What Happened to America's Electronics Stores?

[Music] [Music] this is the parks mall in arlington texas there's nothing specifically awesome about this mall it just happens to be the mall i grew up around in fact there were three malls i shopped at as a kid and this was one of them another one was called the forum 303 mall which was torn down years ago the other one was called the six flags mall and it too was also torn down years ago of course there are plenty of other malls in the dallas fort worth metroplex like the hewlett mall or the galleria dallas i never visited these as a kid we also had the tandy center mall which i've talked about before but it was also demolished a few years ago so the only thing special about the parks mall is that it's the only one of my three childhood malls that remains standing today which makes it more interesting to talk about because we can compare what it is like today versus in the 1980s one problem that has plagued me with making a video on this topic is the sheer lack of multimedia like pictures and video of the insides of these electronic stores and shopping malls and places that i wanted to talk about and it's not for a lack of trying in fact when i was much younger on many occasions i tried to take a video camera or even a still camera into various electronic stores or shopping malls you know what always happened that's right security always told me to leave in fact one time they even confiscated the film out of my camera these places were extremely paranoid about people taking pictures inside of their stores and i never quite figured out why i actually asked the security guard one time as he was escorting me out exactly what the reason was and his he said it was because they didn't want competitors to come in and document the prices on their products and you know i counted that with like well couldn't they just walk in with a piece of paper and a pencil and write them down or better yet just grab the catalog that you give away to pretty much every customer that comes in for free which clearly documents all the prices of all of the products and i wasn't really giving a good answer to that question but i don't think that that was the real reason i think it was an excuse i'm not quite sure what the real reason was for not allowing photographs but whatever it was it wasn't just me uh basically nobody was able to take pictures in these places and well you can kind of get away with it now because everybody carries a camera in their pocket there just isn't hardly any video or pictures to be found from the 1980s or 90s of the inside of these places but i do have this this is a little window into the past of the park's mall this is a layout of the mall during the 1980s and so we're going to take a little virtual look at the various electronic stores in the mall at that time granted most of these stores are stores that sell clothing shoes jewelry or whatever stuff that nerds like me really don't care about but there were a number of electronics and otherwise nerd worthy stores for me to shop at during that time for example we had babbages now for those that don't remember babbages was a software store now um clearly this photo is from a later time as you can see they're selling games like halo and whatnot but in the 1980s this is where we bought software for our commodores apples ataris among other things the next door is camelot music this is where we went to shop for our cassette tapes and later compact discs electronics boutique was another software store we had here in the mall in fact i think this photo here was actually taken at the parks mall because this is the exact layout of the one that we had anyway again this is where we would shop for commodore or nintendo games later on they actually started putting amigas up on display for people to play with and check out the games next we had music land this was a competitor to camelot again we bought cassettes and compact discs in here and don't forget radio shack and while i'm sure everyone remembers radioshack some younger people might not remember radioshack the way i do in the 1980s they were a store full of cool electronic gadgets many of which just couldn't find anywhere else like this talking clock which i've had since the 1980s 5 17 p.m or roby jr which i've also had since i was a kid and don't forget the armatron and while this is not my original model it's pretty much exactly the same but this is also the place you'd find portable computers like these or even pocket computers when nobody else was selling them at the time one of my christmas rituals was to look through the radio shack catalog and circle the things that i wanted for christmas and give it to my grandparents and then usually buy me one or two things that i'd ask for and that is how i came to be in possession of this roby jr which uh this was a product that was only available at radio shack and i've actually had this in my possession since i was 12 years old and i did in fact get this for christmas a lot of radio shack products were rebranded japanese products that simply weren't for sale in the usa under any other brand name such as the pocket computers or even the model 100 and some products like this keyboard were also available for sale in other stores under the casio brand name however the radio shack that existed in the last decade or so before their bankruptcy didn't hold much resemblance to the radio shack i grew up with in the 1980s anyway back to the parks mall so so far i've shown five of my favorite stores that are now gone but there's a lot more we actually had this store here called the att store now the funny thing about the at t stores you might be thinking well we still have those now but we don't at least not the kind of at t store we had back in the 1980s if you walked into that store what you would have seen are landline telephones like these and they actually had a variety of different types of telephones hundreds of them actually designer telephones garfield telephones uh telephones that looked like they were antiques you know things like that but they were all landline telephones even the cordless phones they had were still designed to work off of a landline they didn't sell cell phones in the store you could get cell phones down at radio shack but not at the att store and so the interesting thing is i have looked and looked and looked all over the internet and i cannot find a single photograph showing what the inside of the att store looked like during the 1980s because when you search for it all you find are pictures of the modern att store so i'd love to be able to show you what it looked like it was actually a pretty cool place for nerds to go we also had a tilt located here this was an arcade very similar to the type of arcade you could see in the movie war games and while tilt is still in business in some locations the one here in the mall has been gone for decades next up on the list we had a ritz camera and this was the store that carried everything you might need for photography and as you can imagine with the invention of the digital camera this place went the way of kodak we also had a kb toy store located here and you might think gee why would you care about a toy store well besides toys they also sold quite a bit of nintendo and sega genesis stuff here and while not inside the mall we had a toys r us right outside the mall that shared the same parking lot so while not shown on this map i always considered it part of the mall and toys r us carried not only game consoles but actual computers like commodore and atari plus you can find neat things there like the fisher-price pixel camera and of course both kb toys and toys r us are both gone today we also had two bookstores b dalton books and walden books and i used to go to these stores to find books on programming as well as my favorite monthly computer magazines like ahoy or compute's gazette and while we still do have a bookstore in the mall today it's a barnes noble instead and the last thing on the map i wanted to mention is sears they used to have quite a large electronics department in fact this exact sears location is where my dad took me and my brother and bought us new computers of which i picked out a