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The Dutch Repair Cafe Versus the Throwaway Society
circletimessquare writes "Everyone in the modern world has thrown away at least one thing that was perfectly good except for an easily fixed defect, because it's just easier to buy a new one. In the Netherlands, in the name of social cohesion, and with government and private foundation grants, there is a trend called the Repair Cafe (Dutch). People bring in broken items: a skirt with a hole in it, an iron that no longer steams, and they fix each other's stuff and meet their neighbors. Now that's an idea worth keeping."
When American population just sits at home watching TV or playing video games, Europeans and especially Dutch tend to spend time together. Sit at cafes getting high, eat at a restaurant and have some fine wine, and socialize with people. The same is true for Asians and Australians too. And the American people introvert culture isn't a new thing that came with computers - they did this before geeks too. Sitting in front of TV watching mindless shows and eating TV dinners, alone.
One great geeky example about Americans making artificial social walls around them is how quick companies were to replace LAN gaming with online gaming so that you could sit alone and not interact with people. I live in asia and when people play games, they go play them with friends to internet cafes. There's a place near me where there is always young guys gaming together. There's a huge cultural difference between US and the rest of the world.
As the saying goes - "We have the technology, we can build anti-social walls around us!"
I'm more than happy to do pc repairs and exchange services with friends, right now one friend helps with mechanical issues with my car and I take care of their computers.
It's a great idea.
We throw away perfectly working pieces of tech. Thing accumulate around the house and just become clutter to be picked up and tossed during a spring cleaning. The problem is that newer tech makes it so that almost no one even wants old laptops and such. Then there is the risk that there is something person stuck somewhere inside and you have to spend extra effort clearing it completely to be safe if you want to give it away. I have an old laptop sitting around that I have run some clean up tools on and I'm still not quite ready to put it up on Freecycle. We really need better recycling programs for old Phones, batteries, etc. People are going to just want something new when the new thing is 100x better than the old thing even if the old thing still works.
"Everyone in the modern world..."
NOT everyone, it's a "1st world" problem, the "consuming" economy problem. SELL MORE.
Things are generally made extremely cheaply these days, and are not designed for repair, so it does make things a bit more difficult than it used to be. In many cases there are tear-down videos and instructions for things available on the internet, so I think this balances out nicely. It's a great chance to learn how things work and teach other as well. I'd really like to see this done in North America, perhaps as a school fund-raising project or something.
The Americans have had a go but just made things worse. Any chance some of this Dutch magic will help?
I refuse to browse it for any longer than a second. But I am also man enough to admit I bring my broken clothes to a turkish tailor who fixes them perfectly, I mean you can see the seams and patches, but isn't that what you youngsters are paying extra for anyway? Pre-torn pants?
This would be a great idea for a Makerspace trying to attract more people/funding.
You've already got tools and a core of tinkerers that know how to fix stuff -- if you could draw in a broader audience from the community, you could make some extra money selling them drinks and munchies, and possibly convert some people to the hobby.
It was done because it offers you the ability to play with people in either scenario, no matter how far away they were.
No. Local play was replaced by internet play because it was seen as more profitable by the games industry to enforce DRM online.
If it were truly about adding features, LAN / local play would still be enabled on Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 games.
This is a problem that only the heavily industrialized societies have. Travel, discover the world, "get out of your rut, open your mind, there is a whole universe waiting"*. (*Isaac Asimov)
The real problem is with lifecycle sustainability.
If raw material sourcing is sustainable, and disposal is as well, then there is no problem with the "throwaway" culture. The "throwaway" culture frees up repairmen to pursue more useful or enjoyable things by using machines to alleviate their burden.
Technology is a separate issue. As technology gets better and better, why should we spend so much repairing it? The recent advances in reducing power consumption and doing more processing in hardware is a good thing. Getting rid of a several year old computer is like getting a gas guzzling junker off the road.
