Check trading standards. The item displayed and offered for sale was complete with battery.

I got a nice one, not sure of the make as it is upstairs but cost £2 with battery, which is silent in operation unlike all the others that go tick. Hence it is upstairs in the bedroom.

So I checked the price: on RS’ UK site, GBP14.21 (not sure if this includes VAT); on RS’ NZ site, NZ$52.04, including GST (our VAT-equivalent, at 15%). At current exchange rate, that’s approx 26 quid!

Would you believe it? Another example of ripping off Kiwis! Years ago, I saw a ‘Henry’ vacuum cleaner in a branch of one of our DIY stores. It was ticketed at $600! The exchange rate then would have made it considerably over 200 quid. They were about 90 quid in UK. This price-gouging is universal here. How do they get away with it?

RS is a shadow of its former self, I still purchase stuff from them but only several times a year compared with several times a week five years ago.

I’ve just seen another nail in their coffin, the PDF datasheet for the clock looks to have been AI generated!

Ian P

RS shows 40 years of changing times. When I started work it was a single 3/4 inch catalogue. Grew to about 6 volumes then the internet came and it shrank to nothing. We used it as reference and loved poring over the p[ictures but were mostly not allowed to buy as they were not Defence 05-21 approved.

The thing that gets me about RS and similar suppliers is incorrect images on the website. I’m not talking about errors but effectively lazyness. In the days of the printed catalogue  when somone had to take a photograph with film, get it developed, halftoned and printed they managed to get a picture of just about every item including things like connectors. And they got the pictures in the right places. Now when it’s easy with a digital camera or even a phone and digital editing they use a generic photograph for multiple items even though it does not represent the item. Examples are different shaped enclosures and variations of connectors which have critical differences that are obvious in images but take a lot of digging through datasheets to find.

Robert.

To be fair, the Radiospares product range is probably about three orders of magnitude larger than it was in the ’70s. I seem to recall that Mr White’s catalogue was about thirty pages of quarto paper, when I was allowed to borrow it at school (Mr white was one of the geography teachers for heavens sakes, I suppose everyone is permitted hobbies 😀 )