[PLUG-TALK] Electronic recycling
Ted Mittelstaedt
tedm at portlandia-it.com
Mon Nov 6 22:15:57 UTC 2023
FG's usability died after the pandemic and they closed their store.
Nowadays they are just like the majority of other off-lease computer vendor out there. I get "pitched" at least once a week from national off-lease computer vendors.
The problem is FG is not large enough to be able to afford to go into the Fortune 1000 and do pallet-load buys of 200-300 off lease computers at a time.
I buy exclusively off-lease nowadays and work with a couple of national off-lease resellers who can deliver batches of 10-20 machines at a time, Intel gen 8's and later. FG isn't in that class, they are in the TechSoup class which is an order of magnitude smaller. That's perfectly OK but what made them worth dealing with was their brick and mortar store.
There's so many times in IT that you need some weird connector, a set of oddball screws, or an old cable or adapter or whatever. FG was great for things like if I needed 2 Cisco VoIP phone power supplies with a weird connector I could stop by there and they would be able to dig something like that out of their "pile of crap to throw away because nobody wants it"
But after they closed the brick and mortar, that ended. They don't sell low-value items on their Ebay store (perfectly understandable why) they just want to sell PC boxes - but just about all the boxes they sell are Dell's and they are not the higher quality Dells they are stuff that small businesses bought cheap with restricted ram, Win Home, pre-Gen8, and the like.
With what Microsoft is doing, it's fundamentally changed the PC market, and I sure hope that FG is paying little to nothing for all those Dells they are selling online, because I wouldn't consider touching more than about 5 of the 500 or so they have up there right now.
Ted
-----Original Message-----
From: PLUG-talk <plug-talk-bounces at lists.pdxlinux.org> On Behalf Of wes
Sent: Sunday, November 5, 2023 9:51 PM
To: Off-topic and potentially flammable discussion <plug-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org>
Subject: Re: [PLUG-TALK] Electronic recycling
On Sun, Nov 5, 2023 at 9:34 PM Ben Koenig <techkoenig at protonmail.com> wrote:
> ------- Original Message -------
> On Sunday, November 5th, 2023 at 9:08 PM, wes <plug at the-wes.com> wrote:
>
>
> > > > I do believe they would have updated their website if they had
> stopped
> > > > taking donations. they don't know how to update their phone
> > > > greeting message but they do know how to update the website ;)
> > > >
> > > > -wes
> > >
> > > Well that's debatable. They still list their education program as
> closed
> > > but appear to have a link to a new "education platform". Though
> > > I'm not sure platform is the correct term since it's just a jumble
> > > of text on a google sites landing page.
> >
> > TIL a great deal of effort and many long hours poured into designing
> > and writing educational material for introductory technology usage
> > can be summed up as a "jumble of text"
> >
> > -wes
>
> I'm well aware of the long hours that go into such a task,
then you should be the last person to criticize the effort.
i'm a little salty about their re-invention of the wheel.
>
I have a lot more reasons to be salty with freegeek than you do. I simply prefer that if we're going to criticize, that the criticism should be based on reality.
>
>
> I sincerely hope whoever wrote this current interation of the Getting
> Started guide gets more credit than those of us in the past. But I
> doubt they will from anyone within Free Geek.
>
>
you are correct that credit is hard to come by there. your issues with the management do not make it rational or reasonable to denigrate the work being done.
-wes
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