Yet another reason to avoid PartMiner

I got the impression that from day 1 they intended to get people hooked with their free access to data sheets, then start charging for it. Maybe I was mistaken...

Bob

I consider spammers to be evil.

It's perfectly reasonable to require reading ads in order to access their data sheets. They could require joining an email list (for ads) as long as the opt-out works and as long as they are up-front about what the deal is. The magic word is informed consent. They would have to specify something about how many and what type of ads they were going to send.

It's not reasonble to sell/trade the email addresses they collect. There is basically no way to opt-out from a system like that. It is reasonable for them to forward ads for other people, again, they have to be up front about how many/often and how big.

In theory, it might be reasonable (as in "informed consent") to require an email address that will get sold, but I can't see how to do that in practice. It would require that people sign up with a disposable address. Would the advertisers accept their end of that?

I worked for Maplin in the Cardiff branch between '98 and 2001 while I was at uni and got to watch the decline from the inside - it all started with an over-eager purchasing manager who got promoted to where he could do some damage. When I first started then the Cardiff branch was one of the "old school" stores with a massive storeroom and a little shop at the front mostly frequented by grubby fingered regulars or people looking for something obscure that they couldn't get elsewhere. We were even allowed to smoke in the storeroom - what luxury!

In '99 the shop was refitted and a large portion of the storeroom was turned into shop space which meant that the building was full of the stupid toys and trinkets that had become the latest rage and all there was no room for the stuff people actually wanted. We lost nearly all the regulars in a matter of weeks when we ended up continually being forced to order in simple parts that always used to be carried in stock. In fairness, the manager normally tried to get requested items carried as stock but there was a limit to the amount of space available - which was reduced from at least 40'x20' to 20'x10' shared with a sales counter.

It is a shame to watch it destroy itself when I used to have such a love for the place. The Chatham branch is still one of the "old school" dingy stores with a big storeroom but it increasingly becoming staffed by muppets and children and they are beginning to discontinue the useful, but obscure, bread and butter lifeblood. I lost count of the times that someone would come in looking for a video drive belt and leave with a bag full of other bits and pieces but, these days, they just leave empty handed.

"Tom Lucas" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@demeter.uk.clara.net...

Pretty much what happened to Radio Shack in the US. Perhaps they are the model - certainly their stock is now 1/4 of what it once sold for.

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

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. 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.

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 remember nipping down to the local Radio Shack in Riyadh about 25 years ago for the parts to make a simple RF field strength detector. It's a shame you can't really do that nowadays.

Cheers

PeteS

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.

On Mon, 02 Oct 2006 14:18:20 -0400, CBFalconer Has Frothed:

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.

Meat Plow wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@nntp.sun-meatplow.local:

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

Gene S. Berkowitz wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@newsgroups.comcast.net:

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.

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

"Arfa Daily" wrote in news:YgpUg.35836$ snipped-for-privacy@newsfe4-win.ntli.net:

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.

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.

paul$@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk (Paul Carpenter) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk:

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.

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.

"Tom Lucas" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@iris.uk.clara.net:

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.

"Tom Lucas" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@iris.uk.clara.net:

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.