I moved 2 years ago but before that I lived about 10m from a micro center for a decade. The hobbyist section in that time progressively got smaller and the selection was overtaken by branded expensive tools and kits. Like instead of just selling the cheap Chinese screwdriver set you could buy on Amazon for 9.99 they’d sell ifixit branded screwdrivers which appeared to be of the same build quality but with the branding and micro center markup were now 24.99 for the exact same set in terms of features. Or the solder practice kits where you could make a blinking heart from an op amp but for $20 when you could get it online for half that. Raspberry pis and arduinos and such were usually priced well but not always although sometimes they’d be on sale for very good deals. They’d sell hats, sensors, and such for them and those would be marked up considerably.

So it was the same problem as RadioShack; anyone who knew what they were doing would plan out a project and order what they needed online to save a considerable amount. What you’d buy would be if you forgot or broke something and needed to grab something asap and didn’t want to wait. That didn’t justify the space I suppose so they kept shrinking it down

What was really annoying was the stuff that would really be handy would be like small packs of passives. Like when I went to akihabara in Japan there was a market that sold small packet of things like resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc. in little baggies for few yen. And when I went to shenzen it was even better, you could get basically anything, smd or throughhole, in any quantity, but that’s kind of cheating ha. Micro center didn’t do this at any point I lived near it. They would only sell the big assortments so if you just needed a 100ohm resistor for an arduino project you had to spend $20 to buy 300 assorted through holes. Frustrating and pricey so id rather just go online and spend less to get a better and broader assortment.

Maybe if we actually do some real right to repair there might be some demand to justify but as is I think it’s just one of those niches that cannot compete with the internet and warehouse/logistic companies like digikey and mouser. There’s just too many skus