Now they’re just $2339! http://i.imgur.com/lRewNyk.jpg
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Completely unrelated, but I read your username as ‘stink badgers’, which my inner 5-year-old found highly amusing. I’m now searching for the cloth so I can clean my dinner off my iPad.
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The quality of their products depended on the actual manufacturer. RS house brands, outside of the TRS-80s, were usually made by someone else, sometimes a subsidiary (e.g. Memtek), other times not. My first set of really decent headphones was Realistic-branded, but made by Koss.
There is still one Shack near my house that has a set of bins with resistors, caps, chokes, etc. I figure that wall must have been overlooked by the clueless upper management when they changed over to selling cellphones that you can buy anywhere and r/c toys which are fun, but not big volume sellers.
Note to self: visit RS tonight.
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I sat on the federal jury that awarded an ex-store manager over $1Million. It was appalling to learn of Radio Shack’s practices in regard to their employees. It was my opinion the plaintiff deserved more than he received in this case based on the evidence. http://tinyurl.com/ms26pjg
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These days it’s a challenge to buy consumer electronics, cheap or pricey, that aren’t Asian-made. But as one of Radio Shack’s 17 customers last year, I can tell you that they’d found a way: my outlet adaptor set was manufactured in Moldova, if I’m interpreting the runes on the Xeroxed instructions correctly. And it was very cheap, in both senses of the word: it cost less than $10 for a whole assortment of plugs, and they were made of plastic about the thickness and rigidity of a blister-pack. (Got the job done, though.)
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I used to work at RadioShack, back in 2008. It’s worse than Walmart. The Walmart deal is: Work for minimum wage, <=20 hrs a week, try to be friendly and helpful.
The RadioShack deal is: Work for minimum wage, <=20 hrs a week, you must sell post-paid cellphones by any means necessary, even if the prepaid deals are mathematically better. You must lie, you must trick the marks into buying cellphones and plans they can’t afford. You must sell insurance. You must use fear, because RS insurance is a scam. You must tell them we don’t share their information, even though we do.
Walmart might be worse for the community, but at least it doesn’t force its employees to act like sociopaths.
Working at RatShack, we never sold a battery holder that was wired parallel. Not one. They were all in series.
Although there was one wonky battery pack we sold, that had 9-volt style nipple caps on top that, combined with a shorted 9-volt battery adapter, could let you wire it up as a parallel circuit.
They build it. They had the technology. At least, in the 1970s they had the requisite parts in the drawer. When I served my 2 years there, the drawers were almost always empty, and were mostly just LED bulbs of various wavelengths, and resistors.
Would have been nice if the clerk could tell me that, or if the package had any labeling, or if the clerk even knew what voltage was…
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Yeah. When I was there, Boost mobile just came out with its $50/mo plan that had unlimited Talk and Text. Which we sold along side shittier prepaid services like Virgin and AT&T prepaid
None of the other carriers we sold for had anything close. Sprint had a 2000 min/mo plan for ~$150 a line. Verizon had 1500 min/mo for $120 a line, and AT&T had 1000 min/mo for $99 a line. All of them charged for texts in 300, 1000 and Unlimited tiers, with unlimited usually being an extra $30.
So, Boost was the obvious choice. Except I only earned commission on postpaid Sprint AT&T and Verizon deals, and those were the only profitable deals for the company.
So I was put under immense pressure to sell a shitty deal to people who were literate and at least minimally numerate. Which meant that as soon as Boost came out, my days were numbered. The corporation set everyone up to fail and managed to stick its dick in a beehive on that one.
Not bitter… Well maybe a little bit. If only the executives could read and write and understand which of two numbers was bigger, I could have quit on my own terms, instead of being laid off due to “lack of performance”.
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