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According to Bloomberg Amazon is in talks to buy some of RadioShack's stores:
Amazon has considered using the RadioShack stores as showcases for the Seattle-based company’s hardware, as well as potential pickup and drop-off centers for online customers, said one of the people, who asked not to be named because the deliberations are private.
RadioShack is on the verge of declaring bankruptcy, and according to other reports, it has also been in talks with wireless carrier Sprint about selling some of its stores. The deal with Amazon may not happen, but nonetheless, it shows where Amazon is headed.
To head off competition from Wal-Mart—one of the few retailers that could pose a legitimate threat to Amazon—and to expand its operation, the company has adopted a new hybrid business model, combining e-commerce with offline services.
Originally spotted at Wired, and also linked at HackerNews.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday February 04 2015, @04:25PM
They arrive and I discover I didn't buy what I thought I was buying.
So I'm repairing this vacuum tube radio with a 300 or so volt B+ line and I need new full wave rectifier (this was awhile ago, don't remember why) so I know the shitty 1N4004 rectifiers at RS are only rated to like 100 volts PIV and cost a couple bucks each, so I go online and order two genuine name brand 1n4007 (rated to 1000 V PIV) and I'm tired and sleepy and RS shit would be like $5 to $10 for two diodes so when the bill comes up for $15 I'm like whatever F me I just wanna get to sleep and fix this thing tomorrow when the parts arrive so I click OK and the rest of the night is a blur, I think I made it into bed before falling asleep...
Next day the package arrives (I live about one shipping day away from thief river falls) and I'm like WTF this is a big box for two diodes, I was expecting two dinky little diodes taped to a piece of cardboard and tossed in a 1st class envelope in the mail, but you could fit a bowling ball in this mother Fer of a crate, this is like HP legendary style of shipping and packaging. Uh oh, this is kind of heavy, theres more than 2 diodes in this crate. I'm starting to sweat, you know that story about the soldier who tried to order a spark plug for his jeep and got one digit off on the order so a truck dumps a battleship anchor on the barracks lawn, OMG what did I just buy... I open it up and instead of two diodes I got two bags, qty one hundred, of 1n4007 diodes. Well, I guess I'll never run out of medium voltage rectifiers. Still have some left many years later.
And that's why RS sucks for parts, for just a little more than their onesie-twosie prices I can buy a near lifetime supply online.
I checked before writing this post and the standard baggie is now 5000 diodes on a tape reel for about $80, but apparently they shipped qty 100 in anti-static bags a decade or so ago. And WTF about digikey shipping mechanical toggle switches in anti-static bags with anti-static warning stickers on them, they're not completely without RS style WTF, just less. I can do even better, I ordered some T-13/4 or WTF they're called LED panel mounts, clip the LED into the mount and thread the mount into a panel, chrome plated pot metal... you guessed it, anti-static packaging, WTF? I'm told they ship nuts n bolts and solder rolls the same way...
There's a bunch of people selling binders full of women, err, I mean binders full of SMD components on ebay/amazon, pretty good deal, I can get qty 100 of a SMD capacitor assortment in a nifty binder for not too much money, all neatly labeled takes up no space. And for legacy thru hole you can get similar deals, too. I checked my caps on my LCR bridge and they're legit, maybe a little fuzzy about peak voltage or Q or resonance freq but at least the capacitance is properly labeled.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Wednesday February 04 2015, @07:09PM
Yeah, you're on a completely different level from me. I'm the kind of guy who will look up a schematic online, build it exactly as specified (as far as I can tell, anyway)...and nine times out of ten, the damn thing still doesn't work. Even the classic, ubiquitous circuit to toggle a relay from a microcontroller -- one transistor, one diode, one relay. Sometimes I can't even get that to work right on the first or fifth try (although these days the most common failure is that I've fried the relay already). And basic schematics like that don't give part numbers. I've tried building stuff from components from Mouser -- didn't work, I never figured out why, and I still have those components about six years later because I've never found anything useful to do with them. But I can take one of those simple schematics, walk down to RS and if it calls for an NPN transistor for example, I grab any NPN from those bins and there's about a 90% chance it will work. If not, I go back and buy the other variant and that does it.
Radioshack parts basically let you do electronics Lego instead of electrical engineering. I've been quite happy paying their massively inflated prices for that convenience. I'm not trying to build some big complicated circuit, I'm not buying hundreds of dollars of parts every month. I'm just trying to get my Raspberry Pi to hit the power button on the projector. By drilling a hole through the projector and wiring a relay across the button contacts, because IR schematics are intimidating, lol
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday February 04 2015, @09:43PM
There used to be an old ARRL project book about designing transistor RF circuits that said something along the lines of the only way to learn RF design was blowing up a bunch of (expensive) transistors and we're both pretty much on that path, although I've blown more stuff up. Electronics work is very much like a first person shooter, that way.