commodore 128d in fact i still remember my dad having to drive around here to the back to pick up the computers that being said sears just recently went out of business as you can see that it's all boarded up however the electronics department has been gone for a long long time already and there's one more story i wanted to mention at the mall and that's suncoast motion picture company and it doesn't show up on this map because the store wasn't added until about a year after this map was printed but if i remember correctly it was right up here and this was the place i shop to find all my favorite movies and tv shows on vhs tape and eventually even laserdisc and so out of all these fun stores in the mall literally none of these exist today and what's worse it isn't like they were replaced by competitors there are literally no electronic stores music or video stores in the mall at all unless you count game stop which doesn't exactly have a bright future as such for the last couple of decades there hasn't been much of any good reason for me to even go there all that remains are clothing stores and all of the other things that us nerds just don't care about but it's not just them all my parents bought my first vic-20 at a store called best which has been gone for decades now and some of my computer equipment also came from service merchandise which was part of that forum 303 mall that i said was demolished years ago we had a computer store here called computer city which has been gone since the 1990s and don't forget circuit city although i think they sort of deserve to die after trying to unleash that horrible divx format on the world comp usa was another great computer store that's been gone for a long time and another store that was actually in the parks mall during the 1990s was sharper image and they had a lot of neat electronics gadgets but also disappeared a long time ago of course everyone knows blockbuster video i can't count how many videos i rented from them uh and about 20 years ago me and a friend of mine put a live fish in their return box we had just caught it out of the lake it was about the size of a video cassette so it fit just fine then we filmed the crime so we could laugh at it for decades and well you know here we are still laughing at that um anyway uh moving along we also had this really cool store called incredible universe now unfortunately they didn't last more than a year or so went out of business and the building that they were in was bought out by fry's electronics who occupied it up until just recently and i'm sure everyone has heard the news by now that fry's is officially out of business putting one of the last nails in the coffin of electronic stores and you know it wasn't just large electronic stores like these there were lots of smaller independently operated electronic stores all over the country too many to count in fact that have all suffered the same fate so what happened to these stores why did they all die out over the last 20 years admittedly some of the earlier ones that died in the 80s or 90s were probably due to bad business practices however i think all of them that died in the last 20 years or so can be attributed to three specific factors the first and possibly most important problem was the invention of the smartphone to illustrate exactly what i'm talking about let's take a look at this old radio shack catalog from 1985 and imagine how these products would sell today oh look vcrs who needs that oh look uh portable stereo systems who needs that when you have a smartphone in your pocket portable cassette recorders for dictation who needs that portable cassette players for your music again who needs that link media more home stereo stuff oh look cassette players for your car stereo who needs that cb radios for communicating on the road who needs that ooh landline telephones who uses those anymore even cordless phones um more portable stereos alarm clocks does anyone still use those even more alarm clocks including some fancy talking clock portable televisions i mean who needs that when you can watch anything you want from a device in your pocket yet even more clocks pages and pages of calculators i mean who needs one of these when everyone has one in their pocket already oh and a pocket pager to keep you in touch with family who needs that oh and automatic telephone answering systems yeah does anyone still have one of these and um portable computers but why bother when everybody carries a super computer in their pocket or even pocket computers kind of pointless these days that's just the radio shack catalog but don't forget some of the other important things that disappeared like video cameras i mean sure some people still buy them for professional use but the average citizen has no need of such a thing same goes for still cameras no need for those portable gps systems sort of went away for the most part since everyone has one in their pocket now but it's not just the electronics devices that went away but also all of the supporting products for example why would an electronic store have aisles and aisles worth of space for cassettes or cds or even videotapes or dvds for example and nobody buys their computer software from a shelf anymore i mean we download it from the app store imagine taking the menu at taco bell and just blotting out eighty percent of the items on that menu and saying that nobody was ever going to buy those again and what's worse is there would be no increase in sales of the remaining items on the menu either and that would reduce taco bell from a major player in the food industry to just a small niche and a food truck or something i mean it would destroy their business and that's essentially what the smartphone has done to electronic stores but it's not the only cause the second nail in the coffin is of course the dramatic cost reduction of electronics i mean just as an example i take a look at this ad from 2001 here a decent living room size tv could cost as much as 3 thousand dollars and if you wanted a plasma tv around this time the cost was as high as fourteen thousand dollars um you either had to be wealthy or put it on a payment plan that today you can go into best buy and buy a similar size tv for a little over four hundred bucks so i mean let's imagine the profit margin on such an item is 10 considered average these days um that means that they make 40 for selling you a nice living room tv as opposed to 300 that they would have made back in the 90s and if you account for inflation it would really be more like 500 so with most of the electronics items the profit margin was literally 10 times higher back in the 90s than it is today this is most likely one of the reasons they have ridiculous prices on things like hdmi cables and try to scan every buyer with some kind of extended warranty because there isn't enough profit to be made on the electronics items themselves and that brings us to the last nail on the coffin which is online shopping and more specifically ebay and amazon i mean why drive to the store and sit through traffic just to look at a smaller selection of stuff than what you can find online instead you can order from the convenience of your smartphone wherever you happen to be probably pay a little bit less for the product and have it at your doorstep in a day or two and so these three things are why i believe the electronic stores of yesterday went out of business and they're never coming back and the sad part about this is there's a culture that has been essentially lost to time um it's impossible to recreate the shopping experience that we had back in the 1980s i mean i i don't want to give up my smartphone or online shopping but i do miss being able to go into a variety of stores and look at all the gadgets and gizmos that they had on the shelves and trying to decide you know which was the one i just absolutely couldn't live without um you know but that's all that's all history these days and and i don't think people unless they were born in that era i don't think people will ever be able to experience it again which is a somewhat unfortunate but anyway that wraps it up for this episode so as always thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: The 8-Bit Guy

