In a word - No. With a couple of caveats.
I spent seven years working in a hobby shop while I was in grad school. Seven years don't really constitute a long time in the grand scheme of the universe - but in my case they were plenty. I'm glad I had the experience. I learned a lot about various hobbies - including the fact that they have far more to teach each other than most hobbiests realize. (My big interest is ship modeling, but I learned all sorts of fascinating things, and became aware of all sorts of useful products, by means of model railroad magazines.) And I met lots of fine, interesting people whom I never would have met otherwise - from railroad engineers to bankers to academics to military officers to GM employees to aeronautical engineers. I wouldn't trade those acquaintances for anything.
I also met some people I wish I hadn't. The narrow-minded nut cases who, coffee cups in hand, parked themselves in front of the cash register for hours at a stretch pronouncing judgments on which kits were good, which were bad, which politicians were communists, what was wrong with the younger generation, why the Cincinnati Reds were a bunch of degenerate bums, etc. The kids who tried to buy a dozen tubes of Testor's glue at a time. ("I'm working on this great big model, man!" Yeah, right.) The guy who never built a model during the fifteen years I knew him - but insisted on buying every new Microscale decal sheet before anybody else could get it. The guy who, in the course of a dozen visits over a couple of months, sneaked out the door with an entire Tamiya 1/25 Tiger tank - one sprue at a time. The parents who blamed me for the fact that the electric train sets they gave their kids for Christmas stopped working on December 26. Etc., etc., etc.
Believe me, familiarity really does breed contempt. Working in a hobby shop obviously didn't drive me out of the hobby, but it came depressingly close. (And I did NOT get an employee discount. The boss couldn't afford it.)
After those seven years I got a job in a maritime museum, where I was in charge of (among other things) ship models for three years. When I got home after a day's work in that place, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was work on a model.
More seriously, in recent years I've become convinced that the traditional hobby shop, as a business proposition, is just about dead. Part of that state of affairs is, of course, due to the changing nature of the business: it seems to be a fact that fewer people - especially young people - are building models these days than did thirty or forty years ago. (When I was working in a hobby shop at least half of our customers were of high school age or younger. I recently asked a friend who owns a hobby shop what percentage of his regular customers were under twenty-one. He laughed bitterly and said, "Zero." I made some sympathetic remark to the effect that the drop in interest among kids was a commentary on the state of the hobby in the nineties. He laughed even more bitterly and said, "Where have you been? That happened twenty years ago." I'm afraid he's right.)
Another point that deserves to be remembered: as the number of people participating in scale modeling has dropped, the amount of merchandise available has grown astronomically. Take a look at the ads in FSM, or the daily listing of new releases on the Squadron website. Out of curiousity, I just did the latter. The "new" listings for the past week (July 6-10, 2009) included 35 items, ranging from cars to ships to aircraft to armored vehicles to books to decals. If you bought one of each item (from Squadron), they'd cost you (by my calculation) $1,382. The standard markup on the retail level is (or was when I was involved in the business) 40%. So to stock one each of every item on that list would require the hobby shop owner to invest $8,292. And that's only counting the stuff that Squadron sells. Throw in the model railroad stuff, the airbrushes, the X-acto blades, the paint jars and cans, the adhesives, the RC gear, the slot car sets, the paint-by-number sets, etc., etc. Then consider the need to maintain a good stock of the stuff that was released last week - or ten years ago. Then figure in the rent, the employees' salaries, the refills for the coffee machine (so those jerks keep parking themselves by the cash register), etc., etc.
My boss's standard practice was to buy virtually all the merchandise from the wholesalers on credit, with the bill coming due each January 31. After the Christmas rush (gawd bless electric train sets and accessories) he'd sit down and do the books, and figure out whether he'd gone bankrupt this year or not. What a way to live.
I've watched quite a few hobby shops go out of business in recent years, and every single one of the owners has said two words: "Never again."
It looks to me like it's just plain impractical nowadays to operate a good, well-stocked, adult-oriented hobby shop unless it has a clientele of hundreds, if not thousands, of enthusiastic, regular customers. That sort of situation can only exist in, or near, a major metropolitan area. I suspect the time is nearing when really good local hobby shops will only be found in places like New York, Chicago, and LA.
In many ways this is a golden age of model building. The average quality of the kits available has never been higher. The range of kits has never been bigger. Such things as photo-etching and cottage-industry aftermarket companies have added wonderful new dimensions that weren't dreamed of a few decades ago. There's a constant stream of new research material - in print and on the web. And the web lets us buy a staggering variety of merchandise literally from all over the world, and get it delivered to our doorsteps.
The beginning of the twenty-first century is a great time to be a modeler. But those same forces are forcing us to change our buying habits. I live in a community of about 65,000 people. If I want to buy a bottle of Poly-Scale or Testor's Model Master paint, I have two options: drive thirty-five miles to the nearest local hobby shop, or place an order over the web. I hope that hobby shop in Wilson (which concentrates heavily on railroading, and practically got flooded out by Hurricane Floyd ten years ago) stays around for a long time. If it ever goes under, I'll have to pursue my hobby almost entirely by way of the web - as I'm sure thousands of modelers are doing already.
Maybe that's not such a bad development, in the grand scheme of things. But I'll sure miss the grand old traditional hobby shop. (I'll also miss the grand old traditional record store. One of my other hobbies is classical music; I buy almost all my CDs over the web these days.) But times do change, and Olde Phogies like me may as well make the best of the changes.
Open a hobby shop? In 2009? I wish somebody would - preferably around the corner from my house. But not me.