Tandy Opens Radio Shack Super Store in Santa Ana : Electronics: It carries more than 3,500 products in 4,000 square feet of space, double that of regular stores.

A Radio Shack Super Store, the third of its kind in the nation, opened Thursday in a strip shopping center on South Bristol Street in Santa Ana.

Parent Tandy Corp., the Texas-based electronics retailer, wants to build a coast-to-coast chain of the stores, which at 4,000 square feet are double the size of regular Radio Shacks, said Ron Trumbla, spokesman at Tandy’s Ft. Worth headquarters.

The first of Radio Shack Super Stores opened in 1992 in Mesquite, Tex., and Scottsdale, Ariz.

The Super Stores carry more than 3,500 consumer electronic products, including Tandy’s new Sensation Multimedia Personal Computer, Trumbla said.

Tandy, best known for its relatively small Radio Shack retail outlets, is now developing “quite a spectrum of different retail formats,” he said.

The company recently opened several Computer City locations--discount retail stores that offer a variety of brand products, including IBM and Apple computers. One of those outlets is on Sunflower Avenue near Bristol Street in Santa Ana.

Tandy has also opened two Incredible Universe mega-stores in Texas and Oregon and a handful of fast-service kiosks. The 180,000-square-foot Incredible Universe stores offer “everything from major (brand) appliances to computers, and everything you can imagine in electronics,” Trumbla said.

He would not say Thursday if an Incredible Universe store or a kiosk is slated for Southern California in the near future.