Yet another reason to avoid PartMiner

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.

--
Pierre Salinger Memorial Hook, Line & Sinker, June 2004

COOSN-266-06-25794

Henry wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

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.

On Mon, 02 Oct 2006 22:20:28 +0000, Lostgallifreyan Has Frothed:

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

--
Pierre Salinger Memorial Hook, Line & Sinker, June 2004

COOSN-266-06-25794

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?

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

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

Your view is outdated.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

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.

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

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.

--
Paul Carpenter          | paul@pcserviceselectronics.co.uk
    PC Services
              GNU H8 & mailing list info
             For those web sites you hate

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.

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

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