Back in the day they used to need your name address and phone number written on carbon triplicate forms just to buy a blank cassette tape.
God, that was the worst part of my job when I worked there. f*cking EVERYBODY would ask why I needed their name and address, and I don't blame them. But we had to ask. They literally kept track of that shit, like what percentage of customers you got names and addys for. One of my friends actually got fired because he put some smart ass comment in the name/address section of someone's receipt. Something like "this job sucks". So someone was actually reading that shit.
One of my fondest memories of working there was this: We used to sell a shitty little guitar amp at the store. My co-worker and I both played the guitar, so one day I brought my electric guitar in. We would open the back door to the stock room and stand in the doorway smoking weed, then take turns playing the guitar. I just remember being high and helping some customer find some whatever thingy while Duane was in the back room wailing on my guitar with the amp turned up to 11.
We also used to sell computer games there, and for some reason sometimes the boxes weren't shrink-wrapped. So we had a copy of that game "Indy Car" by Papyrus (this was in 1995) and it wasn't shrink-wrapped. Literally NOBODY ever bought those games, so I took the disks out and took them home to play the game, fully intending to return the disks to the box. Well, before I had the chance, my manager discovered that the disks were missing (probably because he wanted to do exactly what I had already done) and he went off on us, saying that people were shoplifting in the store right under our noses and we weren't paying proper attention. So obviously I couldn't return the disks at that point or he would know that one of us took them. I still have them.
Lastly, I bought my Atari Lynx from one of my co-workers there (the same guy who got fired for the address thing) and I actually bought a Lynx game out of the Radio Shack Shop-at-Home catalog. I thought it was pretty neat that we sold those, since the Lynx was pretty much a dead platform by then. Desert Strike, in case anyone is wondering. Still have that, too.
