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Yet another reason to avoid PartMiner

H

Homer J Simpson

Jan 1, 1970
0
I think they just laid off about 2000 employees. Virtually no
point in visiting their stores anymore. All they do is flog cell
phones.

It wouldn't even cross my mind to buy a cellphone there. I did just buy a
CD/MP3 player there - because it was cheap.
 
M

Meat Plow

Jan 1, 1970
0
I think they just laid off about 2000 employees. Virtually no point in
visiting their stores anymore. All they do is flog cell phones.

There used to be one old school RS in my area. The "then" manager strived
to keep useful things on the shelves. Now unless you're looking for a
phone battery, talking picture frame, or an R/C toy you're shit outta luck.
 
L

Lostgallifreyan

Jan 1, 1970
0
This is crap buying a bigscreen TV with a one year
warranty and it goes tits up eight months out of warranty and no
longer supported. All they are doing is filling our landfills and
forcing us to buy their new products on a regular schedule. Won't be
long before automobiles will follow!

That's something that will be legislated against. If ROHS can be forced to
avoid dangerous waste, so can this, and in this case I think the
legislation will probably be more welcome. Once a customer is not able to
discard eletronics as if they were biodegradable rags, the service industry
might start looking better again. There might be a heathy return of second
hand shops too, because as the value of used goods rises, so will the
respect for them, so the crime which helped the demise of the second hand
eletronics trade will be guarded against, at least enough to establish the
return of that trade. I think people would probably rather buy second hand
gear from a shop with a decent service dept than take their chances on
eBay, especially as eBay is now derelict regarding its responsibility to
protect its users.
 
M

Meat Plow

Jan 1, 1970
0
That's something that will be legislated against. If ROHS can be forced to
avoid dangerous waste, so can this, and in this case I think the
legislation will probably be more welcome. Once a customer is not able to
discard eletronics as if they were biodegradable rags, the service
industry might start looking better again. There might be a heathy return
of second hand shops too, because as the value of used goods rises, so
will the respect for them, so the crime which helped the demise of the
second hand eletronics trade will be guarded against, at least enough to
establish the return of that trade. I think people would probably rather
buy second hand gear from a shop with a decent service dept than take
their chances on eBay, especially as eBay is now derelict regarding its
responsibility to protect its users.

Any decent Sawzall can render a big screen into camp fire wood within
minutes.
 
L

Lostgallifreyan

Jan 1, 1970
0
Any decent Sawzall can render a big screen into camp fire wood within
minutes.

The day you find a CRT made entirely of wood, be sure to let everyone know,
ok?
 
G

Gene S. Berkowitz

Jan 1, 1970
0
no- said:
That's something that will be legislated against. If ROHS can be forced to
avoid dangerous waste, so can this, and in this case I think the
legislation will probably be more welcome. Once a customer is not able to
discard eletronics as if they were biodegradable rags, the service industry
might start looking better again. There might be a heathy return of second
hand shops too, because as the value of used goods rises, so will the
respect for them, so the crime which helped the demise of the second hand
eletronics trade will be guarded against, at least enough to establish the
return of that trade. I think people would probably rather buy second hand
gear from a shop with a decent service dept than take their chances on
eBay, especially as eBay is now derelict regarding its responsibility to
protect its users.

No, because there is no incentive to spend the extra money to make
these products repairable. The "big box"/Wal-Mart model drives the
manufacturer to produce goods at the lowest cost, not the highest
reliability. That means offshore design & manufacture, with extremely
high integration components that might have only a two-year lifespan in
the market.

As long as consumers behave as though a big-box off-brand, or worse, a
big-box-only "name brand" model is the equivalent of the higher end
product, this trend will continue.

--Gene
 
L

Lostgallifreyan

Jan 1, 1970
0
No, because there is no incentive to spend the extra money to make
these products repairable. The "big box"/Wal-Mart model drives the
manufacturer to produce goods at the lowest cost, not the highest
reliability. That means offshore design & manufacture, with extremely
high integration components that might have only a two-year lifespan
in the market.

As long as consumers behave as though a big-box off-brand, or worse, a
big-box-only "name brand" model is the equivalent of the higher end
product, this trend will continue.

