[smacktoward]

Fry's, which has 34 locations, seems an odd choice to point to for what a company with 4,000+ locations could have aspired to become. If anything it reinforces the thought that the "maker" market is far too small to have saved RS by itself.

[emerod]

Precisely. They needed to ditch the old Neighborhood Hobby Shop Full of Expert Geeks marketing strategy in order to be competitive in the mass consumer market. Radio Shack was always targeting the mass market. It would have required a huge change of internal culture in the 1990s for Radio Shack to actually cater to the niche hacker/maker community.