What ever happened to the good old days when every city had a well
stocked electronics parts store? I recall them in the 60's and spent
a good amount of time and money at them, when I was in my teens.

Seriously, you must live in a dream world. There are very few
servicable parts inside electronics now. In the 60's, you'd be lucky
to have a few transistors in a device, and probably 90% of the
components were capacitors and resistors. Which is why anything you
bought took up half your living room.

Cut to the 2000s, where your entire life can be kept on a phone that
neatly fits into your shirt pocket. A device that has a few tiny
surface mount components which never go bad, and 2 or 3 ICs that also
last forever (unless the phone happens to fall into the toilet!)

I'm all for fixing and tinkering, but we're in the very small
minority. I fixed a home DVD player which happened to have a cap go
bad (poor design, under rated component, as it was a common problem
with this certain model). Of course, when the DVD player initially
went bad, I bought a new one. One with some new great features (like
the ability to play MPG and AVIs off a standard CD or DVD ROM), for
$40. It took me longer to research the problem with the old DVD
player, dig a cap out of my supply, and solder the new one in than it
took to go to Best Buy and pick up my new fangled DVD player.

You don't HAVE to fix stuff now, because the replacement is dirt cheap
to buy. While bad for the land fills, it's a GOOD thing for pretty
much everything else.

On top of that, you STILL have electronic supply sources.. HUGE
sources like DigiKey (my favorite) that ship out within 24 hours.
Sometimes I get the stuff the next day.