GONE - End of an Era

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ndiamone

600 Club - QQ All-Star
Joined
Jun 13, 2008
Messages
658
Location
Silicon Valley (but I don't own it)
Weirdstuff Warehouse and Advanced Component Electronics Closes Up Shop

For those of you lucky enough to live in or near Silicon Valley, 2018 has been a dearth year for vintage electronics retail shops - the kind that open up in abandoned warehouses nobody else wants in less-than-stellar areas of town.

Guys brave the grease and grunge day after day year after year in hopes of scrounging some kind of gem out from under the dirt and destruction and now what used to be an entire route of stops that would take a day or two just to see them all is now down to one (Halted Electronics) and its' fate going forward is precarious at best.

For nigh onto 40 years WWH and ACE have been stalwarts in the used- electronics retail categories - but when Apple bought up ACE's building by the smelting works and Google bought up the whole campus out by the city dump that contained WWH and lots of startup businesses as well - everybody tried to find alternate business locations in even more undesireable locations around the valley - but even those had been already snapped up by flippers for community redevelopment and gentrification.

The startups either went back East up North or down South where accommodations were cheaper - or moved their business back into their daddy's garage just like they used to do 40 years ago at the start of the computer revolution.

Eventually they all had to retire and sell out to people whose acerage hadn't yet been gobbled up by the tech companies - either because they were too far (Gilroy to the south and Cloverdale to the north) or because they didn't have to worry about the expense of a retail business license or the operations requirements of a brick-and-mortar store.

Just like when record shops go out of business due to owners deaths and nobody else in the family knowing or caring anything about it - who don't know about selling to Zero Freitas - everything that was left got sold off at fire sale prices to Outback Equipment in the case of Weirdstuff and Excess Solutions in the case of ACE.

Everything left behind after THAT got scooped up and thrown into a series of Sims Metal Recycling dumpsters to get hauled off and melted down.

So that all the hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought in by Google and Apple can afford housing - these companies are starting to make coffin sized Oriental/Indian/Malaysian accommodations as part of the compensation packages.

When Americans start wanting these jobs and are willing to tolerate the conditions - only then will the housing market in silicon valley go back to normal and not until.
 
It is (and I am treading on thin ice here as you did,) the industrial complex, Amazon/Google, that are bringing this country to absolute ruin. One just need listen to Eisenhower's last talk as POTUS.
I apologize if I crossed the line-it had to be said!
 
Um...he specifically called out the "military-industrial" complex, not industry in general. Just for history's sake. Sorry ndiamone, but we're not all aware of the problems with real estate prices in the Bay Area, at least not intimately. There will always be a "correction".
 
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