Greenbrook Electronics since 1974 - old school electronics the way I remember

[tthornto]

We have a similar place in Riverside, CA and we have an account there for my work. It's nice being able to walk in, grab what i need, show my work ID card, and my boss gets the bill.
Electronics Warehouse
2691 Main St. Riverside, CA 92501
www.electronicswarehouse.net

 

[Jim_No_Garage]

I just found this post, I currently live in the Central NJ and work up in North Jersey but have never heard of this store. From the looks of the pictures you posted this is the kind of store my dad would love to go to and spend hours talking to the counter guy. I am going to start planning the trip now.

My son and I were in there a while ago and we started chatting with an older gentleman behind the counter. My son said this would be a good place to work and the guy said yes - I was your age when I arrived and I'm still here.

There's TONS of stuff there in stock - I'm not an electronics guy so a lot of it is wasted on me.

Jim

 

[MBfreak]

Hi.
Great place, may it continue for ever!

I live in a city in which the majority of Swedish electric engineering companies have large offices and shops.
I am into electronics since I was 13 ( ie 1959) and I am still active. And luckily there is a fantastic place here, microkit, which caters for both pros and amateurs. No request goes unanswered and no order is too small or too big.
Since it is 2016, they are (unfortunately) now part of a much bigger company.
But the personnel and service level is the same as 20 years ago.

A sign of the times is that the technical college purchases have gone down by 75% over the last years. Nowadays the buy " programmable kits" whereas 10 years ago they had students building advanced analog and digital electronics from scratch.

I love the place and although retired and not a big company customer anymore, I always get perfect service with a smile.

Best regards

Ola

 

[goingtoarizona]

Wow, like I just died and went to heaven. Much better than shifting through hundreds of pages of catalogs online looking for a five capacitor!

 

[Jim_No_Garage]

Just a quick update - Greenbrook Electronics have moved after 45 years!

Greenbrook Electronics
269 U.S. Highway 22 East,
Green Brook, NJ 08812, USA

1-732-968-3500

http://www.greenbrookelectronics.com/

My son says it's a much larger facility - but they appear to be still sorting things out.

Cheers

Jim

 

[LS6 Tommy]

Reading this thread update just reminded me of another great place just off of Route 22, Disco Electronics. Our family used to get all our big item consumer electronics there, like TVs, stereos and such. There was no fancy show room, just a warehouse type of place wit ha service desk. Walk in, tell them you want an ABC-123 and they go get it off the rack. I remember buying a 22" color stereo tube TV for my bedroom before I even had a driver's license. I asked for an RCA, they told me I didn't want that, get a GE instead. Apparently, back them GE made TVs for RCA and you could get one that was identical to the RCA for about 1/3 the price. That TV was still working perfectly when I upgraded it to a flat screen 10 years ago. Try getting a flat screen of any price to last ~33 years...

Disco is still around, too:

http://discoelectronics22.com/

Tommy

 

[driftpin]

Seeing the thread made me search for info on Olson Electronics. There was one south of Ft. Lauderdale FL. I liked to go in & poke around, buy some small stuff.

Here's the best article I found:
Olson Electronics

USA based mail order retailer founded by brothers Irving, Sidney and Philip Olson in 1927 as Olson Radio and was based in Akron, Ohio. Interestingly the company had a chain of small retail stores spread across the USA, more like Radio Shack became later on, but their "catalogue" competitors like Lafayette usually had a few big stores in major metropolitan areas, also notable is that in the early years at the least a large part of their offerings was surplus stock and their catalogues where decidedly more downmarket than most, being printed on newspaper stock which in turn means that fewer copies have survived the ravages of time even though print runs hit the one million mark.

In addition to developing their own lline of kits that were largely radio and audio related the company did sell audio and other electronic products under their own name including turntables and separates but their loudspeakers are the most fondly remembered by some although it is not known who was the OEM provider or providers for those, but in the 60’s Olson´s was still supplying USA made speaker components unlike most of cheaper electronics stuff that was by then largely imported from Japan. The company owned another firm originally called American Electronic Parts (AEPC) but later became known as Herald Electronics and was based in Chicago, Illinois, but HE became a sourcing operation for Olson´s in addition to supplying independent dealers with OEM products under a variety of names, that HE was a wholesale supplier meant that Olson´s ownership of the company was never much publicised.

