I've always felt that Radio Shack at this juncture would be more profitable if they created locations that would serve as ad-hoc hacker spaces. Kinda like SF's Tech Shop but for the consumer. I imagine it as a mini Akahabara in your own town, with 3D printers, CNC machines, micro-controllers and SoCs all available to use/purchase, has lessons and other community events and staffed by capable people. Unfortunately I see it only as a maker's utopian pipe dream.
This, again and again. There's probably a lot of disjoint hobbies that they could cater to, too. Radio-controlled, for instance, constantly needs lots of little parts (repairs after flight crashes) as well as space and gear to make the repairs. HAM radio guys go gear-crazy, and often have to tune their sine waves and what-not. C.f. the various posts on HN about drones and UAVs, etc.
++ We have a Hobby Town USA near by, I went in looking for arduinos and stepper motors for robotics projects. Big fat NOPE. I don't imagine the market for these is very large at the moment, there's a lot of STEM knowledge required to buy the components and build from scratch. Pre fabbed kits suffer the problem of high price tags making them a difficult or impossible purchase for most families of young children who would benefit. So we have Lego Mindstorms for the foreseeable future.
