Esoteric WeirdStuff Warehouse closed Sunday
‘Where else are us nerds going to go?,’ Glenn, a longtime customer, asked
Silicon Valley is going to be a little less weird on Monday.
After 32 years in the South Bay, WeirdStuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale closed its doors for the final time Sunday afternoon, the owners said.
The 27,000 square-foot warehouse — a modern Mecca for techies, tinkerers and artists — is known for its expansive selection of used electronics, from small and delicate internal components to larger pieces of equipment like network switches and servers, as well as racks, mounts, caddies and screws to put it all together.
There’s also power distribution units, technical manuals, typewriters, video cards, keyboards, monitors, anti-static bags, rechargeable batteries and, oh yes, hard disk drives. There are so many hard disk drives.
“Where else am I going to get this stuff?,” David Glenn, a physician of from Menlo Park said while crouching near a shelf full of laptop security locks, clutching some cables and other items he had already picked out from other parts of the space.
Glenn said he has visited the place once a month for about a decade, fueling his moonlighting as an inventor and tinkerer.
“Where else are us nerds going to go,?” he asked.
WeirdStuff co-founder Chuck Schuetz, 72, got his start selling surplus electronics in personal ads in the pages of Byte magazine in the early 1980s.
An engineer at the time for Shugart Corporation, he felt “it was a crime” to see local tech firms dumping functional equipment by the truckload.
He started the warehouse with co-founder Richard Andersen in San Jose in February 1986, and it existed in a few different South Bay locations until 1996, when it moved into the current space on Caribbean Drive in 1996. He now shares ownership with his brother Jim Schuetz and partner Dave MacDougall.
The location is great, Schuetz said, because it is surrounded by large and small companies and labs that frequently offload their surplus material to his company.
However, that prime location also enticed Google — which already has several buildings nearby — and in a flurry of real estate buying last year, the tech giant snatched up the property, and started the clock on the end of the warehouse.
Schuetz said with property and rent prices soaring, keeping the warehouse business alive somewhere else isn’t feasible. He’s sad to see the end.
“It’s been a way of life for 32 years,” he said.
The warehouse parking lot on Sunday was jammed, a rarity for a weekend there.
Inside, people young and old milled about the aisles, sifting and sorting through products on the racks, obsessing over retro parts and sharing memories about old tech they worked on, with some saying they could point to a few things on the shelves they helped design. Some took selfies in front of the equipment or the warehouse’s many signs.
All were saddened to hear of the end of the weird and wonderful warehouse.
Gary Anthony and Al Brown were chatting next to a rack full cables and cords, reminiscing about “when silicon valley was rockin’ and rollin’ and we built things here,” Anthony said.
Mike Animal, who has since moved out the area, but came back for one last shopping spree, used to visit frequently because it always stocked “bitchin’ weird stuff.”
Taleena Herkenhoff was here from the east coast for a job interview with a tech firm, and made just her second visit to the warehouse ever, picking up some circuit boards and other items that have interesting visual patterns for an art project she’s working on.
Anna Zeng, 21, said she thinks a place like WeirdStuff is critical for those in Silicon Valley who want to experiment and create.
“Just as an artist needs their paint brushes and tools, electronics hobbyists need tools and equipment to make their vision come to fruition,” she said.
Zeng and many others in the aisles Sunday bemoaned the loss of surplus operations in the Bay Area. With only a few of these outfits left, locals are concerned the Valley is losing something greater than the sum of their (assorted) parts.
“This was a unique place and it’s a sad commentary that it’s been allowed to be destroyed,” Bruce Kendall, 73, a retired electrical engineer retired From Sunnyvale said.
Ironically, Kendall said he expects many engineers at Google who might someday work in a new campus in the same space would want to keep a place like this around.
Jack Hong, a longtime customer who volunteered some time to help close the warehouse on its final day said he was saddened for the people who won’t get to experience the warehouse.
With a budding generation of engineers and makers coming up, many following course pathways in high school and college emphasizing building and problem solving, Hong said the closure will leave a need unfilled.
“Where’s the next Steve Jobs going to get their parts?,” he asked.