--Gene

Your view is outdated. The pressure to recycle, not just to satisfy new
laws and regulations, but also to satisfy the ease of getting raw materials
cheaply from existing stuff. That means modularity. The only way you can
defeat that is to invest hugely in smart materials so a gradient of heat
can make them part company in sequence for easy separation later. Work is
being done on this, and if people want to have gaudy fashionable shells
that change from week to week, that work will be vital and must continue,
because there's only a limited time that sweatshops in China and such will
tolerate doing that work by cheap manual labour. China's been buying the
West's scrap metals like there's no tomorrow, because it knows what we've
allowed ourselves to foget, that where there's muck there's brass, as it's
said in Yorkshire. The only reason why the Wallmart kind of business
thrives as it does, is because they can pass the resposibility while raking
in the buck, if you take my meaning... Once the oil reserves become
expensive, people will have to either have to be VERY smart with their
materials, as I said at the start of this post, OR thry will have to revert
to modularity, the way telecoms companies made their phones for many years.
Both will probably happen. Either way, both methods will involve a lot more
recoverable stuff than current methods, so a healthy service industry will
rebuild on the strength of that.
 
L

Lostgallifreyan

Jan 1, 1970
0
extremely
high integration components that might have only a two-year lifespan in
the market.

I take your point there. Thing is, that stuff will become code. While the
number of PIC's and AVR's and all are proliferating like mutating rabbits,
eventually people will get fed up and start to gravitate to the few types
that are most useful to them. The numbers and families will start to reduce
in number as the remaining ones start to more effectively cover the range
of operations most demanded from programmable IC's.

While new tech makes it possible for hardware to be designed on as
mercurial a basis as code has known for decades, that doesn't mean it's a
good idea. Human minds vary immensely too, but nature never makes our
brains look much different. We need to learn from that.
 
A

Arfa Daily

Jan 1, 1970
0
Lostgallifreyan said:
Your view is outdated. The pressure to recycle, not just to satisfy new
laws and regulations, but also to satisfy the ease of getting raw
materials
cheaply from existing stuff. That means modularity. The only way you can
defeat that is to invest hugely in smart materials so a gradient of heat
can make them part company in sequence for easy separation later. Work is
being done on this, and if people want to have gaudy fashionable shells
that change from week to week, that work will be vital and must continue,
because there's only a limited time that sweatshops in China and such will
tolerate doing that work by cheap manual labour. China's been buying the
West's scrap metals like there's no tomorrow, because it knows what we've
allowed ourselves to foget, that where there's muck there's brass, as it's
said in Yorkshire. The only reason why the Wallmart kind of business
thrives as it does, is because they can pass the resposibility while
raking
in the buck, if you take my meaning... Once the oil reserves become
expensive, people will have to either have to be VERY smart with their
materials, as I said at the start of this post, OR thry will have to
revert
to modularity, the way telecoms companies made their phones for many
years.
Both will probably happen. Either way, both methods will involve a lot
more
recoverable stuff than current methods, so a healthy service industry will
rebuild on the strength of that.

Your feelings on the service industry's future, are touchingly optimistic,
but I fear, fundamentally flawed. As the level of integration on consumer
electronics increases, it becomes more and more impossible to fix, not only
from the fault-finding point of view, but also from the practicalities of
being able to successfully remove and replace some of the high integration
devices - BGA's for instance. Owners of the gear expect now to bring it in,
and collect it next day, fixed. If they can't, they will go to the local
Tesco or Walmart or wherever, and just buy another, with more whizzbang
features on it than the last. Plasma TVs seem to have gone back for the
moment to the old days of modular electronics, but nothing that the you can
( or the manufacturers will let you ) fix on the modules, for the most part.
I don't actually believe that even the modules that you are sending back to
them, are actually getting repaired.

All that I can see happening, with the benefit of 35 years in the service
trade behind me, is that the manufacturers will find better ways of allowing
the stuff to be more readily reduced to its constituent parts, at what is
considered to be its ( commercial ) life-end. Their business is driven by
volume sales. For every one high quality expensive item that was sold by
them in the past, they probably now need to shift a hundred or more, so they
really don't want the likes of us repairing them ad infinitum. Where some
serious inroads to this could be made, is in the cost of spares. How many
DVD players have you scrapped, for instance, because the 50 cent laser
that's in it, comes out at 100 or more times that when it's offered as a
spare ? But there you go - they don't really want us putting a new one in,
do they ?

