Radio Shack sales tactics got on my nerve in the 70's, 80's. It was clear that everyone in the store got some kind of a commission — the way they would hound you. (Pushy salespeople are never a positive for the customer.)
My interest in electronics led me to apply there in around 1980 or so. It turns out I should have instead been interested in selling if I was applying there. My interview question (yep, there was an interview for a 16 year old applying at a local Radio Shack store) had nothing to do with knowledge about electronics as I had hoped. Instead I was handed the nearest thing to the manager, a stapler, and told, "Sell me this stapler."
And I'm thinking the customer either wants to buy the stapler or does not — there is little I am going to be able to do to get them to buy a thing they don't even want. Further, I don't even want to be doing that: maybe they need the money for something more important.
I don't remember exactly what I said (I think I was a little confused actually – caught off guard). But you can imagine that, given my perspective on the idea of hard-selling anyone, I was pretty lackluster in my enthusiasm.
Needless to say I was not offered the job. (Probably just as well, ha ha.)
I was offended. I couldn't grasp that he was so nakedly honest about his desire to make a fortune by hawking /something/.
It would be a dream job for a young ham but a disaster for a corporate guy putting together training for non-ham employees that would be making minimum wage.
I gotta admit, though: the TRS-80 series was a wonder, all told. You could legit go from a Model I to a 6000 running a full UNIX (Okay, it was XENIX, but still!)
You'd never WANT to do that - even running the 6000 on XENIX was a bad idea compared to running XENIX on an 80386, never mind that it was XENIX. This was back before SCO turned evil, anyway. But you COULD!
This very selective memory of theShack not offering radio equipment is divergent from my experience