This is the Parks Mall in Arlington, TX. There’s nothing specifically awesome about this mall.
It just happens to be the mall I grew up around. In fact, there were 3 malls I shopped at as a kid.
This was one of them. Another one was called the Forum 303 mall,
which was torn down years ago. The other one was called the Six Flags mall, and it too
was also turn down years ago. Of course there are plenty of other Malls in the Dallas/Fort Worth
metroplex like the Hulen Mall or the Gallaria Dallas. I never visited these as a kid. We also
had the Tandy Center Mall, which I’ve talked about before but it was also demolished a few years ago.
So, the only thing special about The Parks Mall is that it is the only one of my 3 childhood malls
that remains standing today. Which makes it more interesting to talk
about because we can compare what it is like today versus in the 1980s.
One problem that has plagued me with making a video on this topic is the sheer lack of
multimedia, like pictures and video, of the insides of these electronics stores and shopping
malls and places that I wanted to talk about. And it’s not for a lack of trying. In fact,
when I was much younger, on many occasions I tried to take a video camera or even a still camera
into various electronics stores or shopping malls and you know what always happened? That’s right,
security always told me to leave. In fact, one time they even confiscated the film out of my
camera. These places were extremely paranoid about people taking pictures inside their stores and I
never quite figured out why. I actually asked the security guard one time as he was escorting me out
exactly what the reason was, and he said it was because they didn’t want competitors to come in
and document the prices on their products. And you know, I countered that with like well, couldn’t
they just walk in with a piece of paper and a pencil and and write them down? Or better yet,
just grab the catalog that you give away to pretty much every customer that comes in for free, which
clearly documents all of the prices of all of the products. And I wasn’t really given a good answer
to that question. But I don’t think that that was the real reason, I think it was an excuse.
I’m not quite sure what the real reason was for not allowing photographs, but whatever it was,
it wasn’t just me, basically nobody was able to take pictures in these places and and you
can kind of get away with it now because everybody carries a camera in their pocket, there just isn’t
hardly any video or pictures to be found from the 1980s or or 90s of the inside of these places.
But I do have this. This is a little window into the past of The Parks Mall.
This is a layout of the mall during the 1980s. And so, we’re going to
take a little virtual look at the various electronics stores in the mall at that time.
Granted, most of these stores are stores that sell clothing, shoes,
jewelry, or whatever. Stuff that nerds like me really don’t care about. But there were a number
of electronics and otherwise nerd-worthy stores for me to shop at during that time.
For example, we had a Babbages. For those that don’t remember, Babbages was a software store.
Now, clearly this photo is from a later time as you can see they are selling games like
Halo and whatnot. But in the 1980s this is where we bought software for our Commodores,
Apples, and Ataris, among other things.
The next store is Camelot Music. This is where we went to shop for our cassette tapes, and later
compact disks. Electronics Boutique was another software store we had here in the mall. In fact,
I think this photo here was actually taken at The Parks Mall because this is the exact layout of the
one we had. Anyway, again, this is where we would shop for Commodore or Nintendo games. Later on,
they actually started putting Amigas up on display for people to play with and check out the games.
Next, we had Musicland. This was a competitor to Camelot. Again,
we bought cassettes and compact discs in here.
And don’t forget Radio Shack. And while I’m sure everyone remembers Radio Shack,
some younger people might not remember Radio Shack the way I do. In the 1980s they were
a store full of cool electronics gadgets. Many of which you just couldn’t find anywhere else,
like this talking clock, which I’ve had since the 1980s. Or Robie Jr, which I’ve also had
since I was a kid. And don’t forget the Armatron. And while this is not my original model, it is
pretty much exactly the same. This is also the place you’d find portable computers like these,
or even pocket computers when nobody else was selling them at the time.
One of my Christmas rituals was to look through the radio shack
catalog and circle the things I wanted for Christmas and give it to my grandparents.
They’d usually buy me one or two of the things I asked for.
That’s how I came to be in possession of this Robie Jr. This was a product
that was only available at Radio Shack and I’ve actually had this
in my possession since I was 12 years old and I did in fact get this for Christmas.
A lot of Radio Shacks products were rebranded Japanese products that
simply weren’t for sale in the USA under any other brand name,
such as the pocket computers or even the Model-100. And some products like this
keyboard were also available for sale in other stores under the Casio brand name.
However, the Radio shack that existed in the last decade or so before their
bankruptcy didn’t hold much resemblance to the Radio Shack I grew up with in the 1980s.
