I popped up to The Source (née Radio Shack) in the Confederation Court Mall yesterday to pick up some earphones for my brother Mike, who was about to jump on a plane back to Hamilton and needed a pair to while away the flight. I was greeted by this scene:

The Source has closed.

This is a blow to downtown Charlottetown, the immediate practical effects of which were evident from my earphone search: I tried “Bob’s,” the dollar-store-like discount store on the first floor of the mall, and Shopper’s Drug Mart, and while they both sell earphones, they are of the cheap $7 variety, and they don’t have anything for a modern iPhone.

When I first moved to Charlottetown in 1993, I was happy to find a very well-stocked Radio Shack store on Queen Street just south of Richmond. It was a handy shop to pick up many things unavailable elsewhere: batteries, serial cables, soldering irons, resistors, floppy disks, tractor printer paper; all the stuff of digital life at the dawn of the Internet.

The store later moved to Grafton Street across from the Confederation Centre of the Arts¹, and later, rebranded as “The Source,” to the second floor of the Confederation Court Mall. Although The Source was never as hobbyist-focused as Radio Shack, it continued to be a place to get batteries, USB cables, mobile phone SIM cards, ink cartridges, clock radios, SD cards, Ethernet cables and earphones; all the stuff of digital life in the Internet’s adolescence.

While there’s a The Source out at the Charlottetown Mall, that’s effectively as far away as Amazon.ca is for many people living and working downtown, and the effect will, I’m sure, be a loss of local jobs and purchasing in addition to the loss of convenience.

So long, Radio Shack: you will be missed.

1. Thanks to my friend Dave Cairns for reminding me of this location.