The ecological aversion to the "throwaway" culture comes from a time where reuse and repair was seen as necessary to the inherent unsustainable sourcing and landfill disposal. Once those problems are addressed we must reexamine our assumptions about the value of reuse and repair.
Sometimes the cost of repairing something easily fixed is higher than just getting a new one. Two examples: at one point in time certain printers were cheaper to buy again with included ink cartridges than getting separate new ink cartridges, and a pocket calculator actually cost less than the batteries that it needed when the originals ran out.
It's a sad fact of life that in the U.S. it is often cheaper to replace something than it is to repair it. With electronics you have the added penalty that you're often repairing something that's now slower than the replacement.
A sign of our times
I was babysitting a 5 year old in high school and she had this alphabet book of professions. U = upholsterer. She asked me what that was. I told her it was someone who repaired or replaced the fabric on your couch. She asked me why you didn't throw it out and get a new one. That it didn't even occur to her that someone might want to try to fix something rather than just dump it in a landfill somewhere really struck me.
Creating a new item on an assembly line is generally cheaper than trying to repair it.
The dutch are insanely thrifty people. Americans and wasteful people in general have a lot to learn from them
No, I'm not dutch.
I remember a slashdotter telling about something similar in germany, where you can come into a shop where the rent you the tools, and you fix the stuff there and then. It also acted as an edutainment, with people coming in to watch and learn.
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Isn't that the same thing?
A missing button, a broken vase, a bent prong on a plug - sure. But most of the things we throw out are broken beyond repair. A white shirt with a large coffee stain that won't bleach out is pretty much over and done as a shirt, and can safely be downgraded to "wipe rag." The last pair of jeans I gave up on had an inseam that had split right down the middle. Even with a patch, even with me re-sewing the seam, they were still structurally degraded. Ever have a seam split in public? It's pretty embarrassing. That said, I didn't actually throw the jeans away - I cut the panels free and saved the scraps without holes in them for quilting.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
When American population just sits at home watching TV or playing video games, Europeans and especially Dutch tend to spend time together. Sit at cafes getting high, eat at a restaurant and have some fine wine, and socialize with people.
I've lived in America and the Netherlands, Americans do that just as much as the Dutch. Go into any large city and visit bars and restaurants, you'll find them plenty crowded with people socializing.
What is somewhat true is that the Dutch watch less TV, but they do other things around the house too.
People in general are social and like to go out. People with families stay in more because it's harder to go out with children. That does not really change much across cultures.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Take for instance an electric iron. It might just be clogged up from hard water deposits that could be removed with some solution like CLR or LimeAway. The problem is, in order to get to the parts that are clogged you have to deal with sonic welding, adhesives and fasteners that were designed to be one-way. The only way to disassemble the unit is to break it and glue it back together, which is not very elegant nor safe when dealing with mains current plus heating elements.
Same thing goes for about 90% of small electric appliances today. They are not designed to be repairable.
Most of this is not so much cultural as others have pointed out but it all comes down to the cost of labor. At one time in the US decorative scrollwork in homes was hand-carved. The craftsman doing the work made maybe $0.25 a day which for the time wasn't all that bad but it was by no means extravagant. It would be comparable to what any common laborer would get paid or someone clerking in a store.
Today, to have someone skilled in wood carving come to your home and do some work would be easily $200 an hour. An experienced technician wouldn't be getting that individually, but you can figure a company in the business of appliance repair is going to be charging at least $100 an hour. Which makes a $30 electric iron absurd to even consider repairing - it would cost $30 for someone to spend 20 minutes on it. Even larger appliances begin to reach the point where it makes no sense to repair them simply because of the cost of labor. Why spend $200 to fix a washing machine that cost $250 to replace?
Where things get really confused is in the 1800s and early 1900s the US saw significant immigration from Europe of craftsmen and skilled workers. Someone that spent 20 years making fine furniture would come to the US and could find immediate work basically doing the same sort of thing for at least as much money if not more. Today, we have huge low-skill immigration which skews the wage scale in interesting ways. In some parts of the country it is cheaper to hire more people (immigrant labor) using hand tools to do a job than it is to use power tools or other modern assists with fewer people. This only works in low-skill areas, though. If the US had a huge number of immigrants coming in that were skilled electronics technicians or computer programmers it would be quite different.
