As the most populous city in Southern California, Los Angeles has a huge number of consumer electronics stores. With fully 50 Circuit City stores and 18 Best Buys, two of the largest electronics retailers are plentiful indeed. One can also add to that, the over 1,000 specialty shops and chain stores and you can see a situation where the populace has many choices as they search for their next big screen television.



The phrase consumer electronics is associated with electronic equipment designed for everyday use. They are most often used for communications, entertainment and personal productivity. Mainstream consumer electronics products include personal computers, telephones, speakers, TVs, and calculators. Popular brands of electronics include many large domestic and foreign manufacturers, such as Apple, Philips, Samsung, Sanyo, Sony and Toshiba, among others.

The Consumer Electronics Association estimates 2007 nationwide consumer electronics purchases at 150 billion dollars. A very large portion of those sales originated in Los Angeles, and other major cites like New York and Boston.

As previously noted, consumer electronics are made around the globe, though there is a very high concentration of manufacturing facilities in Asia, particularly China and Singapore. The most cutting-edge consumer electronics are previewed yearly at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, NV, which is near to Los Angeles, at which many industry pioneers speak including Microsoft's Bill Gates.

One interesting characteristic of the consumer electronic field is the longstanding trend of lower prices. Knowledgeable individuals posit that such a development is caused by gains in manufacturing efficiency and more use of automation, combined with numerous improvements in semiconductors. The popularly observed Moore's Law, says that, for a given price, electronics industry functionality doubles every 18 months.

Consumer electronics in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the country, and in the world, continue in a trend of functional combinations, wherein a DVD player and television become a media center, combining characteristics of several electronic items. Consumers face difficult decisions when purchasing electronics items. Doing so is starting to be more about an item's style and price, as opposed to its specifications and performance.

On the negative side, loads of consumer electronics result in e-waste. It is thought that in 2003 the United States alone generated over 2.8 million tons of electronic waste. No more than 10 percent of that amount was recycled.