It's too bad that Radio Shack misunderstood the threat posed by Amazon. To get a bit ahead of myself, Best Buy did NOT misunderstand the threat, and they're still around. Anyway, Radio Shack went all-in on impulse buys. They focused on putting stores in shopping malls near entrances/exits, and filled their store window with silly gadgets like plasma balls and robots. They also tried to become a cellphone store, for some reason. Best Buy survived by picking the worst locations. In industrial parks, near highways, land nobody else wanted. They properly realized that Amazon's weakness was their two-day shipping. If you need something right now, you're willing to drive 30min-1hr to get it.

A closer competitor to Radio Shack was Fry's Electronics, which also located their stores on non-prime real estate, but their infamously bad customer service [1], embezzlement losses, and poor inventory choices doomed them.

[1] - shout out to the Fry's employee at the Freemont location who got in a huffy fit when I decided that the price for an oscilloscope probe was too high, and tried to argue with me and say he couldn't remove the item when I wouldn't insert my card to pay for it. Really A+ attitude there bud.