“I bet RadioShack was great once,” reminisces former employee Jon Bois in a widely-shared 2014 article for SB Nation. “I can’t look through their decades-old catalogs and come away with any other impression. They sold giant walnut-wood speakers I’d kill to have today. They sold computers back when people were trying to understand what they were. When I was a little kid, going to RadioShack was better than going to the toy store. It was the toy store for tall people.” However, by the mid-2010s, it had transformed into a “panicked and half-dead retail empire” and in 2015, it eventually declared bankruptcy.
Despite its downfall, the digital archive at Radioshackcatalogs.com preserves all those catalogs for free browsing. The first volume dates back to 1939, when Radio Shack (originally spelled as “Radio Shack”) had already been serving customers for seventeen years. The catalog’s opening letter states, “This catalog is intended to serve as a comprehensive and accurate listing of what we believe to be the essential and unusual requirements of the radio amateur, the serviceman, laboratories, industries, and schools.”
Although service and growth were no longer hallmarks of the company during Bois’ time, RadioShack’s journey chronicled in the first 50 years of RadioShack catalogs mirrors the evolution of American consumer electronics. Initially catering to tech-savvy individuals, the company’s offerings expanded over the years to cater to hobbyists and eventually ordinary people seeking electronic and later digital enrichment in their professional and personal lives.
Some Americans ventured into RadioShack through building crystal radios and science projects in childhood, while others frequented its stores to assemble their first hi-fi systems component by component. Some entered the world of personal computing through RadioShack’s TRS-80, affectionately dubbed the “Trash 80” by computer enthusiasts. Personally, my grandfather’s love for RadioShack led to our home being filled with inherited RadioShack products when he passed away, from Realistic radios to Tandy computers.
“This is a consumer technology business that is built to work perfectly in the year 1975,” remarks Bois. Indeed, the 1975 RadioShack catalog showcases a treasure trove of remote-controlled stereos, eight-track car tape decks, calculators promising a “pocketful of miracles,” and do-it-yourself intercoms, pocket lie detectors, and “color organs.” Sadly, RadioShack failed to embrace the internet like many other mid-20th-century commercial enterprises and was ultimately overshadowed by it, a fittingly ironic fate for the once go-to technology store. Explore the archive of RadioShack catalogs here.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