Anyway, back to the Parks Mall. So far I’ve shown 5 of my favorite stores that are now gone,
but there’s a lot more. We actually had this store here called the AT&T store.
Now the funny thing about the AT&T store. You might be thinking, we still have those now.
But, we don’t! At least not the kind of AT&T store we had back in the 1980s. If you walked
into that store, what you would have seen are landline telephones like these. They actually
had a variety of different types of telephones, hundreds of them actually, designer telephones,
Garfield telephones, telephones that look like they were antiques, you know things like that.
But they were all land-line telephones, even the cordless phones they had were still designed
to work off of a landline. They didn’t sell cellphones in the store. You could
get cellphones down at Radio Shack, but not at the AT&T store. And so the interesting thing is,
I have looked and looked and looked all over the internet and I cannot find a single photograph
showing what the inside of the AT&T store looked like during the 1980s because when
you search for it, all you find are pictures of the modern AT&T store, so I’d love to be
able to show you what it looked like. It was actually a pretty cool place for nerds to go!
We also had a Tilt located here. This was an arcade,
very similar to the type of arcade you could see here in the movie WarGames. And while Tilt is
still in business in some locations, the one here in the mall has been gone for decades.
Next up on the list, we had a Ritz camera. This was the store
that carried everything you might need for photography. As you can
imagine with the invention of the digital camera, this place went the way of Kodak.
We also had a KB toys located here. And you might think gee, why would you care about a toy
store. Well, besides toys they also sold quite a lot of Nintendo and Sega Genesis stuff here.
And while not inside the mall, we had a Toys R Us right outside the mall, that shared the same
parking lot. So, while not shown on this map, I always considered it part of the mall. And
Toys R Us carried not only game consoles but actual computers like Commodore and Atari,
plus you could find neat things there like the Fisher Price Pixl camera.
And of course, both KB Toys and Toys R us are both gone today.
We also had two bookstores, B.Dalton Books and Waldenbooks. I used to go to these stores to
find books on programming as well as my favorite monthly computer magazines like Ahoy! Or Compute’s
Gazette. And while we do still have a bookstore in the mall today, it’s a Barnes and Noble instead.
And the last thing on the map I want to mention is Sears. They used to have quite a large
electronics department. In fact, this exact Sears location is where my Dad took me and my brother
and bought us both new computers, of which I picked out a Commodore 128D.
In fact, I still remember my dad having to drive around here to the back to pickup the computers.
That being said, Sears just recently went out of business as you can see that it is all boarded
up. However, the electronics department has been gone for a long, long time already.
And there’s one more store I wanted to mention at the mall. And that’s Suncaost Motion Picture
company. It doesn’t show up on this map because the store wasn’t added until about a year after
this map was printed. But if I remember correctly, it was right up here. And this was a place I
shopped to find all of my favorite movies and TV shows on VHS tape and eventually even laserdisc.
And, so of all of these fun stores in the mall,
literally none of these exists today. And what’s worse, it isn’t like they were replaced by
competitors. There are literally no electronics stores, music or video stores in the mall at all,
unless you count Gamestop, which doesn’t exactly have a bright future. As such, for
the last couple of decades there hasn’t been much of any good reason for me to even go there. All
that remains are clothing stores and all of those other things that us nerds just don’t care about.
But it’s not just the mall. My parents bought my first VIC-20 at a store called BEST, which has
been gone for decades now. Some of my computer equipment also came from Service Merchandise,
which was part of that Forum 303 Mall that I said was demolished years ago.
We had a computer store here called Computer City which has been gone since the 1990s. Don’t forget
Circuit City. Although I sort of think they deserved to die after trying to unleash that
horrible Divx format on the world. CompUSA was another great computer store that’s been
gone a long time. And another store that was actually in the Parks Mall during the 90s was
Sharper Image. They had a lot of neat electronics gadgets, but also disappeared a long time ago.
Of course everyone knows BlockBuster Video. I can’t count how many videos I rented from them.
And about 20 years ago me and a friend of mine put a live fish in their return box,
iWe had just caught it out on the lake and t was about the size of a video cassette,
so it fit just fine. We filmed the crime so we could laugh at it for decades and well,
here we are still laughing at that.
Anyway, moving along, we also had this really cool store called Incredible Universe. Unfortunately,
they didn’t last more than a year or so and went out of business. The building they were
in was bought out by Fry’s Electronics who occupied it up until just recently.
And I’m sure everyone has heard the news by now that Fry’s is officially out of business,
putting one of the last nails in the coffin of electronics stores.
