[TriLUG] OT Local Electronic DIY Store

[Pete Soper]

Also, not all RS locations are created equal. The best I'm aware of is 
the one at Cary/Crossroads, and the manager there genuinely gets it and 
has some sharp kids working for him. He'd rip out 20 feet of shelves and 
fill them with SBC-related stuff if he could, but corporate has him 
mostly hog-tied.

Newark <http://newark.com> has a honking big warehouse in SC that's not 
too far from here, so I've never once been tempted to select anything 
but regular ground transport. It's quite often trivial to order 
something and have it in hand 48 hours later. They stock a fair amount 
of Adafruit stuff as well as Olimex and others. If they would just buy a 
second 386-based server for their web infrastructure to double the 
interactive performance the situation would be great. But they keep 
nicely formatted files of your past orders accessible. Also, in my 
experience Newark's setup appears to be incapable of making a promise 
they can't keep when it comes to estimated ship dates and lead times. 
I've had cases where they initially estimated 29 days and ended up 
delivering two days after an order, but the alternative is that a 
fraction of the time you can't build when you want to build, and that's 
apparently designed out of their system and culture.

Speaking of stock, they have just under forty thousand Raspberry Pi 
boards at the moment. They caught up. :-)

There is nothing else in the area or we'd know about it. Many, many 
years ago there were two places in downtown Raleigh. Capital Electronics 
had limited stock, but the sales people were not disgruntled emotional 
three year olds like the folks behind the counter at Southeastern 
Electronics. I vaguely recall convincing Hamilton Avnet or one of the 
other big distributors to sell me stuff from their north Raleigh 
location, but that was eons ago and it's hard to imagine any local stock 
of anything sold by those guys now.

-Pete