Views: 682,462

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Id: dyuk2cbEZfs

Length: 15min 9sec (909 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I miss Fry’s as well as “Borders Books & Music”. I could spend hours in these places, a structured way to let your mind wander.

[u/WUT_productions]

I still remember FutureShop in Canada. NCIX, another computer retailer closed a few years ago.

We still got Canada Computers, Best Buy, and Memory Express.

If any of y'all nostalgic for Toys R Us we still have em here.

[u/-jp-]

Oh boy. I don't usually get into meta-criticism but that wallpaper in David's new studio is more than a bit much. With all the crazy angles and contrast it's actually physically uncomfortable to look at. :\

I'm sure it looks fine in person so maybe all it needs is something in-frame to establish perspective, like the counter he always used to stand behind.

[u/bantamw]

The thing that keeps them alive in the U.K. is white goods / domestic appliances. Companies like AO (Appliances Online) tend to do very well, as does Curry’s.

In the US, most people seem to buy the same fridge freezer, washer & dryer. In the U.K. we have a huge selection of different domestic appliances (maybe a choice of a few hundred different washing machines, for example), and this is what keeps companies like Curry’s alive. And whereas Walmart sells domestic appliances in the US, the equivalent supermarkets in the U.K. (Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda) don’t tend to sell white goods like fridge freezers or washing machines - only TV’s. (Although Sainsbury’s did buy Argos which was a huge ‘everything’ catalogue shop - when you talked about ringing things in the Radio Shack or Sears catalogue, U.K. kids would do it in the Argos catalogue - Ashens does some good stuff about it)

But we no longer have the electronics stores per-se either. Tandy (radio shack) went bust, as did Comet, Dixon’s got merged into curry’s, maplin (who were awesome for components), Toys R Us. In fact much of the high street is closing in the U.K. and the pandemic has tipped many companies that were struggling over the edge. HMV (our main record store) is perpetually going bust and being bought and reopened. But that was due to supermarkets and later Amazon. There are little glimmers of light such as Richer Sounds who sell TV’s and Hifi or CEX (computer exchange, and yes, you say it how you think you would, which causes much consternation for TV and radio adverts!)

Many department store chains are closing or are in financial trouble - John Lewis (like sears and also had one of the best electronics departments of any department store) is shutting lots of stores and Debenhams has gone pop.

[u/antdude]

I miss the old days. :(