What we have now is it is cheaper to hire five people to use hand tools to do landscaping work than one person with a power mower. But it is also cheaper to replace a $800 TV than it is to bring it to a technician to look at it because his labor is incredibly expensive. The US today is a confused mess of labor rates that will end up sorting itself out in the end, but likely as not things will shift to the low end of the scale.
This seems like a great idea, but does anyone else see the possibility that the repairs will be vastly slanted to a handful of products that are 1) plentiful 2) expensive to replace, and 3) have inexpensive parts?
I can see a cafe that has a line out the door for people want to get their iPhone glass or batteries replaced, or their laptop hard drive swapped out while the person who can repair shoes, sew (a skirt with a hole in it), carve wood, machine parts, or repair a mechanical device (iron which no longer steams) sits reletively idle.
Grandpa: My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star.
Yeah, the Netherlands (41543 km^2) could fit in the U.S. state of West Virginia (62755 km^2). Think "across Europe" rather than "across the Netherlands". In the United States, latency between the west and east coasts might kill you. And there are still some areas that aren't populated densely enough to support DSL, cable, or fiber; the round-trip to a geostationary satellite will kill you harder.
If you repair some electrical device for someone else, and at some point down the line it starts a fire or electrocutes someone, you could easily be held liable here in the US, whether your repair had anything to do with it or not. And half-assed repairs done by well-meaning but untrained people are just BEGGING for trouble. From the NYT article (emphasis mine):
When Mr. van den Akker put the iron back together, two parts were left over â" no matter, he said, they were probably not that important. He plugged the frayed cord into a socket. A green light went on. Rusty water poured out. Finally, it began to steam.
Actual repair shops carry insurance for such eventualities, but random folks at a "repair cafe" wouldn't.
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Complementary to your comment, we have a lot of tech that was created so long ago that it's terribly inefficient and should best be retired. Consider an old machine with an Athlon 1200 CPU, drawing 330 watts of power while an Intel i5-2400 based machine draws only 75 watts. Consider an old hard drive that draws 30 watts to spin at idle, compared to a modern drive that uses 8 watts to do the same, or a SSDD that draws 0.14 watts. Or consider a CRT monitor drawing 120W compared to a newer LCD that draws 22W.
Yes, I get that obviously there are things that people can't afford to replace today, and when repairing them for free is an option, it'll happen. But these old devices still cost them tremendously on their electric bills. I believe the Dutch pay somewhere around $0.40/kWh, meaning that an old PC there would cost over $4 per day to run, compared to a new efficient machine that would cost less than $1 per day. And that new machine would certainly have better performance, more capabilities, and likely better security (not that I want to get into a big debate about it, but running Windows 7 and IE 9 instead of XP and IE 6 would be a big improvement for most home user's security.)
Some working things should be retired.
John
Hmm, I don't really want to take a chance on having my iron or clothes or computer repaired by my hobbyist neighbor. I'd rather have them repaired correctly by somebody who does those repairs professionally all the time, while also having the side effect of keeping those repair people in business.
For your own use, no. But if you sell or even give away something you've repaired, which turns out to be dangerous, at the very least you face civil liability - and possibly criminal negligence, in addition to whatever penalties come from violating safety standards in your jurisdiction. Even if your repair is perfectly safe and to a professional standards, many countries require certification to work on anything using mains electricity, and if you're not certified (Which a hobbyist is unlikely to be) it can still be an offense to give away something you have repaired yourself.
socializing with my friends, but the truth is after two jobs and 14 hours of work im too tired. my second job, customer service, makes me cranky and irritable by the time i get home and honestly ive spent so much time sitting under fluorescent lights and talking to people about their medical bills id rather stay in anyway.
