As Dave and Tim note, the local "hobby shop" is a dead medium anyway, and CL items have been rare or non-existent for a long, long time. CL hasn't been a mainstream modeling activity since the mid-70s and it has been hard to find or impossible to find locally about as long.
Tower and associated companies (Great Planes) killed the local hobby shop a very long time ago. Now, even in the SF Bay Area, there are *no* general-interest hobby shops that regularly sell model airplane construction supplies, and the one that still has anything is just selling off old stock (Sheldon's) while going full-bore into the RC Car market. When they run out, there will not be any more. So even with maybe 8 million people in a 50 mile radius, you cannot support any sort of modeling. The nearest real hobby shop I know of is in Sacramento.
During that same time, CL Stunt competition slowly dwindled to a low in the mid-80's (when no engines were available and PAMPA was down to a few hundred) to an explosion when piped engine were discovered, but much more, when Mike Keville started improving SN and then the indefatigable Tom Morris made it into a magazine rivalling MA.
That continued pretty unabated until 2005, but throughout that time CL Stunt was frequently in the top 3 of all events at the NATs. At the same time, some of the other competition events just about disappeared - either because of, or in spite of, attempts to "make it more accessible". This continues with a few exceptions (like FAI Combat). In stunt, the only places that seemed to be dying off were, again, the places that fiddled with the event to "make it more accessible", which have been spectacular failures.
I think all these efforts were at best misguided, because they started with the premise that "Stunt is dying, we HAVE TO DO SOMETHING, NOW!" Stunt wasn't dying in the first place, the environment is changing but we have about the same numbers we always do. You can't have CL parts in local hobby shops because it makes absolutely no sense, but you can get literally anything, mostly *much better* than it ever was before, in short order, through other means.
If you start with the wrong premise, it is not surprising that you come up with ineffective or counterproductive "solutions". Start from the premise that we have done a lot of stuff *very right* compared to other events, and use that to avoid making the same mistakes.
Brett