The only store that carries canned spinach where I live is Walmart. Fred Meyer (Kroger), Safeway, Albertsons and others do not carry it. I rarely shop at Walmart so I have just gone without.
SE Michigan. I know of two that closed. I think a third Best Buy in the general area may still be open, but it’s a bit of a drive.
Some remaining ones are also smaller. I’ve been in some Best Buys that have a fake wall set up, blocking off 1/3rd-1/2 of the store with much less inventory than before.
Barnes and Noble still exist. I’m going with waterbed sheets. (Unfortunately) waterbeds are still a thing and sometimes non-negotiables in relationships.
Maybe - but my memories from the days of Toys R Us was not that there were a lot of toys that could only be bought there. They had a much larger selection of everything than any other individual store but I’m pretty sure that the items you could only get in Toys R Us were exclusive Toys R Us editions of more general toys - and I don’t think that’s what the OP is about , because you can’t buy brand-new exclusive Toys R Us LEGO sets online now that TRU no longer exists. Plus, I don’t think being unable to find one or a hundred particular LEGO sets in stores meets the description in the OP if there are hundreds of other sets available in brick and mortar stores
Ice cream salt — the rock salt that you use on the ice in your ice cream churn to lower the melting point and make your ice cream set in a reasonable amount of time.
For eons I’ve been buying “rock salt”, marketed as useful for de-icing your sidewalk and whatnot, but that’s mostly been replaced with more eco-friendly compounds. I worry about their effects on the wooden tub and the metal surfaces so I’ve been averse to using those for ice-cream making.
The last bag of “rock salt” I bought contained freaking ROCKS, despite a prominent label on the bag asserting it was “pure sodium chloride”. Guy who sold it to me insists that’s normal, “it helps keep the sidewalks from being slippery”. Yeah, but I don’t want rocks in my churn. I can pour salty ice-melt down the tub drain when I’m done, WTF am I supposed to do with a wooden tub full of gravel?
They used to be ubiquitous, but bread maker machines are pretty scarce, probably because of the fear of carbs that once gripped the nation. I would think that the bread making craze from the pandemic would bring them back, but I doubt you can find one on a shelf today.
They might also be too well made. Ours is 31 years old and still works great.
Or it might be that people who bake bread don’t want a bread maker. I bake bread fairly often and I see no point in getting a bread maker. It will just be one more single purpose appliance that doesn’t save me much time or effort - especially since I rarely bake the sandwich-type loaves. You can’t really do ciabatta or focaccia or baguettes in a machine. My stand mixer kneads the dough well enough and I have some dough recipes that let me spend a half hour or so making the dough on Sunday and then 5 minutes each day the rest of the week to shape a loaf and put it in the oven. Bread machine bread is probably better than mass-produced supermarket bread if all you want is a sandwich type loaf.
Electronics comp9nents. Radio Shack used to sell a wide array of resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc. Plus there were several other retailers for electronic parts. All gone. There are still commercial electronics suppliers like Allied, but they generally don’t sell to the public. It’s now Amazon for everything.
I think a pretty good portion of the stuff Radio Shack used to sell is impossible to find in brick and mortar stores anymore. Besides electronic components, they had a whole myriad of random adapters, cables, obscure sized batteries, replacement foam for over the ear headphones. And does anyone still carry digital multimeters? I’ve got a Radio Shack brand DMM in my toolbox from like 20 years ago.
Digital multimeters can at least be found at Harbor Freight and many auto part stores.
Try looking for water softener salt, which is in stock at my local Lowe’s. When they were out of stock on regular ice-melting rock salt last winter, I got Morton’s Pure and Natural “water softening crystals” for a slightly higher price. As far as I can tell, it’s pure halite (rock salt) in pieces about the same size as you’d expect from any ice-melting rock salt. Be sure to check the label, because some water softening compounds, including other varieties sold my Morton, contain potassium or magnesium compounds.
Had a heck of a time finding a running watch the last time mine broke. I first went to Target which had a lot of wristwatches but none of the running kind. That made me wonder if they had become some specialty item with the advent of phones and smart watches, so I went to 2 different sports stores to no avail. Retroactively I’m not sure that looking on my phone would have been faster since the sports stores did have expensive specialty watches so my searches might have been filled up with results for those.
Finally found one at Wally World. It’s a good model, too, large numbers, easy buttons, and pretty thick plastic. When this one goes dead I will seriously consider trying to replace the battery instead of throwing it out, even at the risk of spending some time and a large portion of cost of the watch on a repair which may not work, since I like it so much.
You can get some cables and adapters from Walmart, though they definitely do not have the selection that Radio Shack used to have. And the cables are definitely Walmart quality (aka cheap and not well shielded). Walmart also has a lot of oddball batteries back in their camera section.
Harbor Freight has multimeters. I’ve been fairly impressed with a couple that I have bought from them, though admittedly their selection isn’t as good as what Radio Shack used to sell.
Our soft-sided waterbed takes standard sheets. Our hard-sided waterbed took standard sheets as well. Now that mattresses are thicker, standard sheets usually have deeper pockets so fit waterbeds much better. If you have an older bed that absolutely must have special sheets, there is a waterbed store in Phx that carries a large assortment of sheets.
And Harbor Freight stores aren’t nearly as common as Radio Shack stores once were. Radio Shack had thousands of stores, all over the country. It amazes me that the obscure sort of stuff they sold was so easily available.
When shopping for clothes:
The style that I want.
Colors that aren’t hideous.
Available in my size.
A brand that is not hideously expensive.
Brick-and-mortar stores usually have one, sometimes two. But to get all four, I have to go online.
Back in the day, a lot more people actually repaired their devices rather than throwing them away. It was common for any store that sold electronics to have a ‘tube tester’ where you could bring in tubes from your TV or radio, check to see if they worked, and if not buy a replacement.
Normal people did this, not just electronics hobbyists or commercial repairmen.
When I worked at Radio Shack in the 80’s, employees actually had to know something about electronics. We recruited employees from the local college electronics programs. I can remember drawing schematics for customers for simple circuits and we had a coffee machine in the store and a card table, and hobbyists would come in and talk electronics and computers and buy components.
I miss those days.
I might suspect that some chains only stock those in-store on a seasonal basis; demand for electric blankets in South Texas in June must be pretty low.