"Changes in manufacturing took away RadioShack's raison d'être" Being around in the hey day of Radio Shack I will also add that there are many more things that

"Changes in manufacturing took away RadioShack's raison d'être" Being around in the hey day of Radio Shack I will also add that there are many more things that you can do for "fun and learning" today than you could do back them. People (not everyone who would buy things at Radio Shack is hardcore) only have so much time. If they have something better to do than a stamp collection (was big years ago) or a model train set (also a big thing) or building model airliners with glue (did that one myself) then they will do the most fun interesting useful thing with their time. Oh yeah some kids did baseball cards. And we even collected decals and stickers at one point. One thing I did back in the 70's was I had a darkroom in the basement which I would spend hours in. So I visited specialty camera stores and bought darkroom supplies, cameras and so on and spent hours upon hours doing that (turning it into a business which I made a bit of money from). While there were many reasons I did that, one was that there really weren't many things that I could do with my time that I found more interesting. This was before PC's or at least where I was located and that type of "hobby". I'm sure if I had a PC back then I probably might not have done so much photography or some of the other things I spent my time on.