All but one supplier of electronic components in Amsterdam has shut down. The most recent shop to go under was Hecke Electronica. This was actually a mere retirement by the owner in his mid-70s. But all the other shops could not overcome the struggle for business.
According to the owner of an electro shop which sells light bulbs (not components), it’s not interesting to sell components because you do a lot of talking and only to get a sale that earns 20 cents.
A shop that traditionally only sold plastic toy models (“MUCO”) has allocated half the shop to:
entry-level electronic components
- Arduinos/Ras Pis & components for them
- multimeters
- soldering irons
- oscilloscopes
- breadboards
- capacitors, resistors, etc..
Things they seem to be missing are along the lines of:
hacking and repair tools
- isolating transformers
- logic analyzers
- desoldering vacuum
- ESR/capacitance meter
- bus pirate / Flipper Zero
- ISP programmers
- digital microscopes
- contact cleaner spray
The masses of Amazon.com consumers did this. People who prioritise saving a couple euros above the environment while looking the other way as exploited human factory workers pee in jars to keep up with the pace of reverse-centouran robots that keep people’s noses on the grindstone for lousy wages. Only to then toss new non-defective goods into a landfill because they did not reach Bezo’s profitability standard amid warehouse space shortages.
I will only shop offline, with cash. And my focus is on repair, so I need hacker tools to repair broken appliances that consumerist Amazon patrons dump on curbs. So from where I sit this is dystopia unfolding. Unbanked people are fucked. Law may not directly explicitly force you to lick a bank’s boots but if you don’t you’re simply marginalised like an insect under a steam roller.
At the same time, the number of shops selling useless junk souvenirs to tourists is uncountable. But not a single Bus Pirate in town. Clogs and shot glasses won’t help fix a washing machine PCB that has bricked itself due to an anti-repair design.