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Old 6th Jan 2022, 6:27 pm   #1
terrybull
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Default Tandy sale 1991

Thought this may be of interest. Prices are quite a surprise considering average wage in 91.
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Old 6th Jan 2022, 6:40 pm   #2
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

Love it!

I am always interested in the historic pricing of electronics, if only because it shows just what inexorable progress we've made in terms of price/performance/functionality over the last half-century.
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Old 6th Jan 2022, 6:58 pm   #3
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

I think I have one of those mixers. Not bought back then though.
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Old 6th Jan 2022, 6:59 pm   #4
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

You can buy that 'cheap hifi' stuff at a fraction of those prices now.
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Old 6th Jan 2022, 7:45 pm   #5
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

Mega money I see for personal cd player, last new one I bought was about £16.
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Old 6th Jan 2022, 10:08 pm   #6
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

I bought one of those mixers in September 1992. They were still the same price then. Sill got it.

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Old 7th Jan 2022, 12:48 am   #7
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

Even back then, Tandy were relatively expensive. Similar items could often be bought cheaper at other retailers. Nonetheless, I used to like browsing their catalogues or going in their stores, sometimes wishing I could afford to buy that "must-have" gadget. Occasionally I did buy something. That's when the fun started.

When you bought something from Tandy, even small items like batteries or components, the sales person took your name and address. Then you'd receive some Special Offer catalogues in the post. These were also fun to browse through. As I said, the standard prices were quite high. The Tandy Sale prices were closer to the normal prices charged by others and sometimes better. Discontinued products usually had a large price reduction applied.

If a Sale item was temporarily out of stock, you could still buy it for the special offer price by paying for it during the offer period. The sales person would issue a "Rain Check" - a kind of voucher that could be exchanged for the item when it became available again. Another of their marketing tactics was that you'd sometimes get a free gift such as a torch when making a purchase. But the torch came without batteries which you needed to buy separately, hence they made another sale. There was even a Battery Club - you could claim one free standard battery per month just by visiting the store. Of course, while you were there, it was tempting to buy something. I discovered the American Radio Shack stores employed the same sales techniques, perhaps not surprising since they were all part of the same company (InterTAN).

I miss Tandy in a way, although I realise that times have moved on. Electronics have become much cheaper. We can buy online from China and have it delivered for a fraction of the old shop prices. Supermarkets and Pound shops also supply cheap electronics. Consequently few people bother to repair things or build things from kits these days. Tandy gradually became irrelevant. Eventually Carphone Warehouse bought the UK Tandy stores and turned them into mobile phone shops.
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Old 7th Jan 2022, 11:51 am   #8
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

I had that personal CD player, though I recall paying a lot less than that...possibly picked it up in 1992 when it was being replaced by a new model. It lasted a few years, as I recall I still had it when I moved to the USA in 1998 but it died sometime during my time there.

1991 would have been after interTAN became the international arm of Radio Shack. Before 1988 or thereabouts the UK catalogues were almost identical to the US Rat Shack catalogues and prices were more competitive. They also had genuine reductions with their seasonal sales...and a "where is, as is" sale a few times a year where huge reductions were applied to items going out of the catalogue...though whether your local store actually had any of those was a crap shoot.

Still got a bit of Realistic gear from the 80s including the SA-10 mini stereo amplifier which has adorned my workplace for the last decade and must be 40 years old by now. My office turntable is a Memorex branded Tandy special from 1988. What I really miss is the ability to wander to the back of Tandy and rummage through a set of drawers for semiconductors and other components. But that business is long dead really. Last time I was in the USA I found a transistor I needed to repair a 60s portable radio in a Rat Shack in Las Vegas which was closing down, think they let me have it for 50c and wondered if I wanted to buy the entire set of drawers and contents...sad times.
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Old 7th Jan 2022, 12:51 pm   #9
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

Aaaahh, Tandy. Such memories!

A great place to wander into after school and twiddle with/lust for one of their communication receivers. Or maybe collect a free battery, in return for the obligatory squiggle in one's diary.

They were indeed quite pricey, including their components in blister packs. But, if you're suddenly short of stock in the home shack and it's too late to get to Maplin...

Tandy apparently held little interest in recruiting technically knowledgable staff in the UK, in my experience. Any query of a technical nature would prompt rapid flicking through the catalogue and a politely bemused expression!

I briefly worked for Tandy in the mid-1980s. Because I had a modicum of technical knowledge, all customer queries were routed to me by the other sales staff. However, what mattered at Tandy was the ability to sell. I clearly lacked this, so we went our separate ways.

That CD player is a remarkable indicator of the change in the cost of technology. I recall a visit to Argos, several years ago, when I first saw personal CD players at £10 a pop. I stood staring at them in disbelief!
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Old 7th Jan 2022, 1:55 pm   #10
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

Yes I remember the Tandy free-battery Club; they only gave out zinc-carbon ones though. Still, free is free, and if you were giving them out to friends you suddenly found your circle-of-friends was quite large!

