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Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?

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Re: Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?

#201

Post by spookthesunset »

I haven't been to Fry's in a while, but every time I went I always wondered how the hell they managed to stay in business. My random observations over the years of dealing with Fry's:

- Almost all the floor people are paid in part on commission. Even the cashiers salary is in some part commission based. Like, how can a cashier have any control over what somebody purchases in order to maximize their commission?

- Their Point of Sale software seemed to be the most antiquated homebrew garbage on earth. The thing would print out a mile long receipt, even in their cafe. Like, to order coffee the cashier had to do a bunch of steps in on the terminal just to complete the transaction--super bizarre. I'm pretty sure some owners nephew "who knows computers" must have programmed that thing way back in the day and the owners never bothered to modernize.

- The stores always seemed depressing, even ten years ago. Shelves were always dirty with crap strewn about. The isles always had some shelves that were empty with no inventory, or the majority of the inventory out of stock.

- Years ago my monitor crapped out on me and I had an extended warranty. The cheap fuckers didn't replace it but actually wanted to spend several weeks somehow repairing it. I still have pictures on my phone of the absolute mountain of paperwork they gave me for this processes. It was completely insane.

- All the people working there never seemed happy. Several times I overheard employees yelling at each other in neighboring isles. I always got the feeling store management was running the place like a pressure cooker--"gotta sell XYZ of whatever or you are fired" where "XYZ" was some product nobody on earth wanted.

In short, Fry's always had a weird vibe to me. I'm surprised they managed to make it this far.

Re: Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?

#202

Post by chaoticmass »

rossdavidh wrote: post #8
blantonl wrote: post #4

Answer: of course, yes. When I visited Fry's in the DFW area last year (Irving Store off of LBJ freeway) I was shocked at how low energy and sad the place was. It was just one big pile of despair. Just a handful of people were shuffling in and out. They shelves were in complete disrepair, and there were areas where there was no stock on shelves. Computers on display were broken, twisted wrecks. The home theater areas…

How is the Micro Center in DFW doing? I see other electronics retailers doing ok, so I think Amazon is just the coup de grace.

The one off 75 is always very busy when I go there on a Saturday. The DIY PC section always has a few people pushing around a cart full of parts, and even the pre-built system area will be crawling with customers.

Re: Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?

#203

Post by djsumdog »

whalesalad wrote: post #84

The Fry’s by my house is a disaster zone of sadness and empty shelves. The Microcenter up the road has completely blown up as a result. It’s regularly packed to the gills. The employees know it. They’re always referring to how bad it is at Frys and that’s why their store has become so popular. Microcenter is down right dangerous. There are shelves and shelves of new Ryzen processors and those Bucky ball looking Intel…

I used the one in Cincinnati and Chicago quite a bit. Cables and other items I'll still get off eBay or Newegg unless I need them that weekend and am willing to pay the retail upmarks, but for a lot of higher end products, the prices are not too far off from online retail stores (I stopped shopping at Amazon in 2016 so I can't compare to that one; just eBay and Newegg mostly).

There are a lot of products on their site that are "in-store only" which is a good model .. if you happen to live near one. I'll even pay an extra $30~$40 for something high end like a monitor since if something is wrong with it, I can just return it to the store and not have to worry about packaging it and shipping it back.

Re: Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?

#204

Post by chaoticmass »

Rapzid wrote: post #170
blantonl wrote: post #4

Answer: of course, yes. When I visited Fry's in the DFW area last year (Irving Store off of LBJ freeway) I was shocked at how low energy and sad the place was. It was just one big pile of despair. Just a handful of people were shuffling in and out. They shelves were in complete disrepair, and there were areas where there was no stock on shelves. Computers on display were broken, twisted wrecks. The home theater areas…

Ah, I used to work at that location in the mid 00s. The place was a mad house back then. They probably still show the video of me getting a "customer" into a rear naked choke after he started attacking employees. Those were the days :)

And on black friday, the line would loop all the way around the store even with some 200 registers open.

Re: Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?

#205

Post by spookthesunset »

dawnerd wrote: post #166
bradstewart wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fry's is a very strange store. The store here caries both expensive, ancient products as well as reasonably-priced, current gear. It's also the only place I know of to get certain parts and electronics components. The customer service is definitely atrocious though. It took 40 minutes to find someone who could unlock the RAM I needed from a cage (and this was after I had to get a printed PO from someone on the "sales…

Kinda funny how they treat years old ram like its gold. I feel bad for the employee(s) that get locked in cages all day. They're spending a ton of labor for things that don't matter (like keeping a cafe open). No wonder they dont have money to keep their shelves stocked with anything other than as seen on tv junk.

