Conrad Electronic to close all stores in Germany

[ferdieCX]

Is there some distributor in Germany that is a bit less hostile to small orders?

You can try Segor. It is a Shop in Berlin, but they also make shipments

https://www.segor.de

[Neper]

I have been purchasing from Reichelt since the late nineties, largely online but sometimes will call.

Stay away from their cables. They are either dirt cheap and total crap (plugs fall off, screening made of two strands of microscopic wire) or somewhat better but outrageously expensive.

[jfiresto]

Reichelt will gladly let you buy much too cheaply. Are you just dying to buy 9-pin DSUB connectors for 0,15€ each? Well, go for it.

I bought some dirt cheap cables to extend a USB port: to take the wear and tear of plugging and unplugging devices. With some lubrication, I figured I might get a hundred cycles or two before the flash/plating wears through and becomes intermittent. Instead, the first cable failed at the other end, from the contacts creeping apart, because I left it plugged into the computer (and undisturbed) for six months.

Reichelt is often not the cheapest place for tools.

[tooki]

…
Their online store carries also decent brands like Fluke or Amprobe but I have never seen one of those in the physical stores.
…

The Zurich store definitely carried name-brand stuff. Fluke, Rigol, Weller, Ersa, Knipex, Bosch, Makita, etc. were all there.

[janoc]

…
Their online store carries also decent brands like Fluke or Amprobe but I have never seen one of those in the physical stores.
…

The Zurich store definitely carried name-brand stuff. Fluke, Rigol, Weller, Ersa, Knipex, Bosch, Makita, etc. were all there.

Knipex, Bosch and Makita (the hobbyist, not pro ranges) are available also here - but so they are in any Bauhaus (home improvement store, there is one in almost every quarter) and usually with wider range and cheaper.

I meant more things like test equipment, power supplies, multimeters, etc. Conrad sells all that from decent brands on their website. But good luck finding any of those in a physical store. Voltcraft and Basetech is about the best you can hope for, along with other obvious rebrands of cheap Chinese products.

[tooki]

As I said, the one here did carry Fluke, and likely others, too. No, they won’t have a Keysight scope laying around, but you could certainly walk out with a top-brand multimeter or soldering station.

[madires]

Haven't bought anything from Conrad for a long time. A few decades back they had nice kits and resold some good stuff made in East Germany. A small lab PSU and another 13.8V PSU are still going strong.

[david77]

Bought my first lab PSU from Conrad. 30V/3A with analog meters. Used it until it died from spontaneus combustion. It just sat there switched on but not in use, suddenly flames came out the top. It was not one of the GDR made ones.

Conrad also owes me a microphone stand that I mail ordered in 1993. Never delivered it.

[nightfire]

I have been purchasing from Reichelt since the late nineties, largely online but sometimes will call. I find they are generally quite good, especially for small quantities: for nearly all items, there is no quantity discount.

I had the pleasure of really seeing Reichelt being able to grow from a basement-based mail-order shop to the size it has today- I remember visiting my Uncle (RIP) in Wilhelmshaven about 40 years ago, and we went to buy some crocodile clips he needed for some tinkering as he was freshly retired back then- that was their second adress after they moved out from the basement where everything started- their catalogue was something about 30 photocopied pages...

Some years after that I was a student and moved there for a few years, and Reichelt was becoming bigger and bigger and just moved to Sande, some small suburbial area near Wilhelmshaven- basically a very big storage like amazon with some small attached "store" area- basically you would order stuff from the catalogue and some time later, a plastic cradle would appear from the roll basket line with your stuff inside...
Then Angelika Reichelt, the founder, retired and now Reichelt as a company belongs to the Dätwyler holding- and some dimensions have changed...

[jfiresto]

I probably should have written that Reichelt is "pretty good" rather than quite good. I reckon their line-item error rate has been less than half of a percent, but I could probably drive it higher by the unfortunate choice of parts. They have, however, always made things right, but sometimes not without putting up some bureaucratic resistance.

Lately, I have been purchasing from tme.eu. They have been a good experience so far, although their enthusiasm for paperwork is something else.

[tooki]

I like Reichelt in theory (and LOVE that they still give out printed catalogs, updated 1-2 times per year!), but their website is so bad that I’m usually willing to pay more to order from Digi-Key. The parametric searches are awful, when available at all, and above all, you can’t just click “back” to return to the results of a parametric search!!  (It always requires an “are you sure?” dialog, followed by a full — slow — page reload.) More than once, it’s lost my shopping cart during shopping on the same computer. It did that twice on my last order.

On the other hand, they carry some stuff that’s hard to find, and their single component prices (especially for passives, connector parts, etc) are often similar to Digi-Key’s @1k prices.