Arfa
 
T

Tom Lucas

Jan 1, 1970
0
Joel Kolstad said:
I think it's almost impossible to keep an electronic "parts" store
open these days, but that being said, Radio Shack was doing OK when
they had a large mix of consumer electronics and parts some 20 years
ago. I think they became greedy, by deciding to concentrate much more
on the consumer electronics: Even though the unit prices are higher,
they could never compete on price with the Big Box store for price nor
selection.

It's the greed that will kill them all. They had a good niche selling
parts but there wasn't a huge amount of money in it - although there was
plenty to keep the stores open. They then branch out into areas that are
sewn up by other suppliers specialising in those areas and wonder why
they aren't selling anything anymore. It's the drive to dominate all the
market places which is typical of middle management ambition who are
just looking for something to put on their CV for the next job rather
than a sensible decision about the nature and direction of the company.

The cafe around the corner from work does a mean Full English Breakfast
but if they wanted to follow the Maplins strategy then they would stop
selling black pudding and bubble and squeak because not everyone likes
it but they would start selling Whopper style burgers because Burger
King manage to make money out of them. Before you know it I would be
sitting in a McDonalds clone wondering how they managed to take the
hallowed ingredients of a Full English and produce something so entirely
unlike one.
Their decision (pushing a decade ago) to really concentrate on cell
phones should have been obvious as a temporary strategy -- the large
layoffs this year were directly a result of the fact that there's no
longer any huge "untapped" market for cell phone users out there --
sales today are 90+% people upgrading their handsets or new consumers
(kids!) slowly entering the market.

Fortunately Maplin only dabbled in cell phones briefly when the
pay-as-you-go craze started and then got out once the price frenzy begun
amongst the cell phone dealers. They made a pretty penny selling the
top-up cards but never sold anywhere near enough phones to even cover
the wholesale cost. For once, they were ahead of the game by being
amongst the first to offer pay-as-you-go phones but, as always,
completely failed to advertise it, failed to give staff any training in
it and overpriced everything forcing them to demolish their margins
offering heavy discounts after a few months of no sales.
I'm certainly glad that Radio Shacks are still around, but -- like
many companies do over time -- the current management seems completely
out of touch with what made them so useful decades back; this leads
directly to mediocrity at best, at chapter 11 at worst.

I can't understand why the management are doing this. They want to be a
jack of all trades but neglect what got them to where they are now. The
consumer electronics market is cut-throat and you need to be able to
alter prices at a moments notice and catalogue stores find that very
hard. The recent move to turn all Dixons stores into Currys is quite
intersting as they are both stores that know what they are doing in the
consumer electronics market (I don't know why they didn't do this years
ago) and shows a shift in customer demands. I know for a fact that I
want to be fiddling with Sat Navs and digital cameras while the
girlfriend gets all breathless shopping for vacuum cleaners and cookers.
 
P

Paul Carpenter

Jan 1, 1970
0
On Monday, in article
<[email protected]>
That's something that will be legislated against. If ROHS can be forced to
avoid dangerous waste, so can this, and in this case I think the
legislation will probably be more welcome. Once a customer is not able to
discard eletronics as if they were biodegradable rags,

In Europe the upcoming WEEE directive, is geared at the electrical being
returned to manufacturer to dispose of dead equipment. This will probably
effect inkjet printers more than TVs.

They are already moves on vehicles to do the same, especially as the last
thrity years has seen an increase in plastic and reduction in metal in
vehicles.

The aircraft industry is already doing schemes to do this, to avoid sections
or whole old planes being dumped in the seas. Also before long there is
likely to to be several thousand aircraft a year being scrapped as many
aircraft like early 747s reaching 30 years old

..the service industry
might start looking better again. There might be a heathy return of second
hand shops too, because as the value of used goods rises, so will the
respect for them, so the crime which helped the demise of the second hand
eletronics trade will be guarded against, at least enough to establish the
return of that trade. I think people would probably rather buy second hand
gear from a shop with a decent service dept...

