Vineyard Electronics, the former Radio Shack outlet and electronics store that has been a mainstay Vineyard Haven business for 34 years, will close, owner Linda Sibley confirmed.

Once a busy retail hub for television and stereo sales and repairs beginning in the 1980s, and later computers and cell phones, Mrs. Sibley said the store has seen a steady decline in sales.

“We’ve been losing money for awhile and it’s just been a downward spiral. When Radio Shack went bankrupt things got worse, but I do think at the core it’s the internet,” she said by telephone Tuesday.

“I believe that 10 years from now, maybe less than that — there will be almost no practical retail on the Island,” she added.

The store first opened in 1981 in a former location on State Road and was originally owned by Leo Convery and Bart Smith. A small section of the store sold Radio Shack items. Mrs. Sibley began as an employee and soon became an owner/partner and eventually sole owner of the business. She operated as a licensed retail franchise for Radio Shack for more than three decades until the national company went bankrupt last year after struggling to stay afloat in the digital age.

Three and a half years ago Mrs. Sibley and her husband bought an 11,500-square-foot commercial building across State Road and relocated the store. Today the building also houses Island Entertainment (the Vineyard’s lone video store), a screen printing business and automobile storage space as well as two affordable apartments on the second story. Once Vineyard Electronics closes, the building will be sold, Mrs. Sibley said. She has no firm time frame, although she said she expects to close in about a month.

Mainstay Vineyard Haven store will close after 34 years.

Mark Lovewell

Mainstay Vineyard Haven store will close after 34 years.

Mark Lovewell

She recalled her many years serving customers — good and bad — when her store was the go-to place for electronic parts, repairs and advice. “There were always electronic parts, but in the beginning it was more about hi-fis and TVs, very conventional stuff,” she said. “Then computer sales began and I remember when we sold the first TRS-80s [early generation Radio Shack portable word processors] . . . . much later we got into cell phones.”

Mrs. Sibley has always had a dog in the store, beginning with Melba, the Chesapeake Bay retriever and spokesdog who appeared in television and newspaper ads, most famously in the “Melba knows” series, a takeoff on the “Bo knows” commercial television series. Melba died in 1997 and was succeeded by Dozer, a chocolate Labrador. Today Gracie, an 11-year-old black lab, can be found lounging among the store’s dwindling inventory.

Mrs. Sibley’s chief employee, Simon Bollin, has worked at the store for 24 years and began as a 14-year-old Tisbury school kid on a work study program. Mrs. Sibley is 73 and moved to the Vineyard in the early 1970s with her husband Donald Sibley, an artist and gardener who specializes in Japanese gardens. A longtime West Tisbury resident who is active in civic affairs, she said she has no plans to leave the Island. “My husband has too many bonsais to care for,” she laughed.

The store has at times been a political hub as well as a place where someone will help with a broken television remote.

“With Mrs. Sibley behind the counter, the store, a monarchy, not a democracy, has become a government annex,” the writer C.K. Wolfson noted in a 2004 interview.

“I enjoy it tremendously,” she said of being a business owner. “There are people who I’ve lost my temper with for sure, but that’s the luxury of owning your own place, I suppose. But here is my real honest-to-goodness concern. We spend a good third of our time helping people . . . . We literally have people come into the store and they are older, they were born in another century, they wouldn’t have a cell phone if their children didn’t insist that they have one for safety. They say my cell phone is dead . . . . and they had accidentally turned it off.

“We fix other problems too. People get fuzz stuck in the charging port of their phone. One day I picked a small rabbit out of the charging station. We’ve never figured out how to monetize something you can do in two minutes. We are a free clinic. And I feel like I’m deserting these people.”

She concluded:

“My case isn’t local competition. My competition is the internet.”