SONY-BOY is finally at home with other Sony friends!

I looked up Dixons catalogs on eBay, but unfortunately the prices are in £ ... not in dollars which is what I'm more used to.

Radio Shack here in Canada (and USA) used the brand name Realistic for stereo stuff and they did use the brand name Tandy for their computer and some gadgets. I did have a battery of the month card during the late 70s ... wow, that brings me back to a good time in my life. I was 10 years old. Of course I would grab my free battery and go, cause I was 10 with no money to spend... lol... but I would walk up and down the rows looking at all those cool stereos!

THANKS for that link to the Argos catalogs... I will definitely go through each issue page by page. I must have looked at every radio shack catalog 2 or 3 times so far. I was on there a few nights ago, puts me to sleep LOL. The Argos (so far) reminds me of a store here in Canada called "consumer distributing" that started in 1957 in Toronto and grew to even some northern parts of the US states. They had a bit of everything... some stereo components like Akai, Nikko, Toshiba. Games, game consoles, clothing, furniture, etc. Looks like the same concept as Argos. I've been trying to buy some consumers distributing catalogs from the late 70s but they are rare for some reason - they were a catalog based store.

 

Yes, the Consumer Distributing catalog looks very similar to Argos. If you look at the right year you will find the Atari 2600 in Argos for more £ than that one is $. It is worth noting that the price in UK catalogues is the price you pay, i.e. it includes the sales tax.

If you want to see what they offer today www.argos.co.uk

Argos morphed out of Green Shield stamps which were popular with retailers here in the 1960s but started going out of fashion in the 1970s. A childhood memory was my mother buying an iron on Triple stamps day, and what appeared to yards and yards of stamps coming out of the machine.

 

You're lucky to still have Argos around. I checked out your link, good stuff, feels the same. Don't you love the memories of being a child. Great story about the stamps! But I'll bet you loved it better back when you were a kid in the 80s. The stuff was way more cool and cutting edge... lol

The closest thing to Argos or C.D. is a store that started way back in the 20's and grew to a mega store here in Canada. Called "Canadian Tire"... it's basically a Wal-Mart but without the clothing. The cool thing is they also have the reward program where we got back paper money. My parents would come home and give me those bills. The store is still very very active (a Canadian staple). About 3 years ago, they got rid of the paper money and converted to the plastic points cards. We still get the cash back but digitally. Check out those great vintage catalog covers... they are collectable. There's even a booklet for coin collectors who also collect those bills. They have a collector's value based on condition and how rare a certain bill might be. They even issued a coin!





Consumers Distributing shut down in the mid 90s. But in reality, it started shutting down in the late 80s. So for me living in a small town it was gone by around 1988. It did have a good run from 1957-96.

I so remember flipping through the Chritmas catalog at toys, walkmans, LED watches, calculators, those little hand held LED games, etc. I wanted everything! The most memorable "want" was a Nikko component cassette deck, from around 1983. I never got one (too young, no cash) and still check ebay from time to time for one...

SORRY FOR THE LONG DISCUSSION. I love sharing stories about the past... keep them coming! Which is why we are collectors of old stereo stuff.

 

I messed up, here's the pic of that Nikko cassette deck I wanted.

 

After reading your post about shops I was thinking what the options would be if you woke up one morning last December and suddenly decided you wanted to buy a decent Bluetooth speaker. In the past few years we have lost Dixons main rival Comet, while many department stores have gone bankrupt or stopped selling electricals (usually both)

Anyway the options I can think of are;

www.currys.co.uk (where you could look at the unit and maybe try it in comparison to others).
www.argos.co.uk (as discussed earlier)
www.johnlewis.com (to my knowledge the last nationwide department store that still sells electricals)
www.richersounds.com (a chain of Hifi shops that have actually grown. I bought an Akai FD3L HiFi from them in 1985 back when they only had two shops, making a round trip of 200miles because it was a bargain - Half the price it had been in Dixons the year before)
A local independent store like purewell.co.uk which is only a mile from where I live.

And that is all I can think of. The first boomboxes I ever saw (and admired) were Superscope ones in Debenhams, a department store which no longer sells electricals and which has gone bankrupt twice in the last year.

p.s As for wanting things in the 1980s, I was 17 when they started so could actually afford them. In 1979, after about six months of work/college I went in Dixons and spent £30, over a weeks wages back then, on a close to the top of the range Casio FX8000 calculator.

 

I know... it sucks... all brick and mortar department stores are closing. Here, in Canada, we have Wal-Mart, Canadian Tire, big box hardware stores, hifi-2000 (their not doing so well), and Best Buy. Best Buy is a large chain where you can buy Tv's, computers, stereo, phones, etc. I figure that everything will eventually be on-line! I can't imagine buying clothing, electronics, without sampling them first.

I'm lucky to be 30 minutes drive to Toronto where there are still stereo shops, I can think of about 10 or so high end stereo shops. But still, I personally am not interested in the new stuff out there today. Some stuff is good but are priced way too high for me. At least I lived in a time where all of this new on-line stuff didn't exist - where life was more simple... I don't envy the younger generation!

I did look through a bunch of those older Argos catalogs, very cool.

FYI, as for those Radio Shack on-line catalogs... there's a link in there to a sister site for Allied Radio catalogs and much more. Click on "LINKS" top right corner. Check it out.

 

Oops, maybe I spoke to someone else about
www.radioshackcatalogs.com
Great site with all of the catalogs on-line to view for free.

 

Best Buy actually tried to set up in the UK in 2010 but closed again in 2012.
I guess they couldn't compete with Currys and Comet etc, and the name seemed a bit pretentious.
With a name like that you have to be cheaper than everyone else for the same product.

Asda here in the UK is owned by Walmart but all they seem to have is a few own brand TVs etc. In the late 1980s this was my local shop. https://www.google.com/search?q=asd...1.69i57j0l7.6243j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

However, back then it was a Carrefour (French) Hypermarket which had some really cool stuff including a good record section. I remember admiring a Citizen Handheld LCD TV costing £100 which they had displayed working in a glass cabinet. A couple of years later I actually bought one for about £75 elsewhere.

The big problem all shops have is that stuff is cheaper so profit margins are smaller. I just posted in this thread about TVs http://www.stereo2go.com/forums/threads/sharps-start-into-the-90ies.5571/
The profit margin on that £1400 TV back in 2007 was probably more than the whole TV would sell for today.

 

That's a big YUP! choices are shrinking all the time. Unless all you want is sushi and an iPhone... lol