I know some people might consider this sacrilege, but it's about time they died! Nostalgia aside they've been crap for at least the last 10 years for anything.
Despite I understand their stores and products lost the appeal of older times, in my opinion I don't think this is a great way to put it; real people are losing their jobs...
The difference between a physical store and the net is the browsing aspect of a store is good for introducing people to new things in an immediate, experiential way. The best web sites - and especially communities like this forum, and videos like Dave's capture that, and take it farther, so for us, we lose much less, and gain more that we didn't have before - with the Internet.
However, for the average person who does not make an effort to get exposure to electronics as a knowledge domain in a general way, a source of potential exposure to the hobby vanishes.
The internet brings knowledge from previously unreachable places and unsuspecting sources (hopefully most of the times), but there is something different about the immersive experience of entering into a store and physically exploring the multitude of "trinkets and parts" bags, tools, etc. Several of my childhood friends got engaged in electronics after trips to the store with me.
So what we really need to get people interested in it, is for (very basic and functional) electronics and computer science to be taught in schools as one of the physical sciences, perhaps even in grammar schools.
I think also that in high schools, they also should teach basic database competency and the very basics of how the web and Internet work. (and how to tie them together) That would make it possible for kids to do science if they had an idea they wanted to explore.
Schools in my region never had anything of sorts; our parents were quite engaged in feeding our curiosity with challenges and resources. This worked for both myself and the field of electronics and for my brother and his interest in biology.