The budget nature of some of the company’s goods made for some interesting products, for instance Olson was the company that bought us the "Vibra Sonic" spring reverb, normal spring reverbs use a flat sprung feather attached to a couple of transducers, but to cut costs the Vibra Sonic actually used a bedspring, the sound did not resemble a real reverb in any way but it did make a wonderful “sploink” sound when hard pressed. Olson Electronics was taken over by Teledyne at some point in the latter half of the 60’s and that event marked the start of a decline in the company´s fortunes, Teledyne started dumping low cost but high mark-up wares into the stores and overall quality of the in house brands in general went down. In the late 70’s many of their smaller stores only stocked Olson branded products and locally sourced surplus stock, in addition the interest in surplus products declined with the miniaturisation of electronics and the growing purchasing power of consumer meant that kits were falling out of favour, the computer boom of the late 70’s and early 80’s seems to have been the final nail in the coffin since the people that had been electronic and ham radio enthusiasts a few years earlier were by that time spending their time and money on computers. The company appears to have gone out of business in the early/mid 1980's. Not to be confused with British concern Olson Electronics or a large number of small USA based companies that have appropriated the name since the demise of the original company.

http://audiotools.com/dead_o.html

Lafayette was another. Same source.

Lafayette Radio Electronics

An USA mail order electronics retailer that also had large stores in some major cities, in the early day's mainly supplied electronic parts but later had a range of electronc goods including a range of products with their own brandname and with time the ration of own branded products did increase, but with the possible exception of some early radio models they are not believed to have made any these products themselves. In the 50's and 60's the Lafayette branded product where perceived to have been of at the least reasonable quality and often of a very good quality indeed but during the last years of the operation the products had by and large become the same budget Asian sourced stuff that everyone else was selling. Taken over by Radio Shack in the early 1970's and slowly integrated into that operation. Colloquially known as Lafy, note that there where a number of electronics manufacturers called Lafayette that where not related to this company.

There's a small place like the O.P. mentioned, in Miramar FL, SW of Ft. Lauderdale on Pembroke Rd. just east of the Florida Turnpike intersection, on the south side of the road. Most of their stuff is behind the counter, but they are very helpful. I used to buy speaker foam surrounds to glue to the woofer cones there. It's Alfa Electronics. They have another store in the Miami area. http://www.alfaelectronic.com/index.html

 

[LS6 Tommy]

Growing up my Dad and Uncles all had Lafayette receivers. I inherited better receivers as my Dad upgraded. The first one I got was (I think) an LR100. I think I still have the LR775 Dad gave me when he got his first Onkyo. I had the stereo next to my bed and I can still remember lying there Sunday nights listening to the King Biscuit Flower Hour bathed in the glow of frequency dial...

Tommy

 

[Freejack]

Sounds like Gateway Electronics here in St Louis: http://www.gatewaycatalog.com/

Even their website feels old-school.

Jake

 

[gte718p]

It was close by a Fry's Electronics. Still the only place in the world that I know where you could buy new a motherboard with your choice of processor, RAM memory, UVEPROMS, 6 pack of Jolt, a new stereo, a bag of chips and a ******* magazine all in one stop !

I loved Fry's, when I lived in San Diego in 04 the sandwich counter at Fry's was awesome. I was back a couple of months ago and it looked pretty sad.

You can still buy a car, a TV, dishwasher, hover board, OP amp, computer, magazine, CD, record or a couch in one store. They still have rows of every IC imaginable and computer parts in stock, so you could walk out with everything you need to build a new system in one stop, without waiting for something to ship 4 weeks from china. They also have just about everything on display to touch so you have a much better idea how things are going to look, feel, and function then shopping from pictures on Amazon.