"CBFalconer" wrote in message
...

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.

Henry wrote in
:

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.

Meat Plow wrote in
news
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?

In article , no-
says...
Henry wrote in
:

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.

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
.net:

In article , no-
says...
Henry wrote in
:

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.

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.

Gene S. Berkowitz wrote in
.net:

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.

"Lostgallifreyan" wrote in message
...
Gene S. Berkowitz wrote in
.net:

In article , no-
says...
Henry wrote in
:

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.

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.

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

"Joel Kolstad" wrote in message
...
"Homer J Simpson" wrote in message
news:L0cUg.7286$N4.2849@clgrps12...
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 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.

On Monday, in article

"Lostgallifreyan" wrote:

Henry wrote in
:

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,

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.


--
Paul Carpenter |
http://www.pcserviceselectronics.co.uk/ PC Services
http://www.gnuh8.org.uk/ GNU H8 & mailing list info
http://www.badweb.org.uk/ For those web sites you hate

On 3-Oct-2006, "Tom Lucas"
k wrote:

"Joel Kolstad" wrote in message

...
"Homer J Simpson" wrote in message
news:L0cUg.7286$N4.2849@clgrps12...
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 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.

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
:

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.

(Paul Carpenter) wrote in
news:20061003.0854.320727snz@pcserviceselectronics .co.uk:

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.

"Hershel" wrote in message
...

On 3-Oct-2006, "Tom Lucas"
k wrote:

"Joel Kolstad" wrote in message

...
"Homer J Simpson" wrote in message
news:L0cUg.7286$N4.2849@clgrps12...
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 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.

"Tom Lucas" k wrote in
:

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.

"Lostgallifreyan" wrote in message
...
"Tom Lucas" k wrote
in
:

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.

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" k wrote in
:

"Lostgallifreyan" wrote in message
...
"Tom Lucas" k wrote
in
:

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.

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.

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

Homer J Simpson wrote:
"Tom Lucas" k wrote:

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.

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.

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 **** outta luck.

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

COOSN-266-06-25794

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

"Isaac Bosompem" wrote in message
ups.com...

That is interesting. Here in Toronto, most of the Radio Shacks I've
been to 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.

Yes. A dollar store that sold electrical / electronics only would compete
well with RS (The Source).

The reason they hide that stuff in back is that the salesman makes a modest
commission on a cellphone deal but only about 20 cents on a $3 sale.

In article , Ignoramus906 wrote:
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.

My Radio Shack remodled a couple years ago and I found the new layout the best ever,
except I miss when the stores had a regular stereo listening area setup. They had nice isles
and had soldering stuff, cleaners right there in the middle of things.

They closed this summer.

greg

"Homer J Simpson" wrote in message
news:7qxUg.45700$bf5.17218@edtnps90...
The reason they hide that stuff in back is that the salesman makes a modest
commission on a cellphone deal but only about 20 cents on a $3 sale.

Yeah, but one can argue that -- these days -- it usually requires *selling* to
get someone to purchase a cell phone, whereas for something like an LED the
employee is almost always just going to be an *order taker*.

On 3-Oct-2006, "Joel Kolstad"
wrote:

"Homer J Simpson" wrote in message
news:7qxUg.45700$bf5.17218@edtnps90...
The reason they hide that stuff in back is that the salesman
makes a modest
commission on a cellphone deal but only about 20 cents on a
$3 sale.

Yeah, but one can argue that -- these days -- it usually
requires *selling* to
get someone to purchase a cell phone, whereas for something
like an LED the
employee is almost always just going to be an *order taker*.

But the next guy that comes in the store spends 1/2 hour
asking the employee why he can't connect the LEDs to
120VAC, before he spends the $3.

Then of course, returns the defective parts the next day.

-Hershel

"Hershel" wrote in
:


On 3-Oct-2006, "Joel Kolstad"
wrote:

"Homer J Simpson" wrote in message
news:7qxUg.45700$bf5.17218@edtnps90...
The reason they hide that stuff in back is that the salesman
makes a modest
commission on a cellphone deal but only about 20 cents on a
$3 sale.

Yeah, but one can argue that -- these days -- it usually
requires *selling* to
get someone to purchase a cell phone, whereas for something
like an LED the
employee is almost always just going to be an *order taker*.

But the next guy that comes in the store spends 1/2 hour
asking the employee why he can't connect the LEDs to
120VAC, before he spends the $3.

Then of course, returns the defective parts the next day.

