#supplyhouse — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #supplyhouse, aggregated by home.social.
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There's also the case where you live in a place that doesn't have a large enough population to support a specialty seller of some sort. My city used to have two different electronics supply houses (which exist mainly to serve the trades, but they'll usually tolerate hobbyists coming in to buy stuff), but that was many years ago, when there were still tons of local repair shops fixing microwaves and TVs and stereos and everything else, so there was lots of demand for electronic components and supplies.
Most of those things are now treated as disposable items. The repair shops are long gone. There's not enough demand in my city - actually, in my whole province - to support such a supply house.
So hobbyists and people who still do repairs have to order from somewhere. The closest "local" supply house is in a city that's a 7-hour drive away. So I can order from them - but it's a pain, because they don't have any way to see their stocklist or order online. It's "phone them and hope they're not too busy to tell you which of these 17 diode models they happen to have in stock".
Or I can go online and order from Newark/Element14/Farnell (all the same company), or DigiKey, or Mouser, or Amazon, or Ebay, or AliExpress. And all of these will be cheaper as well as more convenient.
"Shop local" just ain't possible for all things if you don't live in a city like NYC or London or Frankfurt etc.