Fully agree - it was good to be able to go to a local shop to buy components. When I was a teenager in London, we had several independent shops within a few miles selling components. Tandy, as Radio Shack was known round here, came in and put all those independents out of business. Then, some years later, a home-grown competitor, Maplin, sprang up and put Tandy out of business - still selling a wide range of components over the counter. Eventually, the internet won out and Maplin followed Tandy into bankruptcy.
I don't know if it was the same on the west side of the big pond, but Tandy were an infuriating company for stock policy here. They always jumped very early onto new, emerging technologies, but overpriced them terribly, sold nothing and eventually abandoned them. I remember early on in the microcomputer era, my local Tandy bringing in Intel 8080 CPUs and all the associated components - all bubble wrapped on cards hanging on the display racks. I desparately wanted a computer and spent hours gazing longingly at those packages and reading everything I could about how to use them from Intel. But they were horribly expensive and way out of my range. Evidently most others thought the same, because they hung on the racks for years, the packaging getting more and more faded, until they were offered for virtually nothing in the spring sale - but, by then, the world had moved on to Pentiums!
Martin (G8FXC)