For every RadioShack, Fry’s, and Best Buy, there are thousands upon thousands of tiny electronics retailers all over the place. The so-called mom and pop retailers are still there, and reports of their demise are greatly exaggerated.
In the same vein, for every Foxconn, Sony, and Samsung, there are also lots of smaller manufacturing and fabricating operations scattered around the world, a good number of them residing in the low-labor cost regions of Asia.
You would think that like those small electronics stores, they would be on their way to being wiped out by big retailers. Given that economies of scale favor the bigger companies, along with assembly line and automation technologies making things cheaper by the unit, it’s really not that hard to believe that the small players will soon be wiped from the face of the Earth.
They’re not going to disappear, however. Not within the lifetime of this writer, she would think. There are actually a handful of advantages these small electronics shops or mini-factories have that the big factories and foundries do not.