Adventures in electronics

Out cellphone shopping a little while ago, I noticed that Dick Smith Electronics have renovated their Featherston Street store, making it more open and friendlier. The shelves are lower and the furnishings are more modern-looking, meaning the whole store has lost that air of shoddiness that it used to have. They've also rearranged the stock to make it easier to find things. An inevitable casualty of this rearrangement is the ever-shrinking components section, which now seems to have vanished altogether.

DSE used to be the place to go for electrical components - capacitors, resistors, wire, circuit boards, switches. As consumer electronics became a mainstream market, DSE naturally moved into selling complete branded products to end users. Their range of components shrank, and its presentation became haphazard and unpredictable. The containers were so poorly labelled you could easily spend half an hour kneeling before the shelves hunting for a particular type of switch. What was more, not once in that half hour would a staff member offer you any assistance. It just wasn't the DSE way.

It's good to find, then, that along with the new shiny store, DSE have invested in lots of new shiny "Techxperts". Despite that terrible name, it's refreshing to enter DSE and be offered help within thirty seconds. Further exploration of the store invites further offers of help, with sharp-eyed staff members (mostly young and male) ready to leap to the aid of any customer who pauses too long before a display. Once politely turned away, they hover unobtrusively and let you get on with your browsing. It's customer service done properly, and it's great!

The demise of components is a small price to pay for this improvement in service. Due to the lack of range at DSE, for years now Jaycar Electronics has been a much better option for all things electronic and unfinished. Their components are neatly organised in rows and rows of accurately labelled containers, and they have a neat collection of toys, too. The only drawback is getting there - it's always been a long walk to their site at the top of Taranaki Street, but since the bypass was built, it's a noisy walk as well. Crossing lanes and lanes of first southbound, then northbound traffic doesn't really make for a relaxing pedestrian experience.

Nonetheless, the ordeal is made worthwhile by the knowledge that Wellington's finest array of radio controlled helicopters awaits at journey's end. And if they don't turn you on, you can always go home with a farting beer glass instead.