called Grandpa Pidgeon's that catered to blue collar folks especially, with surplus household items of all kinds, often near bottom-of-the-barrel quality on many items, but rugged clothing for workers and farmers and often a bit of a discount on brand name items you could also get at other stores. It was a low price, big box store before Walmart made that a thing across the country. They made tons of money. Expanded from one store to a dozen. Put a concrete floor in their original store and so on. Then computers came along. A computer store looked like easy money in those days. Obviously the owners of Grandpa's didn't think quality computers belonged in their low-rent department store so they opened their own chain of computer stores with a different jazzy name, mostly selling Apples and their accessories. It was a bad gamble. They lost just about everything extra they'd made in the decades before. Then Walmart came along with slightly nicer stores. About the time I left St. Louis, Grampa's money troubles caused them to sell out completely.
When the computer boom was in full flight, my brother and I gravitated to the ads of a California outfit called Fry's Electronics. My brother's older son lived close to one of their brick-and-mortar stores and just raved about it. My brother and I never ordered anything from them, but we kind of drooled over their stock. When I moved to Phoenix there was a Fry's at the far end of town. I happily made the 60 mile round trip a few times to shop and buy things there I knew they'd have. It was within months when Fry's opened a second Phoenix store and the round trip dropped to about 7 miles. I loved going there when I was bored. I spent good money there on TV's, computers, monitors, software of all kinds even bought a washer and a dryer there. The 2008 recession seemed to hit them hard but far from fatally, then they bet heavily on 3D home TVs and that seemed to be more than they could deal with. When that fad fizzled, they stopped stocking as many TVs as they once had. They stopped stocking the latest software and I stopped going. There were never any of their stores in Tucson. Yesterday, I heard they were closing all their stores. It's sad to see these businesses go bad then die altogether.
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