In article ,
Bob Campbell wrote:
Walk into any dept store/Walmart/Best Buy/whatever in the U.S. How many
radios are for sale these days? How many were for sale 20 years ago? 40?
60? There is a definite downward trend.

That's because the big box stores are operating under different principles
than what anyone over 35 would expect. It's not longer "find out what
the customer wants", but "stock what you make the most money selling
and intimidate the customer into buying it". (I think the buzzword is
"Directed Marketing"). The idea is that the store's buyers and the
importer/manufacturer's marketing department know the customer better
than the customer does, and can manipulate them into buying something
that isn't really what they want, because it's fashionable, (and there
isn't an alternative available there anyway).

I also suspect that part of the higher profitability is that the cell
phone providers, pay for play music down-loaders, and satellite Radio and
TV companies provide "sales incentives" (derived from their subscription
fees) to the big box chains which causes them to deemphasize any equipment
that gets free broadcasts.

So radios have been exiled to lower end discount stores, and the
drugstore chains (that don't have a conflict of interest between
the subscription based services and the customer).

Mark Zenier
Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

"Mark Zenier" wrote in message
...

So radios have been exiled to lower end discount stores, and the
drugstore chains (that don't have a conflict of interest between
the subscription based services and the customer).

So its not that no one is interested in radio, it is all YAC (yet another
conspiracy)!

Bob Campbell wrote:
"Mark Zenier" wrote in message
...

So radios have been exiled to lower end discount stores, and the
drugstore chains (that don't have a conflict of interest between
the subscription based services and the customer).

So its not that no one is interested in radio, it is all YAC (yet
another conspiracy)!

We're past the point where "conspiracy" has any meaning.

In article ,
Bob Campbell wrote:
"Mark Zenier" wrote in message
...

So radios have been exiled to lower end discount stores, and the
drugstore chains (that don't have a conflict of interest between
the subscription based services and the customer).

So its not that no one is interested in radio, it is all YAC (yet another
conspiracy)!

Hey, if you went to "Buy More" (in the last several years), there's a
quarter of an aisle of boom boxes and other bottom end home audio stuck
in the back, and there's as much space up front for XM and/or Sirius.
And the same thing for satellite TV with a full aisle of display for
DirectTV and/or Dish Network, and you have to ask the sales geek if
they have any ATSC tuners and he shows you the ONE they have that's
$350-$550, and you understand that the digital TV conversion had more
than just technical reasons for going so slow, and the stores had
the same sort of incentives applied to radio, too. (The subscription
services had shareholder's and subscriber's money to boost their
equipment sales, the local broadcasters didn't).

It's as much of a clusterf*** as a conspiracy, too. 1) "What's on the
Radio", and 2) the really crappy quality of the radios that are for sale
doesn't help either.

Mark Zenier
Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)