“If Radio Shack ever shut down”? There seems little doubt that it will, eventually. It even went through a second bankruptcy earlier this month. As it is, there are only about a thousand stores remaining. At its peak there were something like 10,000 of them throughout the US.
I’d recommend you explore other sources of electronic components. (I think someone mentioned Mouser upthread, and there are other specialty mail order merchants.)
They just filed for bankruptcy (again!) a couple of weeks ago.
Mouser? You do pay $8 shipping, but it’s next day, and everything there is cheaper. Plus, all the cool kids are doing surface mount these days. Just design your circuit board in EasyEDA (I recommend it), and get it made in China for $15. Seriously. For 10 of them, so long as they are under 10cmx10cm squares.
In practice it’s so cheap, and having your own circuit board saves you so many errors and so much time, it’s the right way to go even for a hobbyist. Stuff that takes me 6 hours of soldering and debugging I can design a board for and get it to work the first try.
I’ve worked for several large corporations (including one that was owned by K-Mart) that were poorly managed. There is something about inertia. They are able to hang on for a lot longer than could be expected. Look at GM, they have a tradition of being poorly managed. I had an uncle that worked for them and in the 60’s he told me how messed up the management was. Still the size and inertia kept them going until they could [sort of] right themselves despite the bad management decisions.
K-Mart’s advantage over Wal-Mart was the real estate angle. They fell far behind in giving the customers what they wanted, which was goods with decent quality at a low price. The K-Mart stores are now a mess. As a retailer they can’t compete with Wal-Mart which has it’s own challenges.
K-Mart completely disappearing? Who knows. K-Mart as a factor in American retailing? The nails are in the coffin. They are mostly irrelevant now.
I grew up in central Indiana. The main K-Mart near me was just awesome. When I was a kid, their toy and bicycle parts sections were the best in town. They had a popcorn/frozen Coke/submarine sandwich stand, and the popcorn was great. When I got my first car at 16, their auto parts department supplied me with tune-up parts and oil change supplies. They had a great electronics department full of TVs and small electronics with their own KMC brand- I checked the UL listing tags and found that they were the same as the national brands they also had but cost less. They had a great lawn and garden section and small pets department. Alas, Walmart eventually came to town and basically out K-Marted them. Where there were three stores there is still one, but it is a ghost of what it used to be.
I just don’t enjoy Walmart like I used to enjoy K-Mart. This may be due to advancing age and grouchiness as well as looking back through the rosy lenses of time, of course.