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Comment by easton | Hacker News Reader

I mean, Micro Center exists in some areas of the country (the one near to me is literally next to a Michaels). The reason it’s not everywhere is probably because there’s not as much demand outside of big cities.

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I moved 2 years ago but before that I lived about 10m from a micro center for a decade. The hobbyist section in that time progressively got smaller and the selection was overtaken by branded expensive tools and kits. Like instead of just selling the cheap Chinese screwdriver set you could buy on Amazon for 9.99 they’d sell ifixit branded screwdrivers which appeared to be of the same build quality but with the branding and micro center markup were now 24.99 for the exact same set in terms of features. Or the solder practice kits where you could make a blinking heart from an op amp but for $20 when you could get it online for half that. Raspberry pis and arduinos and such were usually priced well but not always although sometimes they’d be on sale for very good deals. They’d sell hats, sensors, and such for them and those would be marked up considerably.

So it was the same problem as RadioShack; anyone who knew what they were doing would plan out a project and order what they needed online to save a considerable amount. What you’d buy would be if you forgot or broke something and needed to grab something asap and didn’t want to wait. That didn’t justify the space I suppose so they kept shrinking it down

What was really annoying was the stuff that would really be handy would be like small packs of passives. Like when I went to akihabara in Japan there was a market that sold small packet of things like resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc. in little baggies for few yen. And when I went to shenzen it was even better, you could get basically anything, smd or throughhole, in any quantity, but that’s kind of cheating ha. Micro center didn’t do this at any point I lived near it. They would only sell the big assortments so if you just needed a 100ohm resistor for an arduino project you had to spend $20 to buy 300 assorted through holes. Frustrating and pricey so id rather just go online and spend less to get a better and broader assortment.

Maybe if we actually do some real right to repair there might be some demand to justify but as is I think it’s just one of those niches that cannot compete with the internet and warehouse/logistic companies like digikey and mouser. There’s just too many skus

how do you live 10 meters away from a micro center? next building?

10 minutes lol

I knew when I moved from AZ to NC I was going to miss Fry's (RIP), I should have checked to see if there were any micro centers within a 50 mile radius when trying to figure out where to move.

The Fry's next to my house died a couple years ago. It was time for it to go: it seriously sucked to walk through, and they hadn't updated any inventory since like 1990. Half the shelves were unapologetically empty.

This isn't limited to just this Fry's, either. I went to the one in Anaheim and it was also a bad time.

I would kill for a Microcenter to go in there. (I'm in Austin and it seems like we'd have plenty of the target market.)

I live in the Bay Area, which is both big city, and heavily tech/maker, and I have never even heard of a Micro Center, much less seen one.

I miss RadioShack, and especially Frys when they were in their prime.

Cries in Fry's

Austin, of all places, really could use a Microcenter. I'm suprised they haven't put one there given they have them in Houston and Dallas.

Ha, we posted nearly identical comments at nearly the same time.

(Sorry, this comment doesn't add anything, but it was too synchronistic to not point out)

Begging for a Micro Center in Austin. They're in Dallas and Houston, so it surprises me we don't have one in the tech capital of the state.

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