Walk Into a 1996 American Mall What Happened to Every Tech Store Inside

It's a Saturday in December 1996. You walk into an American mall with forty dollars in your pocket. A software store, a video game shop, RadioShack, Sam Goody, Suncoast, The Sharper Image, Brookstone and a one-hour photo counter are all waiting for you. Almost none of them survived. One closed every store to go online and died anyway. One was sunk by a single air purifier. One discovered its stores only worked in airports. And the game shop you walked past that day had just come out of a bankruptcy auction, and went on to outlive the entire corridor. In this video: Egghead Software, the store that left the mall too early How a bankrupt Babbage's and Software Etc. became GameStop The auction Electronics Boutique lost, and how it ended up owned by the winner anyway RadioShack, the TRS-80 and two bankruptcies Why Sears and the anchor stores mattered to every tech shop Sam Goody, Suncoast and the download era The Ionic Breeze and the fall of The Sharper Image Brookstone's airport secret The three waves that emptied the mall, and why one store survived What was your first stop in the mall? Which store did you walk into first, what did you buy there, and what year was it? Tell us in the comments. Subscribe to Silicon Row for the rise and fall of the companies that built your world. Watch next: Encarta, the Microsoft CD-ROM that killed a 200-year-old encyclopedia [link] Sources: FundingUniverse and company histories of GameStop, RadioShack and Egghead SEC filings on the GameStop and Electronics Boutique merger (2005) MIT Technology Review, "Egghead Scrambles to Virtual Retailing" (1998) E-Commerce Times on Amazon's purchase of Egghead (2001) Reuters/Fortune and NPR on RadioShack's bankruptcies (2015, 2017) ConsumerAffairs and SFGate on The Sharper Image bankruptcy (2008) NPR and Fortune on Brookstone's bankruptcy (2018) TIME, "Why the Death of Malls Is About More Than Shopping" #90sNostalgia #DeadMalls #TechHistory