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Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, in my town (pop 1.4 million in South America) nobody can fix anything anymore and the electronics shops are turning into lighting or computer stores.

I couldn't get a ribbon cable last month from what used to be the best electronics shop in town!

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The same thing happened to Radioshack[0] in North America. Then it became The Source[1] in Canada.

You can still get some parts at The Source these days, but not all of them, and not nearly as expansive a selection.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RadioShack

[1] https://www.thesource.ca/

To be clear, Radioshack and Circuit City were two distinct companies in the US. From a cursory look at Wikipedia, Circuit City was liquidated in 2009 (and later revived), and Radioshack is still operating stores.

Radioshack is still around, but has scaled back extremely.

From thousands of operating stores to 500. Had a few in our area all close, so instead of 2-3 miles, now requires 20 miles to get to one. Effectively to some towns/cities it feels like Radioshack is no more because of such a drastic hit to their footprint.

Yeah—that Wikipedia link goes into the more complex history.

I just remember the RadioShack near my hometown that was full of walls of components. Now you're lucky to find a blank F-connector at The Source in the largest city in the country. Sentimentality got to me.

That said—for other Torontonians, or visitors, there's an awesome (edit: AWESOME) shop on College St between Spadina and Bathurst called Creatron: https://www.creatroninc.com/ (and surprisingly don't discount Long and McQuade [repair shop, Bloor St] for good quality pots and switches, albeit at a markup).

If you can wait for 2 days, then you can use Digikey. It is the best thing we have in America for parts. That and Mouser.

Yes! Well acquainted! They were the go-to wholesalers when I was in film/tv. It’s just not the same as wandering into the shop and getting to know people there. Especially for personal interest/development or hobby projects.

Is this brain drain or the result of some sort of legislation?

More likely liability and labor with those skills moving to better paying jobs.

Doing BGA rework with the right tools is pretty trivial. You can teach the average high school kid to do this stuff but it's not worth it when they could just go to college and learn circuit design or programming to create a design for a less educated technician to build. If they'd rather learn the rework, there are plenty of places that will hire them for more than what someone would pay to have their phone potentially destroyed.

I think it's a combination of factors. Vocational education has never been valued (people want college degrees), and also electronics have become cheap (and harder to fix). The country has also been slowly deindustrializing in the last decades.

I think what is happening it that it much cheaper to make something in China than to repair it locally. If you spend half the cost of a new thing to repair it, you may just buy a new thing.

Yes, but its also because just about every business in the US adhears to the "what the market will bear" rather than "quality product at a fair price" idea.

That and regulatory capture (think plumbers/ac repair/etc) mean that while the part may cost $25 retail, and it only takes 5 minutes to replace they can get away with charging $400 for it (happened to me recently) because they know its going to cost you more to replace it. Appliance repair is going the same way, as is automobile repair at a lot of dealers/name brand chains. The smaller guys will replace an alternator for $40+parts, but your going to be looking at 250+marked up parts at a lot of places. I had the dealer quote me $800 for a door lock, that I ended up fixing mysel for $2 in ebay parts and an hour in labor last year.

Its not always regulatory capture. I tried to get my TV fixed a few years back at some third party repair shop and they still wanted a minimum of $200 to maybe fix it vs me buying a new TV for $300. There is no regulatory capture for TV set repair... just the expenses for the repair shop to stay open.

This isn't unique to any specific region, so I would guess it has to do with density of relevant industries and individuals and the rise of e-commerce. As an example, the San Francisco Bay Area used to be full of shops like Halted, Weird Stuff, Frys (back when they were healthy, not the hollowed out shell that exists today), and Radio Shacks where you could get pretty much any component, module, or development tool that you needed as a hobbyist or small company in the hardware space. What has changed in the last decade though is you can now get access to a much broader range of parts and tools relatively quickly from Mouser, Digikey, SparkFun, Amazon, etc and an even broader set slowly from AliExpress.

There are very few places remaining where there is enough density of need in immediate parts, live debugging, or cottage industry-style production to sustain markets like the one in Shenzhen. Worse, decline in one part of the market (dev tools for examples) would result in a decline in visitors and business adjacencies that speed the decline of the other parts.

Aside from Shenzhen, I'm only aware of Akibahara (smaller and more consumer focused) and some of the markets in Seoul (one of which is smaller and consumer focused, and the other which is more machining/tooling cottage industry focused).

Still worth it for Apple devices since they charge a ridiculous amount to fix something.

I’d say this is a consequence of our outsourcing the manufacture of these products. Repairing electronics is a related skill to developing/manufacturing them. It makes sense that the economy we hire to build these products would also be best at repairing them.

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