And you know, it wasn’t just large electronics stores like these. There
were a lot of smaller independently operated electronics stores all over the country,
too many to count in fact, that have all suffered the same fate.
So, what happened to these stores? Why did they all die out over the last 20 years?
Admittedly, some of the earlier ones that died out in the 80s or
90s were probably due to bad business practices.
However, I think all of them that died in the last 20 years can be attributed to 3 specific factors.
The first and possibly most important problem was the invention of the smart phone.
To illustrate exactly what I am talking about, let’s take a look at this old Radio Shack Catalog
from 1985 and imagine how these products would sell today. Oh look, VCRs, who needs that? Oh
look, portable stereo systems. Who needs that when you have a smartphone in your pocket?
Portable cassette recorders for dictation. Who needs that? Portable cassette players for your
music. Again, who needs that? Blank media. More home stereo stuff. Oh look, cassette players
for your car stereo. Who needs that? CB radios for communicating on the road. Who needs that?
Oooh.. Land line telephones. Who uses those anymore? Even cordless phones. More portable
stereos. Alarm clocks. Does anyone still use those? Even more alarm clocks, including some
fancy talking clocks. Portable televisions. I mean, who needs that when you can watch anything
you want from a device in your pocket? Yet even more clocks. Pages and pages of calculators.
Who needs one of these when everyone has one in their pocket already? Ohh and a pocket pager to
keep you in touch with family. Who needs that? Ohh.. and automatic telephone answering systems.
Yeah, does anyone still have one of these? And portable computers. But why bother when everyone
carries a super-computer in their pocket? Or even pocket computers. Kind of pointless these days.
And that’s just the radio shack catalog.. But don’t forget some other important things that
disappeared, like video cameras. I mean, sure some people still buy them for professional
use. But the average citizen has no need of such a thing. Same goes for still cameras.
No need for those. Portable GPS systems sort of went away for the most part since everyone
has one in their pocket now. But, it’s not just the electronics devices that went away,
but also all of the supporting products. For example, why would an electronics store in
isles and isles worth of space for cassettes or CDs, or even video tapes or DVDs for example.
And nobody buys their computer software from a shelf anymore, we download it from an App Store.
Imagine taking the menu at Taco Bell and just blotting out 80% of the items
on that menu and saying that nobody was going to ever buy those again.
And what’s worse is there would be no increase in sales of the remaining items on the menu either.
That would reduce Taco Bell from a major player in the food industry to a small niche in a food
truck or something. It would destroy their business. And that’s essentially what the
smart phone has done to electronics stores. But it’s not the only cause.
The second nail in the coffin is of course the dramatic cost reduction of electronics. Just as
an example, take a look at this ad from 2001 here. A decent living-room sized TV could cost as much
as $3000. If you wanted a Plasma TV around this time, the cost was as high as $14,000. You either
had to be wealthy or put it on a payment plan. Today, you can go to Best Buy and buy a similar
sized TV for a little over $400 bucks. So, let’s imagine the profit margin on such an item is 10%,
considered average these days. That means they make $40 for selling you a nice living room TV,
as opposed to $300 they would have made back in the 90s. And if you account for inflation,
it would really be more like $500. So, with most electronics items, the profit margin was literally
10 times higher back in the 90s than it is today. This is most likely one of the reasons they have
ridiculous prices on things like HDMI cables, and try to scam every buyer with some kind of extended
warranty. It’s because there isn’t enough profit to be made on the electronics items themselves.
And that brings us to the last nail in the coffin, which is online shopping.
More specifically ebay and amazon. I mean, why drive to the store and sit through traffic,
just to look at a smaller selection of stuff than what you can find online.
Instead, you can order from the convenience of your smart phone wherever you happen to be,
probably pay a little bit less for the product, and have it at your doorstep in a day or two.
And so these 3 things are why I believe the electronics stores of yesterday
went out of business and are never coming back.
And the sad part about it is there is a culture that has been essentially lost to time. Its
impossible to recreate the shopping experience that we had back in the 1980s. I don’t want
to give up my smartphone or online shopping, but I do miss being able to go into a variety
of stores and look at all of the gadgets and gizmos that they had on the shelf and
trying to decide which was the one I just absolutely couldn’t live without. You know,
but that’s all history these days and I don’t think people, unless they were born in that era,
I don’t think people will ever be able to experience it again, which is somewhat
unfortunate. But anyway, that wraps it up for this episode, so as always, thanks for watching!