What we lack today is a way to move surplus out of startups and back in to new places. HSC wasn’t just a place to buy stuff, it was also a place to dump excess parts stock. It was part of a cycle of goods that led to better utilization and less waste of valuable materials. And this meant good deals too, so young people like myself 20 years ago could buy some pretty cool stuff for low prices. It was a place of ideation, where you never knew what you were going to find, and those random gizmos sometimes provided a spark of an idea for a new approach to a problem you had been mulling over. It was a place to bump in to other weirdos and talk about projects, learn new things, and make new connections. It was a place where you would walk in and buy one red LED and one resistor for 35 cents, instead of every single pack of items on Amazon containing 100 pieces you will never use and setting you back $10 here and $10 there. It was a place where I learned I could get in to amateur radio really easily if I wanted. And they had one hell of a vacuum tube collection.

It was only accessible to people who lived nearby and that’s a down side for the people who didn’t, but if you worked or lived ten minutes away like I did from college and on for another ten years as I studied robotics and built up my career, it was far and away better than Amazon in almost every way.

Today I rode my bike to Sudo Room in Oakland and picked up three SOT-23 N Channel Mosfets and a couple of 5 amp toggle switches for a fun little project I am working on. There’s bins of switches, caps, wires, motors, power supplies, cables, and who knows what else. It’s all free to members in good standing. Last year my TV died because of bad capacitors. I ordered a capacitor kit for it from Amazon for $15 which actually was missing some important values. I rode my bike to Sudo room and got what I needed for free. I never should have bought the Amazon kit.

There’s a lot to these places where people gather, offer up surplus parts, and take what they need for free when they need it. There’s no packaging waste. There’s no workers pushed so hard they have to pee in bottles to get you a $10 100 pack of red LEDs when all you need is one. Less stuff gets sent to landfill, which means less carbon emissions and environmental damage. It’s like a library instead of a book store. There’s a lot of value there.

For those that no longer have access to places like this, what we have now is really much worse in so many ways.