Considering some of the chnages to things like TVs Radios and Hifis with
going digital, widescreen and other things, most of the old stuff and
early versions of new schemes will not be useable. As soon as some
types of flat screens start developing faults in the highly integrated
glass the vast bulk of it is only scrap, and not repairable without
very complex clean rooms.
 
H

Hershel

Jan 1, 1970
0
It's the greed that will kill them all. They had a good niche
selling
parts but there wasn't a huge amount of money in it - although
there was
plenty to keep the stores open. They then branch out into areas
that are
sewn up by other suppliers specialising in those areas and
wonder why
they aren't selling anything anymore. It's the drive to
dominate all the
market places which is typical of middle management ambition
who are
just looking for something to put on their CV for the next job
rather
than a sensible decision about the nature and direction of the
company.

The cafe around the corner from work does a mean Full English
Breakfast
but if they wanted to follow the Maplins strategy then they
would stop
selling black pudding and bubble and squeak because not
everyone likes
it but they would start selling Whopper style burgers because
Burger
King manage to make money out of them. Before you know it I
would be
sitting in a McDonalds clone wondering how they managed to take
the
hallowed ingredients of a Full English and produce something so
entirely
unlike one.


Fortunately Maplin only dabbled in cell phones briefly when the

pay-as-you-go craze started and then got out once the price
frenzy begun
amongst the cell phone dealers. They made a pretty penny
selling the
top-up cards but never sold anywhere near enough phones to even
cover
the wholesale cost. For once, they were ahead of the game by
being
amongst the first to offer pay-as-you-go phones but, as always,

completely failed to advertise it, failed to give staff any
training in
it and overpriced everything forcing them to demolish their
margins
offering heavy discounts after a few months of no sales.


I can't understand why the management are doing this. They want
to be a
jack of all trades but neglect what got them to where they are
now. The
consumer electronics market is cut-throat and you need to be
able to
alter prices at a moments notice and catalogue stores find that
very
hard. The recent move to turn all Dixons stores into Currys is
quite
intersting as they are both stores that know what they are
doing in the
consumer electronics market (I don't know why they didn't do
this years
ago) and shows a shift in customer demands. I know for a fact
that I
want to be fiddling with Sat Navs and digital cameras while the

girlfriend gets all breathless shopping for vacuum cleaners and
cookers.

I used to manage a RS store about 30 years ago.

We sold a ton of stereo equipment, because there wasn't a
Best Buy down the street. We sold CB radios because they
were popular at the time. We sold PA equipment, microphones,
and the like (expensive goods, with a huge profit margin),
because we were the only place in town (other than the TV
repair shop) where you might find something like that. We sold
TV antennas, masts, rotators, signal boosters, etc. because
everybody didn't have cable.

The electronic components, connectors, hardware and other
little items had a great gross profit, but didn't generate enough
revenue to amount to anything.

Those items were there to attract customers. A guy comes in
to buy a "record player needle", and you sell him a new stereo.

It was great, going into a RS years ago and being able to buy
a couple of 1/4 watt resistors. But when people quit checking
to see what stereo system was on sale while they were there
(because you know you can get one cheaper at Best Buy),
the business model quit working. I think they have done the
best that could be expected, but are on the same path as the
small grocery store or full-service gas station.

Anyway, my $.02.

-Hershel
 
L

Lostgallifreyan

Jan 1, 1970
0
Your feelings on the service industry's future, are touchingly
optimistic, but I fear, fundamentally flawed. As the level of
integration on consumer electronics increases, it becomes more and
more impossible to fix, not only from the fault-finding point of view,
but also from the practicalities of being able to successfully remove
and replace some of the high integration devices - BGA's for instance.
Owners of the gear expect now to bring it in, and collect it next day,
fixed. If they can't, they will go to the local Tesco or Walmart or
wherever, and just buy another, with more whizzbang features on it
than the last. Plasma TVs seem to have gone back for the moment to the
old days of modular electronics, but nothing that the you can ( or the
manufacturers will let you ) fix on the modules, for the most part.
I don't actually believe that even the modules that you are sending
back to them, are actually getting repaired.

