The small cabin near the bridge where the ship's telegraph operator kept his equipment and sent his messages became known as the radio shack. The notion that one could talk to ships at sea captured the imagination of amateur experimenters who fueled a cottage industry. Your local Radio Shack may have one small corner devoted to tools and parts. Think of it as a small shrine to the founders of our industry. Stop by, buy some parts, and build something.
At one time, it had some use as an electronics hobby-shop; back when someone handy with a soldering iron could build gear as good as what was available commercially. Nowadays, surface mount technology and high levels of integration have done tremendous damage to electronics as a hobby; no matter how handy you are with a soldering iron; you're not gonna successfully solder that ball grid array.
Nowadays, it's still useful as a place to get accessories, some types of gear (police scanners and amateur radio), and such. If you want to buy radios (or TVs or computers or other big-ticket electronic items), you're probably better off going elsewhere.
I worked at Radio Shack back when I was in college and miss it not one bit. Retail sucks. -- Scott Johnson
Radio Shack sold me my first computer. -- Eric Hodges
That's where I bought my Trs80 ModelI 4K computer (January1979), and I still have it (upgraded to 16K with Level2Basic Modem, Monitor, Printer, Plotter, Home Controls Interface, cassette recorder, and still - It Works! -- Donald Noyes.20100326 I'll take a picture of it and post it someday.
I'll bet that a lot of folks on Wiki are or were interested in hobby electronics, and so are both familiar with and to some extend interested in Radio Shack/Tandy. -- Keith Braithwaite
It can still come in rather handy for the occasional home built microprocessor project.
I wrote a page about the radio-computer interface I built out of Radio Shack parts. c2.com 
I'm glad that they are just down the street. -- Ward Cunningham
Although Radio Shack can be handy, modern experimenters buy their parts online. These are vendors with good web presence that are willing to sell in experimenter friendly quantities.
Plenty of malls seem to have some Radio Shack clone, but too often they're missing the little cubicles in the back that have things like loose resistors, coaxial cables, childrens' electronics kits, Atari-style TV switch-boxes, and so forth.
If you ever need some Public Domain Humor to spice up your stand-up act, talk about how they ask you for your phone number and address even when you're just buying batteries. Try to work it into your bit about Mac Guyver could take an X and a Y and build a Z.
I miss the old Heath Kit days, and was really pissed when they sold out. To me, they were much better then Radio Shaft, umm.. I mean Shack.
See original on c2.com