Have you ever tried ordering from those cafe things? It is almost comical watching the poor cashier try to punch in the "order" on their POS. Like they had a binder of SKU's they scan for "coffee" or "latte", and then it would spit out the same mile-long receipt you'd get for ordering a $3000 laptop. It was super bizarre.

Re: Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?

#206

Post by Stratoscope »

danesparza wrote: post #111
nradov wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't actually required to have your receipt checked. I just walk straight out and ignore them.

I've been forcibly stopped by them.

If they did that, it was quite illegal.

My practice when I used to shop at Fry's was to stop and let the receipt checking person mark my receipt with their pink marker, if no one was ahead of me in that line. This was only to let them feel good about their job, not because I had any legal obligation.

If there was anyone in the receipt checking line I would just smile and wave and walk by. They never stopped me, nor could they legally, but the people waiting in line would often look at me and look at the receipt checker, puzzled that I could get away with it and they "couldn't".

Re: Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?

#207

Post by djsumdog »

I don't want to see retail outlets go away. There is sometime important about being able to physically check out things like keyboards, gaming mice and headphones. I'll pay the extra premium at a BestBuy just because I can actually paid each bluetooth headphone with my device and try it out and actually hear the sound-stage and quality.

I remember when MediaPlay and Circuit City went away. So are we just down to BestBuy and MicroCenters if you want to actually look at things before buying them? How long until all we have are YouTube videos by Markus/Dave2D/Linus to judge products by?

Re: Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?

#208

Post by shakezula »

blantonl wrote: post #4

Answer: of course, yes. When I visited Fry's in the DFW area last year (Irving Store off of LBJ freeway) I was shocked at how low energy and sad the place was. It was just one big pile of despair. Just a handful of people were shuffling in and out. They shelves were in complete disrepair, and there were areas where there was no stock on shelves. Computers on display were broken, twisted wrecks. The home theater areas…

I had almost this exact same experience three weeks ago at a Fry's in LA. It was honestly sad to see it.

I kept joking to my friend that it felt post-apocalyptic because it looked like it had been looted. There were rough and cut-open boxes on empty shelves, empty and open packaging on the floor, no signs for the aisles to show what they had on them, employees that looked dead in the eyes, rows of shelves that were just empty or had maybe two or three items on them. It was legitimately sad to see.

We were on the hunt for a dual monitor setup. They didn't even have a 4k monitor on the shelves. That was how poor their selection was.

I've heard they're having issues even paying their vendors, so yeah. I'm pretty positive Fry's is in big trouble.

Re: Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?

#209

Post by spookthesunset »

adventured wrote: post #40
ping_pong wrote: post #28

Well, "trouble" is the wrong word. Fry's is more like "dead man walking". The last time I went to Fry's was maybe 1 year ago. If you walk around, all of the electronics are older models, the game shelves are filled with games that are all several years old, even things like hard drives, etc are all old and expensive. There were no salespeople to help except in places like the TV area. The car stereo area, which is wh…

> that suck money out of local stores and diverts all the money to Seattle, except for the local warehouses where minimum wage workers are being worked like robots Fry's is not paying better than Amazon and Amazon's workers do not earn the minimum wage. Show me where Fry's has a national $15 minimum wage policy (they don't), ie nearly 100% higher than the Federal minimum wage.

Plus almost everybody on the floor at Fry's was paid commission, including the cashiers. Woe be the cashier to checks out a $3000 order only to have the customer come back a month later and get a refund... bye bye commission.

Re: Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?

#210

Post by chaoticmass »

jcranmer wrote: post #34
ping_pong wrote: post #28

Well, "trouble" is the wrong word. Fry's is more like "dead man walking". The last time I went to Fry's was maybe 1 year ago. If you walk around, all of the electronics are older models, the game shelves are filled with games that are all several years old, even things like hard drives, etc are all old and expensive. There were no salespeople to help except in places like the TV area. The car stereo area, which is wh…

> Fry's is dead. Chalk one up for Amazon and automation a-la Andrew Yang. It's easy to say that, but then the retort is why isn't Micro Center suffering the same issues? The two should be facing exactly the same pressure from Amazon, so the reasons for Fry's failures has to be more nuanced than "internet retailers are sucking everyone dry." For my part, I'm much more willing to buy computer parts in person because a)…

I think a part of it is due to the difference in store size and product offering. Fry's had PCs and components sure, but it also tried to have a bit of everything. Large home appliances, software/games, DVDs/CDs, car stereo, home security, networking, gadgets, cameras, home theater, a cafe, and on and on...

Seems like a store that big is only sustainable if you've got a ton of daily foot traffic.

Microcenter on the other hand has much smaller stores and a more focused set of product offerings. Also much better service. You can count on Microcenter staff to be helpful and informed, while Fry's staff was hit or miss but mostly pretty useless.

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