ShopJimmy.com win-win for landfills, electronic industry

Need a back light inverter? Looking for an IR remote sensor?

Most of us don’t even know that these are internal parts of a television set. And most of us are much more likely to go out and replace a TV rather than fix it. But hopefully that mentality is shifting.

Just imagine how many TVs end up in the garbage because of one or two bad parts. Even the best TV repairman can’t help you if a part is no longer available.

That’s where http://shopjimmy.com comes in. The business started as one guy buying, fixing and reselling TVs through eBay. But now broken TVs come into Shop Jimmy’s Minnesota location by the truckload. They are mostly TVs that are damaged while being delivered, from what I gather.

The sets are stripped of any usable parts, which are then sold on the Internet or through Shop Jimmy’s growing number of stores.

And from a quick survey of the site, the parts are much cheaper than you could find them elsewhere.

Shop Jimmy is perfect example of a win-win situation. Here are three of the big winners:

Jimmy: Jimmy wins because he has a business with $3 million in revenue this year. This is great for Jimmy, but also his employees and the local economy up there in Minnesota.

The environment: The average American household has more than one TVs. It’s a huge market. It’s also a huge amount of materials that will either end up buried in a landfill or reused. Shop Jimmy is saving a big chunk of materials that would otherwise rot.

The industry: TV repairmen now have a place to go for cheap parts. Even parts that are no longer manufactured or sold by TV makers. That means they’re more likely to be able to fix TVs, more likely to profit, and more likely able to keep people from tossing their televisions in the trash. Every industry should be lucky enough to have a company creating a new market for what would otherwise be junk.