1950's European radio/television retailers

I was wondering where and how radios and televisions were sold in 1950's Europe.  Did they have specialty stores, or sell them in department stores?  I was wondering what a specialty store, if existed, looked like.  Thanks.

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Dear Mr. Radigan!

Behind the Iron Curtain in the former GDR you have found stores like this.

Or in the 1980ies like this.

Often you have to preorder and waiting a few months for a TV set.

In western European countries you could compare the shops partly similar with the US ones.

• Stand allone Radio/TV shops: They often sold a prefered local brand (Hornyphon, Philips,Nordmende, Saba etc.) and a common second one. With the 1960`s japanese and laterin the 1980´s low cost no name Hong-Kong & Taiwan/ Korean items follows (Audioton, Orion, TEC etc.).    
• Embedded Rdaio/TV/HiFi departments in big ware houses (Gerngross, Quelle [Universum], Neckermann), branch of mayor players like Funkberater. 
• In the present time there are often flagship stores with one brand only (Sony/Loewe) while Bang & Olufson was one of the first of them, and
• big players with uncounted square meters like the Media Market.

Wolfgang Scheida European TV Historien

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Thanks!  In fact, the pictures reminded me of a book about a hippie-type who travelled with his friend in the 1970's, and retraced his route decades later.  He and his friend were in Eastern Europe and saw a very old-fashioned looking (even in the past) television in a store display, and they laughed at it.

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Dear Thomas,

Here in Southern Italy radio and television sets were sold by small specialty stores. Usually they operated on the basis of exclusive distribution agreements with a single firm or even a single brand over a given area or over a single town.

For those firms that also made lighting and/or electrical appliances products, as Philips or Siemens did, local dealers usually offered a more or less wide spread of goods from their lines. Dealers in relationship with more specialized radio/television manufacturers usually rounded out their business with lighting or appliances products from third-parties and even with vinyl records or photographic cameras. Most of the dealers that I remember had a small showroom and a service workroom on the back. The swap was a quite common practice for sets still working or serviceable.

I do not remember of flagship stores even in Naples, the largest town here, home market being anyway covered by some franchised distributors or retailers. From the late fifties to the early sixties, the just rising high-fidelity market offered the early examples of multi-brand specialized distributors. In that years the true stereo high-fidelity came from US: names as Marantz, MacIntosh, Altec, Empire, ElectroVoice or Ampex were leaders in this segment. European manufacturers had very few products, mainly oriented to professional music recording and/or reproduction, and Japan was still making experience on small transistor sets. Small stores, run by really experienced guys, became to assemble high-fidelity systems for this niche market, combining components from various manufacturers. These guys had to offer very smart technical capabilities, to install and then to attempt at least a first service for complex and delicate equipment, like precision turntables or tape recorders.

More or less in those years appeared the first wide-range nation-wide distributor: GBC was the first chain that offered a complete line of television, radio, audio sets and components, either with its own brand or from worldwide manufacturers. In its showrooms and in its franchised stores it was possible to find several lines of set, from Italy, Europe, US or Japan, even in kit form for some models.

But low-priced solid-state productions from Japan were growing and the market moved rapidly from very specialized stores to the shelves of large department stores within the early ‘70s.

Regards, Emilio

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Just to let you know I am an experienced electronic technician (I work in an x-ray machine factory) and I joined because of this.

I am also a modeler and asked because I wanted to model a 1950's television set during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis when everyone would be glued to TV sets.  I wanted to depict a scenario when people were glued to the TV wondering about possible nuclear war.  I wish to get size, color, and material specifications for one or more so I can scratchbuild one or more, and think of a setting where people would be watching them.

Now that I know how many East German TV sets there were, an East German scene would perhaps be ideal-they'd have really gotten a pounding from nuclear weapons!

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