Were you a boy in the 1980s? I was. I was a lot. And because I was, I became good friends with a little catalog that I liked to call The Sharper Image.

The Sharper Image was the future in your hands. Scratch that--it was better: It was like having Japan in the palm of your hands. Senseless gadgets that had no reason to exist other than because founder Richard Thalheimer (aka The Poor Man's Steve Jobs) deemed it so? Robots and crazy voice-activated whoizts and night vision that didn't require DoD security clearance to buy? It was paradise on Earth, I tell you.

Sadly, my boyhood enthusiasm for TSI didn't last. And apparently, that's also the case for millions of other people, as the company filed for bankruptcy protection last week. There does seem to be a fatal flaw in the Image's business model: The people most excited by its products are pre-teen-to-teenage boys. Pre-teen-to-teenage boys have little disposable income. By the time said pre-teen-to-teenage boy has enough money to actually start seriously thinking about digital coin sorters, motorized tie racks and the like, he's moved on to other things. Like sex.

There were other problems as well: Heelys replaced Razor scooters in the country's quest for geeky mobility. The company's cash cow, the Ionic Breeze air purifier, started getting dinged pretty heavily by Consumer Reports. And perhaps people realized they didn't need so many different sounds on their white-noise machines--was "insurance office" really all that different from "bus terminal?"

Ok, that last one is not true.

And here's something else that broadsided TSI. Gadgets are no longer something that have to be set aside in a special catalog that could be pored over by Rush fans. Nor do they have to be displayed in stores that are more like museums and science centers than actual places that make money. (While interning one college summer near the South Street Seaport in NY, I used to spend half my lunch hour every day on a motorized massage table at the nearby Sharper Image. Went there for weeks. Never spent a dime.)

Gadgets are everywhere now. Amazon is a gadget store. Wal-Mart is a gadget store. iPods are gadgets. So are TiVos, universal remotes, cellular phones and portable DVD players.

When my father, who's thisclose to being Amish, started asking me if I thought the Motorola Q was better for his purposes than a Blackberry Pearl, I knew it was true: We're all gadget freaks now. Once that became the case, the special, cordoned-off area that The Sharper Image occupied became unnecessary. Like so many of its products, the retailer has met a similar fate:

The Sharper Image has become obsolete.

-- Sam Grobart