That just means that the repair/recycling goes back to source instead of
other people getting a look-in. Sad, but it still allows for one of my
preducted outcomes. It's not a big prediction. Even if legislation doesn't
enforce recycling, it will happen. Think about that heat gradient thing,
the way different melt temperatures allow plastics to separate from each
other. That would benefit the maker immensely, saving them a lot of raw
materials cost. It's in their interset to get the stuff back, ot's one
reason why they like it that way. It doesn't all go to landfill, there are
whole towns in China that specialise in deconstructing stuff to save money
in reuse, and I'm sure the companies would love to automate this, same as
the industrial revolution sought to automate things.
All that I can see happening, with the benefit of 35 years in the
service trade behind me, is that the manufacturers will find better
ways of allowing the stuff to be more readily reduced to its
constituent parts, at what is considered to be its ( commercial )
life-end. Their business is driven by volume sales. For every one high
quality expensive item that was sold by them in the past, they
probably now need to shift a hundred or more, so they really don't
want the likes of us repairing them ad infinitum. Where some serious
inroads to this could be made, is in the cost of spares. How many DVD
players have you scrapped, for instance, because the 50 cent laser
that's in it, comes out at 100 or more times that when it's offered as
a spare ? But there you go - they don't really want us putting a new
one in, do they ?

Then that's where some limited service industry can result. Perverse, I
know, but if buying intact units to strip for spares is the cheap way to
get them, then that's what people will do. I suspect it won't be to do
direct repairs of original gear (except where individuals demand and pay
for it), the firms making it will do that, if anyone does, but there will
be money in it. The trick for people outside the firm's traffic will be in
taking advantage of a cheap item containing parts that someone elsewhere
will pay a lot for. The main problem with this is that many items will have
a high waste to parts ratio. That could be where the enforcing of recycling
comes in though. Once the companies making this stuff identify their
ownership so well that the bulk traffic is to and from them, it might be
easy to make them responsible to handle even dismantled items, providing
the people who dismantled them voluntarily make the effort to return them
at least to a starting point for their journey.

This isn't blind idealism, it's already beginning. Recycling still has a
green treehugging image, but in cities that's rapidly being seen as a basic
service like rubbish collection, but with more detailed demands on what is
put out, and how. Money will drive this, eventually, same as it has for
years with non-ferrous metals. As soon as the price of heavy metals and oil
start to rise as population growth, world-wide industrialisation, and
increasing difficulty getting raw materials grows, so will the rise of a
market for salvage. Wherever there is a need for sorting, even at
domestic level where a lot will be done, there will be a demand for pay
for the work, and as the price will rise, and the work won't get done
without pay, that pay will get paid, though there won't be anything quick
about agreements being made. There will come a complexity and invention of
ways to make money that hasn't been seen or imagined yet.
 
L

Lostgallifreyan

Jan 1, 1970
0
[email protected] (Paul Carpenter) wrote in
Considering some of the chnages to things like TVs Radios and Hifis with
going digital, widescreen and other things, most of the old stuff and
early versions of new schemes will not be useable. As soon as some
types of flat screens start developing faults in the highly integrated
glass the vast bulk of it is only scrap, and not repairable without
very complex clean rooms.

Ok, but it's very recoverable scrap. Extracting phosphor materials from
glassware before melting is probably a viable economy, not very attractive,
but no worse than most recycling business already running.

Once things like Necsels (Novalux laser device, RGB emitter in compact
form) start appearing in TV's, there will be modular parts with high resale
value. New tech is just as likely to make new opportunities as to destroy
old ones.
 
T

Tom Lucas

Jan 1, 1970
0
I used to manage a RS store about 30 years ago.

We sold a ton of stereo equipment, because there wasn't a
Best Buy down the street. We sold CB radios because they
were popular at the time. We sold PA equipment, microphones,
and the like (expensive goods, with a huge profit margin),
because we were the only place in town (other than the TV
repair shop) where you might find something like that. We sold
TV antennas, masts, rotators, signal boosters, etc. because
everybody didn't have cable.

The electronic components, connectors, hardware and other
little items had a great gross profit, but didn't generate enough
revenue to amount to anything.

Those items were there to attract customers. A guy comes in
to buy a "record player needle", and you sell him a new stereo.

It was great, going into a RS years ago and being able to buy
a couple of 1/4 watt resistors. But when people quit checking
to see what stereo system was on sale while they were there
(because you know you can get one cheaper at Best Buy),
the business model quit working. I think they have done the
best that could be expected, but are on the same path as the
small grocery store or full-service gas station.

I'm sure there is still a viable market there for the accessories and
parts that no-one else sells - cordless phone batteries, stylii, fuses,
obscure bulbs etc. There is also another niche market that they should
be involved in, albeit carefully, and that is the support of partially
legal activities. PIC12C508 and 509s are used in the chipping of
playstations, cable boxes and other devices and Maplin is about the only
place around you can buy them in bulk and still pay cash. They also have
their "video copy enhancer" which very effectively strips off
macrovision and other copy protection mechanisms which can be happily
overpriced and people will still buy it.

There is a future for high street electronics shops but they must stick
to their core business and accept that they have grown about as big as
they are going to and stop striving to topple Comet, Currys and Toys 'r'
us.
 
L

Lostgallifreyan

Jan 1, 1970
0
It's the greed that will kill them all. They had a good niche selling
parts but there wasn't a huge amount of money in it - although there was
plenty to keep the stores open. They then branch out into areas that are
sewn up by other suppliers specialising in those areas and wonder why
they aren't selling anything anymore. It's the drive to dominate all the
market places which is typical of middle management ambition who are
just looking for something to put on their CV for the next job rather
than a sensible decision about the nature and direction of the company.

So true, but that actually offers hope. It only takes a bit of realisation
on the part of the public, and of shareholders, and these blinkered
agressive egoists with more ambition than sense will become unemployable.
 
T

Tom Lucas

Jan 1, 1970
0
Lostgallifreyan said:
in


So true, but that actually offers hope. It only takes a bit of
realisation
on the part of the public, and of shareholders, and these blinkered
agressive egoists with more ambition than sense will become
unemployable.

There will always be work for an aggressive egoist with more ambition
than sense. No company large enough to use an HR department for their
recruitment can resist the buzzwords and glowing reference from a
manager desperate to get rid of them. Only small companies are immune
because they have to recruit people on merit.
 
L

Lostgallifreyan

Jan 1, 1970
0
There will always be work for an aggressive egoist with more ambition
than sense. No company large enough to use an HR department for their
recruitment can resist the buzzwords and glowing reference from a
manager desperate to get rid of them. Only small companies are immune
because they have to recruit people on merit.

How long can the big companies afford the indulgence? New stuff happens
with small firms. The big firms buy them out as the thing becomes
established and commercial pressure bites into the profits. The faster new
tech changes, the more it favours the small firms, and the less the big
ones will be able to afford their current indulgence. They won't recruit
from HR agencies, they'll keep their own best staff, and keep the small
firm's staff too, as anything else might become too big a risk. Once the
small firms they buy up are driving the market harder than middle
management is, they won't risk letting some egoistic paper pusher scupper
the ship. They'll want more loyalty, and they'll pay to keep it.
 
I

Isaac Bosompem

Jan 1, 1970
0
Meat said:
There used to be one old school RS in my area. The "then" manager strived
to keep useful things on the shelves. Now unless you're looking for a
phone battery, talking picture frame, or an R/C toy you're shit outta luck.

That is interesting. Here in Toronto, most of the Radio Shacks I've
been too carried electronics components (proto boards, soldering irons,
resistors, caps, LED's, connectors, IR, etc.) but they are hidden at
the far back of the store. Also they are very expensive.
5 LED's will cost you almost $3 CDN, pfft... Thats crazy being that I
can go to the many electronics stores we have downtown and buy 5 for a
quarter.

-Isaac
 
I

Ignoramus906

Jan 1, 1970
0
RadioShack is about consumer goods nowadays, and their salespeople
often do not know what is a resistor etc. Which kind of makes sense,
when electronic components are so easy to buy from various websites, t
makes little sense to sell them in stores.

i
 
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