on the weekends i normally get stuck with TPS reporting, and its not like i can duck out of that because im a salaried employee. besides, this is building equity. i hope.
sometimes on holidays i get off, christmas or the occasional tuesday morning im not working at the baltimization plant, i go to this cafe down the street. the cafe i go to has lots of people in it, but the unspoken rule is that we all have to be quiet and we have to drink their coffee to use the wireless for exactly one hour. I mean, nobody is doing any meaningful work at a cafe its all mostly facebook and minecraft but the possibility still exists that someone is working out a spreadsheet on their ipad and so we're all quiet.
wednesday when i go back to work and realize i also picked up a bartending shift to help pay down my college loans and the loan for the dental work i had done, i get a chance to socialize with people that are drunk. so i guess that counts. by 4 am though im still tired.
ive tried planning things with my friends, but they spend most of their time at work too.
Good people go to bed earlier.
What? Help each other? Avoid buying the new and shiny things? Continue to use things even after there is a perfectly good reason to throw them away? Go through extraordinary lengths like actually lugging stuff out and meet actual other human beings and fix each other's gadgets for free? What kind of anti-corporate attitude is that? No wonder job creators are fleeing Europe. What is the big point in having a society or government or laws if it does not create more profits for the big banks and corporations? Let europe rot its way from socialism to communism. Yoo Es Yay! Yoo Es Yay! Yoo Es Yay! Yoo Es Yay! Yoo Es Yay!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
http://raisedonhoecakes.com/ROH/2012/04/12/your-son-has-been-arrested-for-being-able-to-fix-a-lacrosse-stick/
Try and fix certain electronics governed by the FCC. There are other things that are made less functional to conform to regulations.
I fixed my custom DVR by delivering the feed over Component video and re-encoding it. I'm sure that's illegal too...
This comes off as another one of these "Europeans are great and Americans suck" articles. I know plenty of Americans, who are averse to throwing away old stuff. And if we're going to start comparing societies and their inclination to throw away perfectly good stuff I suggest visiting Asia.
It's also really easy to promote social cohesion when 95% of the population is of a single nationality. Institute a program like this and the odds are high people will participate. It's easy to conduct social engineering when you know how the population will respond. The United States, with a considerably larger variety of ethnic groups is far more unpredictable. Chances are high that a program like this would flop on a national or even regional level. This is the sort of thing that would only work at a community level, and even then it's not a guarantee.
Actually, I think that the rise of internet gaming VS LAN gaming has several factors, few of them due to being antisocial. I still do LAN game but play online as well at times
The bad...
a) Convenience: Pack up your oversized gaming PC, monitor etc. Drag them to somebody's house, possibly popping a few vertebra hauling crap around. Plug into power for 3 daisy-chained power bars and an ethernet cable that is just a bit too short. Pop a few breakers until you figure out who plugs in where. After an hour you might actually get things ready to play.
b) Availability: Try and figure out what you're all going to play. Six of us want to play Shooter Game X, but Bob only wants to play RTS's. Everyone finally agrees on game Y, except John who doesn't have it and needs to install/download. By the time John installs, everyone else has played up and is moving on to another game
c) Play games on a LAN that still need an internet connection. Lag occurs. People get dropped, and even though you're all trying to play with only those in your room, hackerKid239 joins the game and headshots every one of you within 2.5 seconds whilst insulting your mom
d) Several makes of various shapes and sizes drinking, eating greasy food, and fit into a small poorly ventilated room. 'nuff said
The good...
a) Social: You get to visit with your buds, have a few drinks perhaps etc. While loading you can trade funny youtube clips or photoshopped pictures of Bob's wife
b) Private LAN games: For games that actually allow it, being able to play with your buds and *NOT* hackerKid239 is fun
c) Trading: Although arguments over what to play may arise, you get to see what other cool games people in your group have. Rather than spending 5h downloading, buy the game in steam and then snag the install files from a USB drive being passed around
Because to repair an item, you would have to first reverse engineer the item to understand how it works. This is specifically prohibited by the DMCA, and you could face a civil lawsuit, criminal penalties and jail time/fines.
