Quote Originally Posted by wb5ydk View Post
According to Google Maps, the new Plano HRO store is only half a mile away from the Texas Towers store.

From the 1960's through the early 1990's, there was another ham radio store, in Dallas, called Electronics Center. It was the premier store in the area during its 60's-70's heyday. Aside from selling all the newest gear on the market, they also had a big wall loaded with used trade-ins. As a kid with a modest allowance, about they only thing I could do was to enter the store and drool.

One Saturday per month, there was a tailgate, flea market in the store parking lot. Hams would bring "what they got" and then do some horse trading with other area hams.

I don't know why the store isn't still in existence. Maybe, their location, near Downtown Dallas, was too far away for hams living in the rapidly expanding suburbs to the north (where newly-opened Texas Towers was courting customers). As I recall, Electronics Center also started expanding into the highly-competitive personal computer market. Computers, of course, soon became commodity items.
When I first moved to the Pittsburgh area, there was a downtown ham/electronics store called Tydings Electronics. The owner had sold out to another store, South Hills Electronics. SHE eventually folded ALL of their over the counter retail stores in favor of wholesale & bulk sales, more lucarative. SHE is still in existence, although under another name due to mergers, but they don't want to be bothered with the average person.

There had also been a rival downtown store called Cameradio. Yup. Cameras along with radios. They too were bought out by another store, and got folded into Cam/RPC, and their customer retail phased out.

So the corporate entity behind Electronics Center may still be around, but the retail store may have been deemed not profitable or not profitable enough.