Demise of Heathkit

[mike bryce]

I¹ve been reading this thread for a while and decided to throw in my
thoughts. 

I started to look though some of the older catalogs I have here in the
files. In the 1970 catalog, heath had zillions of products, some of which
I¹ve never heard of. In the 1990 catalog, the Heathkit we knew was clearly
gone. In those twenty years, Zenith ( of course they did not own Heath for
all of those twenty years) slowly took the "kit" out of Heathkit.  Can we
set the blame solely on Zenith? More than likely not. Not only did the
Heathkit company change, but Heathkit¹s customer base was slowly changing as
well. As we started the 90¹s the family unit was beginning to disappear. Dad
was working more and more overtime to fund the new toys everyone wanted and
mom was changing from  a stay at home mother to a soccer mom! Who at that
time had the time to sit down and build the family a new color TV? In the
early and mid 60¹s if you wanted a radio you made a trip to the local TV and
radio shop. There you had a selection of maybe half a dozen radios. At the
time, you could assemble one from a Heathkit. You ended up having a lot of
fun while at the same time saving some money as well. Today, if you need a
new radio, you go to best buys and have a selection that numbers into the
hundreds. Who can compete with that?

Technology changed too. Today¹s high speed pick and place surface mount
machines can build a complete radio, TV  or computer in a matter of minutes
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