-Hershel


How many buyers were really that bad? Surely not enough to dent the income
that badly? I think it's arguable that assumptions like that lead to an
impression that stocking small parts leads to being beset with timewasters,
and that might be a big reason why people stopped stocking them. That says
far more about the management than about the customers. I accept that there
is no smoke without fire, but the fire is usually far smaller than the
smoke. Besides, isn't pricing LED at $3 for a pack of 5 asking for trouble?
All the sensible and well-informed clients are buying elsewhere.

The first rule of high street spares and parts is: keep them in stock. That
might not apply to special parts but once it gets to the point where a 16V
1000 µF capacitor or an LM317T regulator can't be bought at a moment's
notice at any time the shop is open, that's when the business goes belly up
with all speed unless it gives up trying and becomes a different kind of
shop, in which case it should make way for another firm who will take on
that trade. Looks like some of the small mail order firms might soon start
doing what Maplin and Tandy/Radio Shack were doing. I guess history repeats
itself.

"Lostgallifreyan" wrote in message
...
"Arfa Daily" wrote in
:

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.

That's all as may be, but I really can't see any mileage in offering
recovered parts to the service industry, or any such thing spawning a
revival in the ' mend and make do ' mentality of Joe Punter. I would not
dream of fitting a second hand recovered laser, or any other component come
to that. It's simply not practical when you've got to be able to offer a
warranty on the repair. Neither would I waste the time recovering components
for commercial use. It would just not make economic sense. The only way that
recycling of electronic equipment is going to have any serious impact, is in
recovery of the base materials for reuse in manufacturing new goods.
However, like wind turbines and battery cars, the energy budget advantage
for doing even this, is dubious. Far better my original contention that
manufacturers should be obliged to pass on spare parts at cost plus
handling, not cost plus handling plus 5000% profit, thus stopping the stuff
being prematurely scrapped in the first place...

Arfa

In article , no-
says...
Gene S. Berkowitz wrote in
.net:

In article , no-
says...
Henry wrote in
:

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.

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.

No, my view is current. We build products to RoHS, and we now document
the quickest and safest ways to disassemble our products for recycling.
In most cases, our SMT boards are not economical to repair; the labor
cost of removing one PLCC package, or God forbid, a BGA, very rapidly
approaches our cost for a new, fully populated and tested PCB from our
turnkey vendor.

It's cheaper and easier to shred the entire product, case & all, skim
the plastics off to make park benches, and throw the rest in the
crucible and separate out any metals of value.

Should China become unwilling to take on the work, there are dozens of
developing economies in Asia and Africa that would be happy to take it
off their hands.

--Gene

Gene S. Berkowitz wrote:

In most cases, our SMT boards are not economical to
repair; the labor cost of removing one PLCC package, or God forbid, a
BGA, very rapidly approaches our cost for a new, fully populated and
tested PCB from our turnkey vendor.

It's cheaper and easier to shred the entire product, case & all, skim
the plastics off to make park benches, and throw the rest in the
crucible and separate out any metals of value.

--Gene

Just out of curiosity, Gene, do you do any failure analysis to determine
the cause before shredding the evidence?

Regards,

Mike Monett

Antiviral, Antibacterial Silver Solution:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/index.htm
SPICE Analysis of Crystal Oscillators:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/spice/xtal/clapp.htm
Noise-Rejecting Wideband Sampler:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/add.automat...pler/intro.htm

"Hershel" wrote in message
...

On 3-Oct-2006, "Joel Kolstad"
wrote:

"Homer J Simpson" wrote in message
news:7qxUg.45700$bf5.17218@edtnps90...
The reason they hide that stuff in back is that the salesman
makes a modest
commission on a cellphone deal but only about 20 cents on a
$3 sale.

Yeah, but one can argue that -- these days -- it usually
requires *selling* to
get someone to purchase a cell phone, whereas for something
like an LED the
employee is almost always just going to be an *order taker*.

But the next guy that comes in the store spends 1/2 hour
asking the employee why he can't connect the LEDs to
120VAC, before he spends the $3.

Then of course, returns the defective parts the next day.

That was one of the better parts of the Maplin job but it certainly did
take a lot of time. I didn't mind on slow week days but on a busy
Saturday when someone hands you a melted mass of black plastic and wants
you to identify and replace a part now absent from a smoking crater then
it becomes a bit tedious.

Good job satisfaction though if you manage to actually teach a customer
something because you know he's going to go bragging to his mates about
his new found knowledge, even if it is just calculating a voltage drop
resistor for a LED.

In article ,
says...
Gene S. Berkowitz wrote:

In most cases, our SMT boards are not economical to
repair; the labor cost of removing one PLCC package, or God forbid, a
BGA, very rapidly approaches our cost for a new, fully populated and
tested PCB from our turnkey vendor.

