"Scrounging is the highest form of recycling..." (The Anonymous Technoid)
"It is the customer who ultimately decides when equipment is 'obsolete,' not the manufacturer..." (Walter Shawlee, Sphere Research)
I feel blessed to have grown up in the
San Francisco Bay Area (B
Unfortunately,
thanks to our culture's ongoing devaluation of what drives the core of
a
healthy and thriving surplus market (local electronics manufacturing,
R&D and engineering, and the jobs that go with them), the Bay
Area's surplus resources have been steadily dwindling over the last
few decades. In fact, though I find it hard to believe, I feel we've
reached the point (2022) where the swap-and-scrounge opportunities in
the Pacific Northwest (WA/OR) are now superior to what's left in the
Bay Area.
Welcome to yet another all-too-visible sign of selling off our country's engineering and manufacturing know-how to the Pacific Rim!
What follows are listings of electronic-specific swap meets and stores in the SF Bay Area, and a few outside of it. I wish there were more. Maybe there will be, in times to come, if our mad dash towards planned obsolescence and mass consumerism can be throttled...
With any electronics swap meet, the best policy is to get there EARLY (at the crack of dawn if you can), as the best deals tend to go very quickly. Here’s what we have in the Bay Area.
This one appears to be a casualty of the pandumbic.
The last known event took place on 31-Mar-19 and there does not appear
to have been any held since. The web site is still there, so perhaps
there is still hope for this one to return in times to come.
The Bay Area was, at one
time, home to nearly a dozen retail-type surplus stores. That number
has dwindled to one in the immediate Bay Area and one in Sacramento, as follows:
Anchor Electronics, San Jose
Excess Solutions, San Jose -- CLOSED PERMANENTLY 15-Jul-22. See memorial page.
Last Update: 22-Apr-22
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