Sometimes you just gotta stick to the core competencies and stick to them well.
Part of me thinks this is what Radio Shack could've made work. They almost made it to the point in time where hobbyist electronics / maker culture was popular again, but by that time they were just the place people used to buy cell phones from.
Notably, the whole sector seems to have collapsed in favor of online shops like Sparkfun and Adafruit. Most small cities used to have a shop where you could go pick through trays of random electronic components. Now, I don't even know where you'd go to do that in major cosmopolitan centers that certainly have the populations to support it. It's just too easy to make a shopping list of components at your desk and hit buy.
Unfortunately, I suspect there are also lots of projects that are on hold while that one component you just realized you needed makes its way through the mail.
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.
Micro Center. They are what Radio Shack might have become if they'd been well-funded and stayed in business.
Unfortunately there are not very many of them.