I had front row seats to RadioShack's decline. I started there while still in high school, age 16, and worked there all the way through getting my undergrad degree. When I started, the Tandy Computers era was just then ending. That was when that company was at its prime. Instead of paying for R&D and fighting for marketshare with MS/IBM and Apple, they just threw in the towel and thought they could be competitive with the likes of Best Buy and Circuit City with PCs. Unfortunately, while getting "exclusive deals," they didn't ever have anything which was clearly better than the competition and they didn't have the floor space for selection. That and the margin on computers at the store level was around 6%, so they were seen more as a vehicle to move higher-margin accessories and credit, and they wouldn't approve someone for credit unless their credit was *perfect*. Still, they continued to be decent in the parts arena until Len Roberts took over as CEO. He started of by running internal ads about how RS was the "Best Place to Work for in America." He then proceeded to restructure associate and managerial pay (read: cut pay) and institute policies which got rid of most older managers and senior employees. He failed to address management structural issues which remain today, and by the end had consolidated our parts business to a few drawers at the back of the store and turned the rest of the store into some sort of ghetto Sharper Image. He proceeded to game the stock, got some big bonuses and then "retired" to a position on the BOD. The next CEO didn't last too long because it was found out he had lied on his application about graduating from college (and even then, the college he lied about was some substandard Bible college in Oklahoma which had closed and relocated)... That's about when I left to go to law school.As far as these high markups go, I think they do the same thing at peer stores like Best Buy. I can sort of justify the price difference in my mind. Folks who are able to hook things up themselves can go to monoprice. If they want to come to a Radio Shack with their manuals and sit down with someone who knows (or ought to know) what he or she is talking about, diagramming how stuff should be hooked up, then the price of the cables versus calling some Geek Squad guy out to your house is probably going to be worth it. That doesn't mean that RS, in its training, doesn't lie to their employees, trying to convince them that the $80.00 Monster Cable for a digital application is going to be better than the $2.00 monoprice version... and why shouldn't those employees repeat that lie? They probably don't know any better... these are folks working for a couple bucks an hour above Minimum Wage. They aren't sophisticated enough (in most cases) to separate the truth from the lies and the turnover rate is so high that by the time they do figure these things out, they're fired or moving on.