At least my neck of the woods (New England, well-educated town), electronics tinkering is alive and well, mostly in the form of robotics competitions. There's a

At least my neck of the woods (New England, well-educated town), electronics tinkering is alive and well, mostly in the form of robotics competitions. There's a _lot_ of robotics clubs around here, starting with Mindstorms and working up to a handful of high-school students who design circuit boards and send their mechanical part designs out to 3D prototyping houses. Notice, also, the popularity of Make magazine, the Arduino, and the open source hardware movement. (Not to mention the self-replicating 3D printer geeks.) RadioShack, I think, is largely a victim of Digikey and other online component retailers. It just doesn't make sense to devote much sales space to resistors and bread boards in a modern mall, when you can get any imaginable part shipped to you in a couple of days.