Brazilian person here, when I moved to Europe I was baffled I couldn't find shops that fixed electronics. Like I wanted to get my Android phone charging port replaced, I literally couldn't find a shop in my city willing to do the repair.
I eventually went back to Brazil and had it fixed there and replaced the battery. Freaking phone lasted 8 years on my very clumsly hands, still works even. The fix cost me ~30 usd plus the battery cost.
Yes, it's something extremely valuable, an expensive portable, and the new models all just keep getting worse and worse. There's no reason not to fix them.
It's also a repair that demands some amount of training. I imagine people fix a lot of things without getting them to a shop.
Hackers are down voting my comment. My question to them: If you could get paid twice the salary per hour to repair expensive machines, would you spend your time repairing mobile phones?
Everybody wants that juicy, juicy cheap labour, but nobody wants to be the cheap worker.
If nobody is offering cell phone repair services, that means repairing cell phones is not profitable enough compared to other things the person can do with their time. Otherwise people would offer these services.
Two economists were walking when they spotted a $100 bill. One asked the other "should one of us pick it up?", the other replied "no, if there was a $100 bill there, somebody would have picked it up already", so they kept walking.
Not even the joke is funny. People repeating it seriously is even less so.
Anyway, you would be right if you are trying to claim that the repairmen isn't the party maintaining the irrational situation, so they are powerless to fix it.
Then put your money where your mouth is and open as many cell phone repair shops in Europe as you please. You can mortgage your house and borrow a bunch of money if you need to get started.
But I think that there is always some reason or another why nobody is offering a service which seems to have great demand among customers.
And you can train those teenagers to do things which are much more profitable. If they have the dexterity and other skills needed to work on cell phone electronics, then they can work on other electronics.
If it was a good business, then there would be cell phone repair shops on every corner in Europe, like you have in other parts of the world where that makes sense.
lol yeah I was gonna say that they fix everything. They can't just Amazon prime new shit. It's weird how OP just assumes they're inept at repairs when that's just not true at all.
I didn’t say, nor do I assume, people are inept at repairs. I said that the communities that are being targeted with off-grid solar don’t currently have the skills or infrastructure required to maintain these systems.
It’s something I’ve seen with my own eyes and that I’ve read in academic literature as a widespread problem. Cross and Murray 2018 [1] being one the first papers to talk about it, I saw it myself for the first time around that time in Tanzania.
I stayed in a village where each house had at least 2 broken solar lanterns stored in a corner (like those old routers people love to keep).
The next closest repair shop was first 30min motorbike ride then a 2 hour bus ride away.
This was a village of 8,000 people.
Yes, the person with a diploma from the local technical college can fix a lot of things but they live in the local town with grid electric etc. They don’t live in these remote rural regions where off grid is so important/impactful.
The solution is to teach more people how to design, build and maintain solar energy systems so that the skills are embedded in off grid communities and give them the tools to carry out the work. You can do a lot with a soldering iron and good grasp of electronics!
Well, what is the alternative then? Probably the same problem when their diesel generator conks out. Small things you can do yourself, but rapidly you run into a situation where you need spare parts, or at least a competently run machine shop.