[jfiresto]

I like Reichelt in theory (and LOVE that they still give out printed catalogs, updated 1-2 times per year!), but their website is so bad that I’m usually willing to pay more to order from Digi-Key. The parametric searches are awful, when available at all, and above all, you can’t just click “back” to return to the results of a parametric search!! (It always requires an “are you sure?” dialog, followed by a full — slow — page reload.) More than once, it’s lost my shopping cart during shopping on the same computer. It did that twice on my last order....

I also find Reichelt's indexing, both online or on paper, is not one of their strong points.

I don't think their shopping cart has ever lost an item on me, and I often slowly fill a basket over many days or weeks between orders. I have never seen an "Are you sure?" dialog, but I use a really old version of Firefox (48.0.2 under 0SX) when I order from them. That browser and their site take a solid minute to finish the first connection of a session, but after that I have no problems. Perhaps that is something to try.

[tooki]

The odd thing is that I can’t identify what causes the cart deletion, because indeed I can happily have stuff in the cart for months, but then when I’m intensively using the site to nail down what I want to order, it hiccups and develops amnesia.

As for “back”: it’s only when using parametric search.

[TassiloH]

I used to see randomly deleted carts with Reichelt, but haven't experienced it for quite some time. Nevertheless I save my cart as a list if I intend to store it for longer. To me more aggravating is the sorting of the cart: All other vendors manage to keep the items in the cart in the order you added them, but for Reichelt it becomes some quasi-random order of line items. That is real fun when I have some 500 line items to order from various sources, have to place the orders at the same time to be able to find alternatives when something is out of stock (which is the new normal now), and in the end want to check that I haven't forgotten something... On the other hand, their error rate is definitely not worse than the other shops on my list.

[tooki]

I used to see randomly deleted carts with Reichelt, but haven't experienced it for quite some time. Nevertheless I save my cart as a list if I intend to store it for longer.

It last happened to me in November.

I’ve since taken to strictly using lists to gather an order, and only adding that to the cart at the last second.

To me more aggravating is the sorting of the cart: All other vendors manage to keep the items in the cart in the order you added them, but for Reichelt it becomes some quasi-random order of line items. That is real fun when I have some 500 line items to order from various sources, have to place the orders at the same time to be able to find alternatives when something is out of stock (which is the new normal now), and in the end want to check that I haven't forgotten something...

FYI, the lists seem to retain the order (and you can change the order of items).

On the other hand, their error rate is definitely not worse than the other shops on my list.

Error rate of what?

[TassiloH]

Error rate of what?

I meant the frequency of wrong or damaged items (referring to jfiresto's post above). In the last couple of years with Reichelt I had one missing item, some extra items (the shipped several tool sets valued 20EUR each or so, so that I actually told them and sent them back), and a damaged item (crystal where they cut off a pin while cutting the tape). For comparison, with Digikey I had one wrong item (wasted quite some time on this, 10pF caps ordered but 1nF shipped in bag labeled with the 10pF part number, took me hours to figure out why the oscillator on a uC would not run - they actually had me ship back the capacitors worth $.50) and one damaged item (dual D-Sub connector, clearly damaged before shipping), and with Mouser had one missing item. I'd say that 3:2:1 ratio is about proportional to my order volume (by line count).

FYI, the lists seem to retain the order (and you can change the order of items).

Ah, thanks, that is useful, I never used the list when entering an order for immediate placement. I will try to use the list again the next time.

[cdev]

There was a time, when every German town had a selection of electronics shops. Cologne had a good dozen of them. Great places where we would go to meet friends, exchange the latest gossip and spend our money.   

Then, in the mid 80s, Conrad Electronic, until then a mail-order business, opened big and impressive stores right in the centre of all major cities. They hired radio amateurs for their radio department, modellers for their modelling department etc. Within a few years, all other electronics shops were gone. Conrad picked out their best staff and hired them.

10 years later, they began to ask for customers' ZIP codes at the check-out. Soon after that, the impressive city-centre stores moved to some industrial estate way out of town. Gone were the highly qualified staff, replaced by the same kind that would be flipping burgers elsewhere. Eventually, the store in Cologne was one of the first to close altogether. That was about a decade ago. I haven't bought a thing from them ever since.

Now, Conrad have announced that they'll close all brick-and-mortar shops before the end of this year and concentrate on B2B.

Good riddance!

I agree. Its interesting that you exposed the method behind their madnesss.. Good for you for saying it. People rarely do.

[cdev]

This was the writing on the wall for a long long time.

I could repeat almost all your points for Hamburg. As a student in the 1980s I probably visited a Conrad store once a week at least.  In the last few years I have not ordered anything from Conrad and also have not visited their stores anymore.

The quality of products went down every year.
The employees were less and less knowledgeable.
The one store in Hamburg had a very good and smart guy working there. After he retired 10 years ago, it was like the store changed and for me it felt like only idiots were working there.

I will not miss them!

This might be similar to the closing of Fry's in the USA.

In the US corporations seem to want to make around 20% yield per annum or they are under pressure to go out of businesss..  Thats a lot of profit. More than many businesses are inherently able to support. Is that unreasonable?