Where did people look for bargains before the days of the World Wide Web and Ebay ? In the UK one place was Exchange and Mart, a Weekly magazine full of bargains from both private and commercial sellers. Trying to prove my memories of Cassette Shops I looked on Ebay and found someone was selling copies from around 1980 at £4 each so I clicked Buy it now. Keeping copies that were never intended to be kept more than a week was a wise move for someone given that the original price was 18p. The one that turned up was from February 1980, right in the middle of what some people consider to be the Golden Age of Boomboxes. The Bank of England claim that inflation has been just over 4 since then so multiply all the prices by 4 to get an idea of prices in today's money. The first section I headed for was Audio & TV where I found lots of interesting ads. The largest was a half page ad from "Cavendish" listing lots of Boomboxes that should be familiar to members. Anyone fancy a Sharp 9595 at £840 in today's money ? A couple of years ago I wrote about a colleague who was the enthusiastic owner of a similar Sharp back in 1981. He was about 60 and brought it in to work to play Christmas Carols on.. Moving on to blank cassettes and there is about a whole page of them, although many are "Type 0s" at prices as low as 15p each in quantity. Sticking to brands I recognise they are more like 50p to £2 each. Going slightly off topic the next section is Home Video which was gaining popularity back then. I was surprised to see that even back in 1980 Betamax was cheaper than VHS at a mere £539 (£2156 today), disproving the myth that VHS won the format war because Betamax was more expensive Skipping through, to the Business Equipment section there are still loads of tapes, with Answerphones and pocket recorders being the latest equipment. I couldn't find a single computer, the closest being a Bookkeeping machine (I had to look up what that was) at the bargain price of £950. Just a few year later a dedicated magazine Micro Mart would be full of Commodore 64s, Sinclair Spectrums, PC XTs, and other cast offs. No personal stereos either, although that is less surprising. So did I find any bargains ? Well I saw this and thought of Nick in West Sussex. At ten times the price it would probably still be a bargain in 2019. A three bed house for 100 times the price of a decent Boombox or 36 times the price of a VCR !
We used to have Highland Appliance, ABC Warehouse and Fretter Appliance around here, very similar, when the Sunday Paper came out it was so cool to see what was the "loss leader" for the week. The other nugget was if you found something that all the stores carried, you could bargain because they all had the low cost guarantee. I bought a Quasar Color TV (yes there were both back then) for around $100 USD after going back and forth between two stores. Finally one guy said I can't go any lower and I got it for dirt cheap.
Around me, it was Highland and Silo. Other than them, it was all the classic department stores, with a Sears catalog outlet in the middle of town. Probably the one thing I miss is the independent radio/television electronics retailers, who had the lighted RCA, Magnavox or Zenith sales & service signs in the window.
One other--sort of--was McDade's. They were a department store as well, but advertised themselves as "the catalog house":
