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1 Small amounts

2 Introduction

2 So what to do?

Distributors for small amounts

More text about the problem...

From:    Jaap van Ganswijk <ganswijk@xs4all.nl>
To:      Michael.Koch@fema.gov
Subject: Re: Chips and DIP

On 19970808, Michael.Koch@fema.gov wrote:
>Perhaps one of these days someone
>will go on-line with a website for us little guys.
>But, the next time I need a few thousand LM382's,
>LM1566's, MK3875/42's I'll know just where to go!

Thanks for all the compliments!

The problem is not that I don't want to help the 'little people', but
it's just that it can't be done economically and the whole point
of helping to find obsolete chips is to make money so I can
continue to expand the ChipDir for everyone.

I (and a lot of others) have thought long and hard about a way
to help the 'little people'.

Problem is just that it costs too much. Nobody has such a stock
(of millions) of obsolete chips that he would only have to go into
the store room and get a couple of chips out, put them into an
box and enveloppe and send them for a few dollars more. No these
large stocks don't exist, so first obsolete stocks need to be found.
But is it economical to buy them up? Some companies do.
They pay almost nothing for the chips but then have to store
them and this is what costs them money. Then they have to
wait and see if anyone is ever interested. Generally people are
always interested in the chips that you haven't got!
No, once someone asks for certain chips his broker will ask
all the other brokers if they got any chips. This costs labor,
phones, fax'ed, computers etc. Then the chips need to be send
from one broker (or his OEM) to the other broker and he will
then forward it to his own client.
This all costs money: Packaging, postage, insurance etc.
The banks also want their share: Fees for caching checks etc.

This way a minimum order needs to be at least $200 to $500
depending on conditions (foreign or not etc...) and this is
before earning any serious money. The broker has to hope
that the client is satisfied enough to come back with a bigger
order next time.

Ok, what would perhaps be an alternative:
We could via the ChipDir set up a set of lists of people
that have small stock that they are willing to exhange
or sell to other 'little people'. How many items do you
think we will get together? Perhaps 100 lists of 100 items?
(I don't think so myself, but let's suppose). You would
then have a chance of about 10000/1.5 M=0.6% to find
exactly the chip and package that you need in this database.
Ok, then you would have to get the owner of that particular
list to send you the stuff and making a paying arrangement
(or you send him twice the value back in other chips that
you have left over), but suppose this person isn't on the
internet anymore, suppose he just died or gone abroad
or is on holiday? Etc... or has a very unprofessional
attitude?
And what about the quality of the parts. Small amounts
of parts will always be taken out of their tray/tubes and
have they been used? Are they still in order?

Other alternative: We centralize the whole operation.
To begin with, everybody sends his parts (for free) and
gets a chip-credit equal to halve of the 'value'.
But who will manage this stock (and those credits...)?
And won't he be wanting to make money on it and
eventually become a full time broker?

Let me know when you want to volunteer! ;-)

I will help in setting up the database (although it's not
really easy, given the current HTML technology...
I already got a list of chips to be donated by the broker
that helps me and I'm sure it won't really be difficult
to find other chips for the set, but still the chance of finding
the chip you're looking for is so small...

Perhaps it's nice for experimenters etc, but for
serious chip finding you will always need to ask the
real brokers and whenever repairing a certain item is
worth something just pay the $200 to $500 for getting the
chip! (This is what it really costs, unless you're having
unpaid volunteers do all the work in their spare time...)

When considering the total cost of repairing an item,
the only conclusion is that it's often better to replace
it right away when broken, how unfortunate this is!
(I always try to repair my own stuff myself first...)

But perhaps you see another solution for the problem?

Believe me, I, the broker I'm working with and a
lot of others would really like to see this problem
solved and we're always sorry when we aren't able to
help somebody, because the costs are too high...

Chip brokers inside of the USA by first letter of name: