I'm guessing 90% of the time they don't have what we need.

I'm guessing two years since we've been in one and walked out with something. It might be more like 5 years though.

I think that I went in there looking for a battery, and as I recall, the guy pissed me off so badly that I left without buying anything.

I bought a massively overpriced power cord for my laptop there this year, only because it was New Year's Eve when the old one crapped out on my and I couldn't go the entire weekend with no internets.

They're abandoning their core market of ham radio enthusiasts.

They lost that market years and years and years ago. You'd have a hard time getting the parts for a crystal radio there, let alone a ham set.

There was definitely a time in my life when it was fun to go in there. I may have been 10.

I still have fun in a Radio Shack.

Okay, maybe "fun" is overselling it a bit, but I have cause to go into Radio Shacks all the time. I cannot count the number of times we've needed some particular part for a show and the nearest Radio Shack was the closest available place to go.

And I have no problems blowing off obsequious RS staff.

Yeah, we go to Radio Shack a lot, still, generally for overpriced cable adapters.

But I do remember when it was a destination, full of nifty bits of things you could plug into other things.

And also, that I always got followed around in there, just like my Navajo buddies. Dude! I'm not going to steal your pseudo autonomous robot dinosaur! What am I going to do, stick it up my shirt?

Oh, yeah, and I also just bought a bigass printer to replace the printer Tino killed when he broke a piece of it off in his paper jam fury.

I did it via ebay with a hinky payment option wherein I had to fax my cc info, so I hope all is well and a giant truck pulls up to my house with a new to me printer shortly.

Because a) I need to print, realio trulio and b) the entire printer (refurb Ricoh Aficio AP4510) cost about the same amount as a new toner cartridge for the broken printer.

Also, also, does anyone want a non-working bigass printer? Heh.

When you need a cable from a Radio Shack, it's an emergency. But I hghly recommend cajoling the staff into double checking the back to see if they have any of their bargain cable, even if they're sure they don't. Most of the time, they only put the gold-tipped BS on the racks, but have the standard, cheaper cables hidden away.

I'm printered out. We've still got a brand new printer in a box that's been in a closet for a year and a half. It came free with the laptop. I tried to give it away once, but it didn't take.

Then there is the network laser printer, the large format ink jet printer, the regular ink jet printer, and the laser printer I hooked up to my computer just for book stuff (I pulled it out of a closet where it had been sitting for something like three years).