In the USA it is ILLEGAL to understand how a product works. You're not allowed to fix stuff, only to consume, and obey.
Remember what country you live in folks, we're just trying to protect you. Now, please strip naked so you can board the subway.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
A lot of items made for sale in the U.S. can not be economically repaired. Welded plastic components that can't be dis-assembled to gain access to the interior. Components that press together with an impossible to separate interference fit or spring retainer that is not designed to be removed. Cheap parts designed to be disposable. They're everywhere.
Okay, so I build my own boxes with best-of-breed parts. They last a long time. In theory, I can repair individual parts. But I still have to keep throwing them out. Even the power supply changes connectors from one motherboard to the next and I can't even use old power supplies. (And I have to have several spare power supplies, just in case one blows and I need to get back up and running immediately. So I trash twice as many when they're obsolete.) Disk drives are so cheaply made I'm afraid to reuse them and put new ones in new machines, since the clock is ticking on their 5-year lifespan. You can't fix disk drives. When you need multiple virtual machines at the same time, that old P3 isn't going to cut it. I had some old IDE DVD drives, but had to get SATA for newer motherboards. I have a basement full of USB thumb drives that are obsolete. I keep the 256MB one just to remind me how fast things change, since I discarded all my floppy disks a few years ago when I finally threw out my low-resolution Mavica camera for a modern one that uses flash memory. I don't actually fix anything at all, I just throw out obsolete stuff. Even if I could somehow keep the Mavica going, where would I get floppy disks and the obsolete batteries it used? I'd love to fix things and keep them working, I really would, but I don't see how.
Philip K dick had a story where this was essentially part of the plot line -- a man from the past arrives in the future and is able to actually...fix things (The Variable Man)
In one scene, children are playing with a toy and it gets broken. The main character starts to fix it and the kids are wondering what he is doing and why he doesn't just throw it out and get a new one.
The book is free on Project Gutenburg here
-- The Genesis project? What's that?
As a hobby, I repair old Teletype machines, from the 1920s and 1930s. These machines were designed for a long life of nearly continuous operation and to be repairable. I have 70 and 80 year old machines running. Everything unscrews (and every screw has a lock nut), everything is interchangeable, and all parts can be reached without dismantling too much. The detailed repair manuals still exist. If one of these machines hasn't been seriously damaged and has all the parts, it's usually repairable. This is as good as it gets in repairability.
The price of this is weight, bulk, and routine maintenance. The frame is cast steel. A printer weighs about 75 pounds, about twice the weight of an electric typewriter. There are over 500 oiling points to be oiled annually, plus about 50 points that require greasing. Every few years of operation, a full cleaning is required. This involves removing the two electrical parts, the motor and the selector electromagnet, and soaking the entire machine in solvent. Western Union did this to their machines routinely.
Then there are adjustments. There are spring tensions and clearances to be adjusted. A spring scale and a feather gauge are required. After any part replacement, there are adjustments to be performed according to the manual.
Nobody would put up with that bulk, weight, and maintenance today to get a machine capable of decades of operation. That is the price of repairability.
There are already some efforts in place around the USA, you just have to _look_ find them. I remember the the Velocipede Bike Project in Baltimore. Plenty of tools and advice to fix your bike from what I remember so long as you mind all the damn hipsters. Also, support your local Tool-Lending Library!
I ran into a few good tellings-off too. Due to some mental health issues, I felt compelled to repair things at school. I couldn't leave something broken, so I always had a few tools on me. Screwdrivers, multitool, tape, glue. The only reason I didn't get expelled was that the school had a unit specialising in supporting students with such issues, and the teachers there were willing to argue strongly on my behalf.
This is a very cool idea, and there are plenty of things that are fixable, but it doesn't help that corporate interest favors products that are not repairable. There is much more money to be made when you can convince or force consumers to buy new. A throwaway society consists of those who buy the throwaways, and those who sell the throwaways.
