The Detroit News has an interesting article from Florida Today writer Billy Cox, Throwaway Society Speeds Decline of Electronics Repairmen. The article notes that the number of repair shops listed in the Yellow Pages has dropped from 20,000 in 1992 to below 9,000 in 2002. The article quotes Ed Hight, a repair shop owner in Merritt Island, Florida, explaining, "I could get a job at (Kennedy) Space Center and make more money doing less work, with full benefits, which I can't afford. It's a disposable society, and the only way to stop it is to make it cost-prohibitive to toss something out the first time it breaks. But we won't do that until the mountains of garbage are so high we can't breathe."
The article explains how it can cost more to fix electronic devices than to replace them, a situation I'm sure many readers have experienced. It also touches on the environmental impact of throwing away electronic equipment.
