My high school/tech school part time job was at a Radio Shack in the Chicago suburbs in the late 1970’s so here are some random memories. Since I was a ham going for an electronics degree, I sometimes did simple customer repairs in the back room for faster turnaround time than the company repair center. The 12V power supplies were the easiest because it was usually fixed by replacing the transformer (blown fusible link). Although some products were poor quality, stereo receivers, scanners, clock radios, antennas & CB’s were good values. Keeping electronics components fully in stock was impossible because they would often zero out many of our orders. At least once a day, I went out to the parking lot to measure swr for a Cber, a service they really appreciated. Many times I had to debunk the myth that cutting your coax to a certain length lowered your swr.
One day I was showing an expensive speaker system to a customer & to my amazement, he cranked the volume, lit a match & held it in front of the woofer. The sound waves blew the match out & he immediately agreed to buy them. Another time, a regular customer came in accompanied by a man with long hair who he called Bud. I sold Bud some wireless intercoms plus other items & when he handed me his credit card, it said “Marlon Brando”. Somehow at that young age, I realized all he wanted to do was walk into a store & be treated normally like anyone else. So with no drama I said it was a pleasure to meet him, shook his hand & rang up the sale. It made sense he visited the store since he lived in the area as a teenager & occasionally returned to visit friends & relatives.
The free battery card was brilliant marketing. Many customers getting the freebie often purchased something during the visit & the markup on batteries was so high, Tandy didn’t lose much giving them away. It baffles me why we sold so many color organs when it was such a cheesy product. Maybe it was like early video games, which were also lame, but it’s all we had.