While this repair cafe is a single cafe in the country, there's a whole community of second hand shops called Kringloopwinkels. I my town of 116.000 people there are about 9 shops like that. The one I worked at was the biggest, with 2 physical shops and more than 1.000.000 Euro sales. They employ about 85 people, of whom maybe 45 or 50 have a paid job.
It's quite a big business, and even with a recession it's a growing business.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
They must pre-chew the food for their students and mouth feed it to them like little birds in Maryland. I mean, they should probably ban scissors too, right?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
So if a plug on a toaster is replaced backwards and someone gets shocked, the plug-replacer gets sued. What if the seam of repaired clothing splits during a presentation, losing the account? Sued?
How are you supposed to assign a fair cash value to it?
One at least has to assign a value for services that doesn't break existing minimum wage laws.
"I'll wash the People's truck!!"
In the US you've got a society that's designed from the ground up to benefit big business. The US is also unquestionably the most powerful country on earth and (practically) owns the world. The US is also one of the most open societies in the world and one of the largest, geographically. The predominant school of thought among social engineers and social planners in the US, is that the population must be highly indoctrinated (and the US population IS higly indoctrinated). The Netherlands really only compares to the US in the openness of its society. Given those facts, you can't compare the US and Dutch people. If you think those facts shouldn't affect people's socilization, you're just not giving the subject enough thought. One example, and this will be a tad controversial; there's a reason the Netherlands enjoy ten political parties and the US has only two (that are basically the same party); What the people of the Netherlands think doesn't matter outside of the Netherlands. What the people in the US think matters a lot.
Just sacrifice the weirdo screws. Use metal tube, small enough to go down the hole and long enough to grip above the surface, for each screw. Mix a blob of epoxy putty and put a small cylindrical bead of it in each tube end. Put tubes in holes, ram the epoxy bead to form it to the screw top and to the inside of the tube. Go have a beer. When you come back, grab the tube top with any convenient pliers and turn the screws out. To reassemble, replace the screws with something standard.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
Even if everything was 100% recyclable there's would still be a considerable energy cost associated with doing so, if you can repair something instead of replacing it then you save all that energy. You also save money, which ideally means you can afford to buy higher-quality things to begin with, which will generally last longer and be even easier to repair. Compare a $100 dollar appliance(or shoe, or...) with a $20 version. Assuming it's not just a "glamour" product, odds are that the $100 version will be considerably more durable, well-designed, and just generally pleasant to use. And it will probably last at least 5x as long as the cheap version, potentially much longer if properly cared for and repaired. In the face of that the only reason to get the cheap version is if you can't afford the good version, or don't plan to use it enough that quality will be an issue.
You have a point with (some) tech stuff, if something is old enough that there's been major upgrades/efficiency improvements since it was created you might be better off replacing it. Then again there's plenty of people who, for example, just want a computer to get online for email and web browsing - a 5-10 year old computer may be plenty fast enough to handle that, especially if running say a streamlined version of Linux. Since there haven't really been any major efficiency improvements in that time period it wouldn't really make sense to replace it.
As for freeing up repairmen for more useful/enoyable things... like what? As manufacturing, agriculture, and even sales and banking are becoming increasingly automated there's ever fewer jobs available in the "useful" areas of the economy, and you're not going to convince me that flipping burgers or scrubbing floors are more enjoyable. We've got a major shift in economic realities coming now that the brief window of "perpetual growth" that characterized the last 150 years since the industrial revolution is coming to an end - I'd say repair is one of the areas that will stand to benefit from the change.
