Electronics Repair shops closing - Another Walmartization casualty... [View All]

[cascadiance]

Walmart and those retailers champion that they are offering cheaper merchandise as a rationalization for off-shoring jobs and lowering benefits.

One other cost though which is an "externalized cost" is that this is contributing to the "throwaway society" that we live in.

I had a DVD player (only about 6 months to a year old) that stopped reading DVDs, and then recently a TV/VCR combo unit that suddenly went into a loop of trying to eject a video tape, basically preventing the TV from being used as a regular TV, and also not allowing it to be powered down without pulling the plug.

I tried to go to my repair shop that I'd gone to before to repair an older laserdisc player, etc. It had a note that it was closed today and to come back tomorrow. Went there a few times since then, and the same note was hanging there.

I tried another place yesterday, which was closed at the time. I called yet another place this morning that said the original place I tried to go to was closing down. When I mentioned both of the problems I had, he said that the first item was definitely a throwaway, and the second one was also likely a throwaway too, since I could probably get a replacement for $99 at Costco that did about the same thing.

He was noting that a lot of repair shops are shutting down, as increasingly there are few problems any more that can be fixed easily, no matter how trivial they might sound, since machines aren't being built that can be fixed at all any more. These folks that are in repair shops are in effect being "outsourced" as well, since their business is going away.

I'd rather have the middle class and the rest of us to have our wages go up so that we can afford to pay for higher priced items and in the course of doing so, provide a space for repair shops to be viable and also prevent us from throwing more stuff on the trash heap and stemming the coming environmental disaster of having too much trash there, which is also going to be growing in places like China too as they get more materialistic too.

I like cheap stuff, but I feel guilty when I look at all of the stuff that fails more quickly and we have to throw away (and therefore we really don't save much over time when we have to replace stuff more often too). There's got to be a way to help Walmart shoppers, etc. to see the big equation here that has much more costs than is obvious, that they themselves will likely take the brunt of paying for, either with lost jobs, or having to buy more to replace stuff over time.