This meant I was finally able to get a closeup of of one of their logo walls! Amazingly, I'm pretty sure all of these brands still exist in some capacity, though history hasn't been kind to all of them (Kodak is a zombie brand, Pentax isn't a household name, and GE... uh, did GE ever make electronics?). It's weird to see these brands listed above piles of baskets, and for the last several years, they've been sitting above (mostly?) non-electronic toys,
GE was one of the great names in consumer electronics at one time, but that started to fade away in the 1990s. Going off memory, RCA was sold to GE in the mid-1980s and then GE sold both the GE and RCA electronics brands to Thomson Consumer Electronics of France in the late 1980s. Thomson kept both brands relevant through the 1990s, but their electronics were known for various reliability faults and the popularity of them waned and both brands were dying by the early 2000s when consumer electronics were still big items.
ReplyDeleteEven still, things like GE clock radios were known to be very good. I'm not sure how much the GE name was still being used on consumer electronics around the time this Fred Meyer was being built though so it is a bit strange to see it included versus some emerging brands which had already become popular like LG and Samsung.
The Pentax name is most certainly still around! Ricoh owns the name and it seems that Ricoh was favoring their branding over the Pentax name for a while, but it seems Ricoh finally realized the Pentax name has more value than their own on cameras and so the Pentax name is being used quite a bit more now. Pentax even released a new 35mm camera recently, the Pentax 17, just in case you want to start taking retail photos on film. You can even use Kodak film, which is still being made!
I've never really thought of GE as being an electronics company as opposed to appliances/electrical stuff, and I feel like their electronics that I've seen have all been very low end. Perhaps I'm just too late to this, but this store was built in 2002, which is around the time I might have started noticing these things. I also didn't realize GE has been licensing their brand to other companies for that long!
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