Some of us gamed the system; I had three or four 'free battery club' cards in slightly-different renditions of my name, registered to three different addresses [home, my brother's house, my father's office]. To avoid suspicion being raised I'd pick up some batteries during the week and others at the weekend when the store-cletks were different.

The "sale" flyers I remember too - with their "good, better, best" hifi packages. I had a pair of Micronta Minimus-10 bookshelf-speakers which had diecast aluminium cases and sounded quite good fed from a single-ended 6BW6 stereo-amp.
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Old 7th Jan 2022, 2:51 pm   #11
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

Loved Tandy/Radio shack.
Used to go in on a saturday just to play around with the TRS-80s computers and buy components and bits .
They always had interesting and unusual stuff as i recall.

The name still goes on as there is a Tandy online store that sells components and even some valves.
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Old 10th Jan 2022, 11:52 am   #12
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

One of the saddest things about the decline of Tandy/Radio Shack was literally watching the quality of their audio gear slip down year by year.

The Realistic brand had acquired a justified good reputation. I mean who else would hit up TEAC to OEM a reel to reel tape deck and specify that it must be *better* than the corresponding TEAC model? Cassette decks made by Hitachi and JVC....amplifiers either genuinely made in the USA or OEM'd by equally reputable Japanese manufacturers.

Then came the mid to late 80s scramble to "black, plastic crap"....their receivers became adorned with lots of flashing lights and the full specifications which had hitherto been given in the catalogue, gave way to dimensions and weight. Though they even stopped mentioning the weight of their loudspeakers as they got lighter and lighter as the cabinet materials used got cheaper and cheaper. Realistic Mach 1 gave way to Memorex 801 or something similar....wholly inferior product.

Now all their products have a dodgy reputation...but it wasn't always so. My "Micronta" DMM has served me well since the late 80s, and continues to do so.

But the man on the Clapham omnibus stopped buying hi-fi....stopped building his own electrical circuits....and Tandy failed to move with the times, as did the parent Radio Shack. Sad indeed.

There's a website with just about every Radio Shack catalog (US) out there.
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Old 10th Jan 2022, 3:47 pm   #13
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

In a way, you could sat that Tandy fell victim to Amstrad, and couldn't compete with the big box-shifters like Comet.

Same sort of fate as befell Laskys.
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Old 10th Jan 2022, 4:01 pm   #14
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

Just came back into my head. Often on these adverts was a small portable radio powered from a PP3. Claimed output power 250MW. I think the probably meant mW or that PP3 isn't going to last long!
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Old 10th Jan 2022, 4:22 pm   #15
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

Before I discovered Maplins I remember being genuinely excited to go in the Tandy stores. I was magnetically attracted to the test gear section and extortionately priced bags of a few components. Unfortunately 40 years later I am still attracted to test gear it just costs me more now!
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Old 11th Jan 2022, 12:58 am   #16
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

I remember when I first discovered Tandy's and used to buy the single LED's packed in their own individual blister packs.

Now I buy LED's loose in packs of 1000 and think nothing of it. ��
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Old 11th Jan 2022, 4:36 pm   #17
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

Going into Tandy always felt a little exotic for me. They seemed to have US-brand components that I didn't see in Maplin!
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Old 11th Jan 2022, 5:23 pm   #18
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Quote:
They seemed to have US-brand components that I didn't see in Maplin!
Like the mains clock module, it was for 60Hz. I bought one in the 80's from Tandy Cambridge (Cambs. UK), no quibble for the return but they said "we have sold lots, yours is the first to come back". Almost as if they knew...
 
Old 11th Jan 2022, 6:48 pm   #19
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

I built a mains-powered red-LED clock from a Tandy module (bought from their Stafford branch) in the late-1970s; it had little jumper-pads [intended to be bridged by a blob of solder] to select 12/24-hour and 50/60Hz mains.

It also had two timezones; essentially two separate clock-counters, you switched between them by a switch which linked 2 more pads, so you could either make it instantaneous-display-of-the-other-timezone by using a push-to-make switch or a longer toggling by way of a proper single-pole toggle-switch.

It was the first 'thing' I came across whose chip was not encapsulated as a traditional multi-legged DIL device; on this the chip was integrated direct onto the PCB and entombed in a blob of brown epoxy. Worked rather well as a 'radio shack clock' for a few decades.
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Old 14th Jan 2022, 12:58 pm   #20
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Default Re: Tandy sale 1991

Looking for the DC power socket I knew I had in my odds and ends box, I came across these items that I had bought from my local Tandy shop in the 1980's. I have now used the power socket! I never found anything that took that size of power plug.

My bedside radio is a Realistic "Voice of the World" 4-band model. In the garage I use a MW/FM stereo portable bought for a fiver during a Tandy closing-down sale, and an Optimus shoebox cassette recorder that is used on the rare occasions that I need to record telephone conversations.
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