So, I made a few devices in senior project in college (a couple of robots), and more recently have been branching into developing my own hardware for embedded system work. (the clients keep giving me sorry, ate up hardware that either has design flaws or is a 25 year old design and costs 100 times as much as a modern design)
Well, while waiting on the internet to ship me parts and prototype circuit boards, I’ve started breadboarding and perfboarding individual circuits in order to test their functionality and bypass faults in the client’s equipment.
You can’t get jack in retail stores. Fry’s Electronics, Radio shack, another electronics supplier - nobody has anything but the most low end, basic parts that are worse than useless. (like 5% accurate resistors, op amps but no instrumentation amps, a shortage of resistors, no TTL MOSFETs…)
Even a bloody lightbulb for my desk lamp wasn’t available anywhere with decent quality but online.
And don’t get me started on the price difference. Online is anywhere from 30% cheaper to half price, depending on the product in question. A lot less than that if you can get a lot of parts in one order from digikey or Mouser. But, the biggest problem is, again, if you need anything other than the most elementary parts, they ain’t got it. I needed a current sensor - nope. A gate driver - nope. Instrumentation amplifier - nope. Nope, nada, nothing.
Is brick and mortar dead? It’s starting to seem to me that we basically need 1 kind of local store : a walmart for goods that are just too heavy or perishable to inexpensively ship. Everything else, online.
There were electronic parts stores that catered to professionals. Allied, for example had brick-and-mortor stores. Hobbiest stores like RS, Lafayette, and Heathkit had more parts than they do now. There were also lots of surplus stores - I used to go parts picking all the time.
And, there was always mail-order. You may not realize it but Digi-Key got their start as a hobbiest parts supplier. They used to advertise in the back of Popular Electronics, along with Poly Paks, and James Electronics (sound familiar?).
Ever wonder why so many DigiKey part numbers end in ‘-ND’? It’s because they used to have a quantity discount when mail ordering - it you ordered $10 worth of parts you got 10% off, if you ordered $100 you got more off, etc. the ‘-ND’ meant No Discount.
I remember fondly browsing through the catalogs and carefully filling out the order forms, then sending it off with a check my mother wrote, and waiting for the package to arrive… sigh
I was a Radio Shack manager in my youth and RS had a much larger selection of parts then than now. In the day the “278 series” was a significant profit center. Even so we rarely got the serious buyers unless it was the weekend or odd hours, they had professional dedicated electronics parts stores. Those places spent MILLIONS on printing their huge catalogs.
Also remember the internet as a mature delivery channel is quite recent. Before the last decade or so not everything was online.
Some historical documents here.
Great memories.
BTW, ever wonder how Digi-Key manages to sell a few components off of a big reel of them? Some type of marvelous tape-cutting robot?
Nope. It’s rows of women with scissors, cutting the correct count off of a reel (I have a friend who owns a decent-sized assembly house, and they gave him a tour of their warehouse).
Huh. I was wondering that. So how the hell do they make a profit when I order two 7-cent LEDs? It’s all nicely cut from a reel and put in a taped anti-static bag. Maybe the answer is that they don’t make a profit…
I think they really have it down to a science. If you look at T&R pricing, the per-part cost when buying a full reel is about 1/10 the 1-10 price. So, even if they actually lose money if you only buy 1 led, enough people by 10 at 20x their actual cost (assuming they have a 50% markup) to more than make up for it.
According to my friend, they have an incredibly automated inventory system - the reels are all picked robotically, and end up in bins before the cutters, who cut the required number off of the reel, and then put them back to be re-stocked.
I’m lucky in that Kansas City still has a serious electronics store - Electronic Supply Company on Main Street. They make most of their money via big orders taken by phone and web, but they still have a counter that you can drop in on and get pretty much any part the OP mentioned, as well as a huge selection of wire and cable cut to the foot. I’ve been shopping there since I was a teen, and I’m 54. It’s privately owned and I think they never got the memo that they are an anachronism.
Between them and Google Fiber, it is a quiet geek paradise.
When I was a kid my father worked for an electronics supplier. He would bring home spools of transistors, resistors, and the like and we would cut off 10 at a time, put them into bags, and stick labels on the bags. We got paid to do this, though I can’t remember how much.
I buy a lot of parts from Mouser and I once asked a sales support guy who I struck up an email conversation with. He said that for every single order, an individual label is printed up for every unique part, listing the part number and quantity. The labels are then printed by thermal printers located in the actual warehouse aisle where the parts are. Dedicated pickers for that aisle then pick the parts, bag them, and affix the labels. The bags then travel on a conveyer to the packing area where the label barcodes are used to sort all the bags into individual orders. Then there’s a final check and the orders are boxed and shipped. Really impressive operation.
Like Digi-Key, Mouser got their start selling components to schools and hobbyists (their founder was a former teacher.) They’re still one of the few places that will sell you a single 3-cent resistor if you want. You have to pay shipping tho.
Radio Shack had a lot more parts. Until a few years ago the manager at one not that far from here was still stocking the drawers himself. There were also more electronics distributors and they would sell retail also (although you might not be able to purchase a single component). There were also electronics retailers specialized for businesses. They would have wire, soldering supplies, and assorted useful stuff. In addition some TV repair shops carried a few components, and there was also a grapevine of businesses that might sell or loan you a part if they had it available. And if all that failed, then as now, you could call Digi-Key and several other mail order outlets.