Define "many ham radio operators".

"A large percentage of" might have been a better choice.

Yes, you can do a lot of nice and funny stuff. But that is irrelevant. The relevant thing is the number of radio amateurs. A large percentage are using prebuilt equipment with low-grade radio licenses. So if you look at it, you don't have any real volume of radio amateurs out there to keep electronics shops alive.

It's all in the numbers - not in how fun some specific people may have.

The general needs have been removed and replaced by Internet. In reality, you have a trickle of new ham operators compared to what you would have had in 1950, since the majority of people who would have had ham radio as only choice in 1950 get their needs covered by Internet today.

The average age of ham operators are definitely increasing.

Yes, I do know about text transmission, voice and video transmissions using radios, lunar bounce transmissions, ... But the debate in this thread was about RadioShack. How many new ham operators do you this world see every year? Compared to the number of people who "just" plays with microprocessors, ZigBee and similar? The majority of the commercial needs for ham operators can be handled by quite few postal order sites, many of which specializes in surplus equipment.

What is the volume of users who do buy old military equipment and modifies them to get different frequency bands? I still claim that Internet have jumped in and picked up the majority of potential new operators. You might possibly have around 3 million world-wide, and quite a number of them are using pre-built equipment they can get from "normal" postal order companies,

The good thing here is that most countries have removed the needs for morse code requirements, realizing that more and more ham operators have interests in different directions. That has allowed a bit more new blood into the hobby. But not enough to support any commercial busines except for postal order except for really large cities.

As long as commercial interests doesn't kill the available frequency bands, radio amateurs will continue to operate for a good many years. But not in volumes relevant for normal commercial shops/chains.

In the end, it's just about perspective, not about heart.