If you did have a car, where would you go for electronics? There’s not many places left I wouldn’t avoid.
I’m near enough to MicroCenter and You-Do-It, but most people aren’t and there’s really not much else worth going to.
Online is king for electronics shopping
MicroCenter has a website you can order from and have shipped directly to you
Newegg for most things. Some electronics, I know of smaller online stores and I prefer to order from them.
The only brick and mortar store near me is a Best Buy and that is no good for anyone.
Monoprice for cables, even if I wasn’t near electronics places I probably still would. Cable markup is goofy.
I walk, it’s not ideal but I take one for mother earth and walk the whole 10000 cm to the store when needed.
Who remembers when Radio Shack carried actual radio components?
I don’t, but grew up hearing the tales.
Even when they were an RC car store they still had that one area in the back that none of the salespeople knew about. It didnt actually get removed until it turned into a phone store
Who remembers when Radio Shack carried actual radio components?
It was glorious.
I remember growing up and hitting the radio shack components section. Bought new motors for a remote control car, modded it to fit with super glue and twisted/electrical taped a stronger battery on it.
It worked great for like 5 min before the magic smoke came out 🤣
Edit: I think I was 8-10 years old
The answer depends heavily on your location. Where are you (roughly) located?
USA. Sorry for my American Defaultism 😅
Microcenter, Newegg, B&H Photo and Video.
These and I’d add Crutchfield, Sweetwater, and Best Buy has good sales.
For components, the standard Mouser, Digikey, and McMaster-Carr
Costco for anything they have. Newegg. ABT electronics.
There aren’t even good stores to buy electronics from where I live. Online is my first choice.
The only possible way to get to a shop is “a car”… Poor Americans!
As a poor American who had to move back in with family out to a rural nowhere town and then had their car break down yet can’t afford to get it running again, it absolutely fucking sucks.
I literally cannot go anywhere. I’m surrounded by fields. The closest store of any kind would be an hour’s walk just to get there traveling on 55+mph highways for 80% of the trip with no sidewalk, just a 1ft gravel shoulder between the road and 4ft deep ditches filled with god knows what.
I haven’t had social interaction that isn’t the two family members I live with, and I don’t even want to get started on how they are absolute drains on my already failing mental state.
Plus, now that I don’t have a car, even if I do finally get a bite on my job search, which has been going for more than 6 months now, I have no transportation to get to work. I can’t work from home due to the country bumpkin internet either.
It seriously just feels like waiting to die out here.
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Sounds awful. Your situation is extreme (ah rural America!) but I won’t deny there’s something freeing about cars. These days I hate cars with a passion, and I’ve always lived in big European cities where they’re completely unnecessary, but even I had a car when I was 20, and I loved it. But then a couple of years later I got rid of it, and that also felt like freedom and I loved that too… Anyway, just an anecdote. As for your situation, good luck, you’ll find a way out of there.
PS off-topic: I’ve always found “good luck” to be a bit lacking for these contexts, in French there’s the much better “bon courage”, sadly untranslatable but much more appropriate in your case.
I’m in Louisiana, so using French is actually quite appropriate.
Many people don’t really understand how rural it can get.
Alza.cz! Probably not very useful to you in the US, I guess. Unless you visit Czechia and want to buy some electronics.
For me personally, for older electronics, eBay is my default.
For newer stuff I don’t even bother online, for the most part anymore. I try my best not to go through amazon ( even though that’s where I ended up getting my 2TB external drive and a supposedly refurbished tablet ) because I don’t wanna give them business if I don’t have to, every single time I have ever tried ordering anything on the walmart website any account I make gets flagged or some other problem arises, I have no experience with other sites like NewEgg, and I think Best Buy is a little overpriced, usually, for what I’m looking for.
Online, bestbuy usually has good deals, if I can wait manufacturer websites have decent deals sometimes but month for shipping, newegg like once, amazon a lot. I do want to buy more chinese stuff, since so much amazon stuff is just rebranded aliexpress stuff with faster shipping lol. But I don’t like waiting and theres a lot more research needed sometimes to not get scammed.
aliexpress has great deals for solid tech like tablets way better than the cheap (around 300$) ones here
I’m into Arduino and ESP32 and other small electronics. Aliexpress is my best friend. They have it down to about 2 weeks for delivery, pretty consistently. Or if you can’t wait, Amazon can get you the same products by the end of the day for twice the price.
I live in the city. I don’t have this weakness you speak of
I once had my power supply die on me and had an assignment due very soon that I needed to work on. So I biked down to Best Buy and bought myself a replacement. The replacement didn’t work and when I looked closely I could see the capacitors inside were all corroded. So I was a bit tired and I took the bus back to Best Buy to make the exchange. The replacement also did not work, it was missing a wire connector. At this point I cried a little bit and asked my sister to get me with her car so I could get another replacment. I was sad that it came to that.
Yikes, that sounds awful. I will say tho if driving is the easier option then your city still isn’t setup for proper transit (which sadly makes sense if you live in north America)
