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Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Of course they do, it's yet another chance to punish their customers.

I ordered from Newark/Element14 once, doing battle with and finally prevailing over their extremely clunky online system. It took several days for my $100 order to even ship, and it eventually showed up in two gigantic boxes (a few 4ft pieces of heat shrink tubing had obviously required their own 4ft long box). The packing materials and shipping must have totaled at least $100, to say nothing of the obviously manual labor.

I've no idea how they stay in business.

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Totally agree. Their packing process appears to be designed for $10k orders, so when the optimism fails, the box leaves nearly empty. Perhaps they're trying to send a subtle message: 'don't waste this box, buy more stuff.'

One time I ordered from them some XAM3359ZCZs (a Texas Instruments ARM CPU which is about half a cell phone or double an Rπ) -- out of stock in US, but available from UK. I was in a hurry, so I spring for the extra shipping. Weeks later, no parts and no word. Called, them and 'oops' it is stuck in UK and I need to make a customs declaration to re-import to the US this US part from the UK. Very annoying on several levels.

I ordered from them exactly once, and it took so long that I eventually got in touch to see what was going on: they had forgotten about my order. Soon after, I received 4 rush packages from them (all from the same address), with only a couple of components in each. All told I received about half my order - I just gave up on them.

In the UK Farnell/Element14 are the best choice for components. My items always arrive next-day when ordered before 5pm and delivery is free (you have to spend at least £20 to pay by card).

The site is a lot more usable than RS-Online so I will often order from them though I have an RS trade-counter nearby. Mouser's and Digikey's sites are just as good (this is from a user perspective, from a designer's perspective they are pretty awful) but orders will ship from the US and take longer.

I find Mouser and Digikey's sites fairly unusable, myself... I search for stuff on Element14 because I find their filtering so much easier, and once I've found an appropriate part I search the part number on Digikey and buy it there if I don't need it in the next few days...

The search is the main thing that struck me as clunky - many important parameters were downright missing, making it so I had to manually click through a bunch of results' datasheets. IIRC, electrolytic caps were missing ESR (seems to be no longer the case, although still no ripple current). The values of an individual category don't "cover" all current results, making it impossible to eliminate values. Plus that horrible needle-in-a-haystack interspersing of greyed out unavailable parameters with the still-active ones. All around it felt like it was only meant to locate something I already have specified, rather than guide as to what is available.

I guess that at least helps me understand why RPi went with them as a distributor, even though their business seems archaic on this side of the Atlantic.

I don't know what you mean by Digikey being awful from a designer's perspective - I've long considered their parametric search a bona fide design tool. So much so that I actively avoid designing in parts that Digikey doesn't stock.

Digikey's and Farnell's parametric search are the best from a user's perspective. All the sites are pretty terrible from a designer's perspective. I concluded this from working out how to generate HTTP requests for them for my pet project: https://github.com/kasbah/1clickBOM

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