In the past, there were only enough components to fill a few shelves. Also, you can get many, many components from local stores now, if you're willing to pay the 4x-10x premium.

Not many people are, so local stores aren't as common.

In 2010, the local store had more components than I can order at reichelt, and was cheaper than aliexpress (if you include shipping).

I really miss having a place (back then we even had ad dozen of them in a few km distance) with a huge selection carrying every component you might ever need, and with enough technical expertise that you could show your circuit diagram and get feedback how to improve it. This is something only seen in shenzhen today.

Now I just don't do any small projects anymore as there are no stores in the entire state left, and the extreme premium in shipping and waiting time of aliexpress just isn't worth it anymore.

>I really miss having a place (back then we even had ad dozen of them in a few km distance) with a huge selection carrying every component you might ever need

That sounds very atypical. I live outside a major US metro and I know of one good computer store in the area (Micro Center). I imagine there a few small places that carry electronic components but not sure how many. And it wasn't much different 10 to 20 years ago unless you count Radio Shack which wasn't really all that great.

I count RadioShack, because it was great. As late as 2016 they had their transisor, resistor, capacitor buckets and speaker wire. You couldn't get arbitrary ICs there, but for basic components or last-minute bodges they were key. And now they're no longer carried.

There was only one store like that in my childhood city but it had everything you might want.

There would be a queue of people waiting on a Saturday to give their handwritten list of components to an employee to go find.

How much is AliExpress shipping for you? It's free (or a few cents) for most of the world, AFAIK.

Depends on the seller, but quite a bit if you desire 24h or even 14 day shipping instead of the usual 90 day shipping

>You can get many many components from local stores now, if you're willing to pay the 4x-10x premium

Well. No. RadioShack is closed. Fry's is closed. If I needed a resistor, I honestly wouldn't know where to go. Probably AliExpress or DigiKey. There's no local stores left.

Comic books shops are suffering the same problem. It's not just computers.

I really miss hardware shops now that you pointed this out :(

The obverse of this is that everybody can get whatever they need from Shenzen nowadays, not just some privileged American communities.

I live in Germany, so I never had the advantages of the US situation with fry's, radioshack or microcenter.

And companies sending parts remotely always existed, all that happened is now some have less access.