For a long time I was dirty on Dick Smith for selling out to The Grocer which quickly showed it knew nothing about the business. As he was walking out the door his marketing manager Gary Johnson was voicing his concern about his future under the new management. Dick replied, "Look at this for sale ad here for John Carr & Co -- that's a good business" and thankfully Johnson did buy it.

As I've said before, I really miss the pre-Woolworths Tandy mainly because it stocked a different range of parts (Archer, etc) from DSE.

It really showed that Woolworths board got it all wrong and should have kept their monopolistic fingers out of areas they knew zero about. Dick had the philosophy that the first $Million was the hardest: Naturally like Uncle Cecil, you could then afford to take calculated risks. Some mining claims were duds: But the ones that weren't, more than covered the loss.

I have always suspected that trying to sell what people did not want, was not helpful but I still believe that the "infinity cable" fiasco, has cost Millions in itself.

I mentioned somewhere, that I had a Tandy digital meter that only recently died, but there are two others one analogue & 1 FET still going. I did mention to the purveyor of the replacement digital, that not having a stand alone on / off button was PIB. Obviously designed by a person with little practical experience.

Also from the 90's: MMS-10 Amp. Designed to have a CRT monitor sit on it. Has a 27" Curved screen one on it now. Its had about three incidents of solder joints cracking, but it runs around 5-6 hrs a day, so there is not a lot of reason to complain about their stuff.

Should've kept copies of the ephemeral USA-Dick Smith-Catalogue: would be kind of a collector's item now!
It was basically a reworked Aussie catalogue with some unique US items they managed to get special buys on, and the same handy technical reference pages at the back. I used them for buying those convenient Japanese 'Green-caps' -- the same ones I used to buy at Dick Smith store in blighted urban Wooloongabba, Bris.

I remember back to when Dick Smith used to boast quite loudly about the data section in their catalogue. You could even buy optional posters with waveforms for all sorts of things, pinouts for 4000-series CMOS ICs and resistor colour codes.

I was a constant customer of Tandy back in the "good old days", and bought many Japanese/Taiwanese things from them - and I still have a few of those items.

I started moving away when they started stocking crappy Chinese-made stuff that barely worked out of the box.

Dick Smith York St also was visited many times (as well as the other nearby electronics stores) back in the 80s. But when I moved to the outer suburbs it was just too far away. Back then the people behind the counter were ham radio operators who knew what they were talking about.