It's cheaper and easier to shred the entire product, case & all, skim
the plastics off to make park benches, and throw the rest in the
crucible and separate out any metals of value.

--Gene

Just out of curiosity, Gene, do you do any failure analysis to determine
the cause before shredding the evidence?

I didn't say we don't investigate, it just isn't cost-effective to
repair the board by hand, rather than pull a new one from stock.

We do investigate hen we can. Some of our boards are potted for
intrinsic safety, and it's pretty difficult to remove. When a product
is returned because it was struck by lightning, or flooded, we don't
usually investigate much!

The failures we see in-house have been due to improper handling (bad
wrist straps), correctly marked SMT resistors that are the wrong value,
and an occasional defective EEPROM.

--Gene






Regards,

Mike Monett

Antiviral, Antibacterial Silver Solution:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/index.htm
SPICE Analysis of Crystal Oscillators:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/spice/xtal/clapp.htm
Noise-Rejecting Wideband Sampler:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/add.automat...pler/intro.htm

Gene S. Berkowitz wrote:

I didn't say we don't investigate, it just isn't cost-effective to
repair the board by hand, rather than pull a new one from stock.

We do investigate when we can. Some of our boards are potted for
intrinsic safety, and it's pretty difficult to remove. When a
product is returned because it was struck by lightning, or
flooded, we don't usually investigate much!

The failures we see in-house have been due to improper handling
(bad wrist straps), correctly marked SMT resistors that are the
wrong value, and an occasional defective EEPROM.

--Gene

Thanks, Gene,

Is it correct to assume the in-house problems are detected before
shipment? Do you do a burnin where you run a self-test program?

Regards,

Mike Monett

Antiviral, Antibacterial Silver Solution:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/index.htm
SPICE Analysis of Crystal Oscillators:
http://silversol.freewebpage.org/spice/xtal/clapp.htm
Noise-Rejecting Wideband Sampler:
http://www3.sympatico.ca/add.automat...pler/intro.htm

In article ,
says...
Gene S. Berkowitz wrote:

I didn't say we don't investigate, it just isn't cost-effective to
repair the board by hand, rather than pull a new one from stock.

We do investigate when we can. Some of our boards are potted for
intrinsic safety, and it's pretty difficult to remove. When a
product is returned because it was struck by lightning, or
flooded, we don't usually investigate much!

The failures we see in-house have been due to improper handling
(bad wrist straps), correctly marked SMT resistors that are the
wrong value, and an occasional defective EEPROM.

--Gene

Thanks, Gene,

Is it correct to assume the in-house problems are detected before
shipment? Do you do a burnin where you run a self-test program?

We have board-level tests that are either performed at the vendor or by
us prior to product assembly. The finished product usually undergoes
further performance/accuracy checks. This catches virtually all our
defects. We usually don't burn in products unless they have mechanical
parts like compressors or pumps that tend to have much higher "infant
mortality".

--Gene

"Aly" wrote in message
news
"larwe" wrote in message
ups.com...
I stopped using PartMiner years ago, when they closed down all free
access to datasheets.

Today I received an email from PartMiner which says, in essence, "our
core business model is unprofitable, so we are now professional
spamwhores. Your contact details are being sold to anyone we can find
who will pay us a nickel":

If you would like to receive business or career related offers
from PartMiner Information Systems, you do not have to respond
to this e-mail. You can easily unsubscribe each time you receive
an e-mail from us if you don't find the information worthwhile. To
unsubscribe now, please scroll to the bottom of this e-mail for
instructions.

This "vendor" should be boycotted.


I agree with this. I outright refuse to use suppliers that expect ME to
pay
for their advertising material. Maplin is one them, wanting £5 for a
catalogue. RS are so stingy with their catalogues it's unheard of, you'd
think they'd be giving them away on every street corner when you see their
prices. After LOADS of arguing I lost interest, they sent them eventually
by UPS/TNT? to a rural country location taking 3-weeks of further
cock-ups,
such that I had absolutely no faith in anything I ever ordered getting to
me. The catalogues went in the bin.

Buy our products *AND* buy our sales merchandise. Use *OUR* delivery
service that *WE* have a cut price contract with, even if it'll never get
to
you because the drivers are too lazy to even bother.

This methodology wouldn't work at my local Indian Restaurant I'm sure.


I was going to reply with some sense, but why bother with effort on
these deals - just tell PartsMiner to go and get stuffed. In fact, tell them
nothing, just move on. There are plenty of other parts suppliers just
waiting for real business, you don't need these arseholes - just boycott
them. RS are no better. I have an account with them, but, in fact, even if
you have an account, they're not interested
.... Johnny