If I had millions to buy the Radio Shack IP, my hail mary play would have been to convert Radio Shacks to mini maker spaces. Stock "jellybean" components and entry level tools, and then put in work benches with various tools available for learning and "one off" needs. Take a page out of Walmart's playbook and hire a bunch of retired EE's and developers that just want something to do, and take a page out of Apple's playbook and sell a "once a week come chat with an expert one on one" membership. Pair one-on-one members with your retired EEs and market the hell out of it to highschool kids and hobbyists.
The goal is to get people in the store and building together. Of course no one is going to drive to the store and spend $30 on an aux cable when Amazon will ship it to you tomorrow. But they might just spend $20 on a pack of resistors and a USB breakout board while they're already at the shop using the oscilloscope to probe out a signal on their in flight project and ordering from amazon means stopping progress for the day.
I'd probably also aim to have on-prem competitions, think ant-weight battle bots stuff, micro-mouse or even pinewood derby stuff.
Heck you could probably even lure in some additional markup sales on components by having a "grab-bag" bench, in which you can't bring your own stuff, but you only pay for what you take out. Want to build a battle bot but don't know in advance what pieces you will or won't need? Build it on the grab-bag bench and we'll total up your costs after the fact. Sure you probably could get everything cheaper if you ordered it all online, but how convenient to just have a massive wall of parts already and only get the things you need and not need to store the rest of the 500 resistor pack you had to order to get the 20 you needed.
It might not have worked, the whole thing still might have ended in liquidation, but it feels like it would have had a better chance than batteries and cell phones.
