Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

I have a friend who's worked at Best Buy for the past ~7 years. According to him, they:

- Beefed up their online presence. It's honestly a better experience than Amazon because it's specialized (which is a low bar, but still).

- Use stores as distribution centers. You can make an online purchase and then go pick it up that day if you feel like it, which Amazon struggles to compete with.

- Focus on customer service; both sales and Geek Squad. People who don't know exactly what they want will be lost on Amazon; Best Buy not only has people who will give recommendations, they'll even send someone to your house for free to evaluate your needs. Then after you purchase you can get in-person customer support (which can also go to your house if you want). Almost an "Apple Store for all the other tech products" kind of idea. There's an angle here, of course, but I think there's also genuine value for non-techies.

Contrasting the way they and Fry's responded to the e-commerce era is actually really striking as a case-study

I lived near the Palo Alto Fry's around the same time when I was a kid, and I always remembered it as a supermarket with some electronics. It wasn't until college that I got interested in computers and electronics and started to go back to Fry's again. I was always sort of puzzled - did I remember the supermarket correctly? Was it a Fry's? Whenever I said to people, "Fry's was a supermarket," they looked at me like I was indeed crazy.

Lots of nostalgia about Fry’s here. Well, I have a different take. Fry’s was my first job, and my first introduction to wage slavery. They never at any point cared about employee health or well-being. Breaks were the state minimum. Pay was the state minimum. The entire staff (and there were hundreds back in the day, when the checkout line would back up into the store even with 20 registers open) shared one 7x7 beige break room. It looked like something from Prison Architect, just an old tube TV with bent bunny ears (you weren’t allowed to turn it on though, it was for training) and the stale smell of cigarette smoke. Knowledge was irrelevant, it was all about sales. SPIFs (bounty-style sales commissions) and revenue ruled the day. Aside from that, the owners didn’t care; cliques and in-groups ruled hiring and firing in the absence of leadership. Stores were always falling apart even when they were new. I don’t think anything over 7’ up was ever dusted; even 20 years ago, it was so thick in some places you couldn’t see the paint. The repair bar employees would regularly rifle through customers’ hard drivers and keep the juciest pictures.

Just another cynical retail empire, pumped hard and drained dry by its owners while the foundation rotted from below. May they build condos on its grave.

"I’m not surprised, but this makes me feel incredibly sad. I built my first PC using parts from there. I’m going to miss it."

Yeah, same here. I'm not sure if the first PC I built was from Fry's parts but the second+ definitely were. I used to love going there in the late 90s-early 2000s – they put a lot of effort into demo areas/displays back then and the selection was unbeatable, especially for components and things that Best Buy wouldn't (and doesn't) even bother with. I get that paying retail rents to stock $2 patch cables doesn't work these days but I will miss it.

This makes me sad. When I lived in Phoenix in the early aughts, the Thunderbird Fry's was about halfway between the office and home. On bad traffic days I would pull off the freeway and kill time in there until things eased up a bit.

Today, the nearest store is about a 45 minute drive away and I've probably only been there a handful of times in the past 15 years.