All of which ignores the fact that the article is actually talking about a social club of people who enjoy fixing things getting together with people who have things they'd like fixed in order to talk and tinker. It doesn't sound like there's any money changing hands, just people doing something they enjoy to give back to the community. Personally I think it sounds like a more worthy way to spend time than a sewing circle, book club, church social, or night at the bar.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Only poor people would do that. Rich people don't pay taxes, they collect them.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I often will use a Dremel to grind straight slots in uncooperative screw heads so I can use a regular flat blade screwdriver to remove them. This generally works well for stripped Philips head screws, too. And I've made specialty screwdrivers (triangles, two-pronged, etc.) by grinding the needed custom tips onto small pieces of barstock, but the soft metal generally isn't as durable as I need it to be. I have a few cases where I made those tools using a sacrificial screwdriver as the starting blank, but grinding the case-hardened tips usually results in a weak tool anyway.
I never thought about using epoxy to get at an otherwise inaccessible screw! And using a tube to contain the epoxy, preventing damage to the product itself, well, that's just amazingly clever! Thank you so much!
John
Replying to emphasize AC co-poster's point: This isn't a lawyer problem, this is a people problem.
If you gave a stranger your laptop and bought him lunch and a beer to fix it - and despite his best efforts he not only failed to, but it ended up worse off than it was before - would you try to hold him responsible? For a lot of people, that answer is "yes." Those people should seek professional repair services and pay the premium for that. I repair computers and devices all the time for family and friends and I'm shocked if I don't have one or two tiny little screws left over. They know this going into it and accept the risk because their machine didn't work before anyway and would not have paid to have it properly repaired to begin with. A repair cafe like this would work *if* the people coming in are already on the assumption that what they have is a total loss, and they're making a small gamble that they might get it going again for cheap.
+1 Disagree
Sort of new to Slashdot, so I see it has my post list as "by Anonymous Coward". So, just to be clear, this was not written by Mr. Coward, but by me, Steve Berl.
"People bring in broken items: a skirt with a hole in it, an iron that no longer steams, and they fix each other's stuff and meet their neighbors. Now that's an idea worth keeping."
......
:- http://www.shmoop.com/time-machine-hg-wells/plot-analysis.html
Special case of Tragedy of the Commons coming up
There are people who will do the repairing, and others who will sit back and let them do it.
I have always been a repairer and saver. I hate throwing stuff away that can be repaired - partly because older stuff is often much better. Eg I'm using an IBM At keyboard right now, 20(?) years old that I have taken to pieces to clean at least 5 times. I have repaired huge amounts of stuff over the years - cars, PCs, washing machines, furniture and I have built up a vast arrray of tools and stock of metals, fasteners, timber, electrical components etc.
However I have never met anyone else remotely into repairing things at this level. I have done plenty of repairs for "friends", and things like designing their kitchens, with, I am afraid to say, little thanks (let alone a returned favour), maybe because they have no idea of the work and knowledge involved. Or maybe they are just self-centred. I feel that they regard me in the same light as the Eloi would regard a Morlock. In fact I believe I am the prototype Morlock.
From
The Eloi are pretty and the Morlocks are not
The Eloi are dumb and the Morlocks are not
The Eloi wear clothes, the Morlocks do not
The Eloi eat fruit, the Morlocks seriously do not.
Perhaps most important, the Morlocks work and the Eloi do not.
Now I only repair things for the immediate family.
So the power cord on your toaster is faulty. Easy fix, right? You steal a cord from your broken radio, get out your soldering gun and have at it. No radio? The hardware store can give you a cord at much lower cost than a new toaster.
New toaster $25. Cost to repair $4. Easy math, right? Let's forget that your radio cord can't handle the wattage of the toaster and it starts a fire that burns the house down.
Instead, focus on time. You took 3 hours to fix the toaster. Your job pays you $42/hr plus benefits worth $18. Your time is worth $60/hr, so the toaster repair cost you $180!
Of course you only work 8 hours/day, 5 days/wk, $2400/wk which is actually 188 hours. Your average for those hours is $12.77/hour, so the repair cost $38.30- about double the cost of a new toaster. Now you have an old crumby toaster that will work a while longer and you've messed up the kitchen table and pissed off your wife.
Is there nothing better that you could have done with that time? Mother's day is Sunday this week. Spend the $38 on flowers and buy a new toaster.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Posting to remove unintentional mod.