Holiday Tech Shortages: How to Get the Tech You Need

Holiday shopping has always been a stressful activity, but it has been made even more troublesome with supply chain challenges and ongoing chip shortages making it harder to get the must-have tech and increasing prices.  Tech has become more difficult to source with just 12% of global chip manufacturing being carried out in the U.S. Supply chain costs have also significantly increased in 2021 with sending shipping containers from Asia to the U.S. costing 14 x more than what it did in 2019 and air cargo rates rising 40% since the end of August.  

However, people have found ways to fulfill their tech wish lists by regifting their used tech.  Repairing used tech can bypass the supply chain challenges, be an eco-friendly solution, restore devices so they can be used for more years, and save people money.  In fact, choosing to repair electronics instead of replacing them could reduce household spending on tech by 22%.  

It doesn’t take much to fix old devices so they are working almost like new.  Usually devices would just require repairs to the USB port, charging port, or headphone jacks or need replacements for the hard drive, battery, or screen to gain a few more years of life.  These fixes are also cheap, probably costing less than $110 and taking less than 45 minutes to complete.  

So take advantage of the tech shortage this year to save money and avoid shipping delays by regifting repaired tech at a fraction of the cost.