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Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

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Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#131

Post by rainyMammoth »

someperson wrote: post #41
dlevine wrote: post #5

I remember going to Fry's for the first time in the late 90s. Having grown up on the East Coast, I had only heard about this magical place where you could buy pretty much anything computer-related. It was truly an experience, especially when compared with from CompUSA and Best Buy. When I moved to the Bay Area, I did enjoy going to Fry's and walking around ogling the hardware. Over time, I switched pretty much to buy…

In the Bay Area do people often bring dogs into retail stores?

unfortunately dogs owner seem genuinely incapable to realize that some people are allergic and are simply not comfortable with unpredictable animals in public places.

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#132

Post by mountaineer »

I'm about 15 minutes from that store in the Tweet, but haven't been there in years. They always the strangest mix of merchandise. I remember their grand opening weekend, must've been late 90's when they mistakenly put a price on a car stereo in an ad for like $39 instead of $239. We got there first thing and they eventually relented on giving us the advertised price. College students weren't going to pass that deal.

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#133

Post by Foomf »

I saw this coming a mile away. My local fry's (Renton) used to be a really fun place to visit. Over the past decade or so it has really gone downhill. It is such a depressing store to visit nowadays. A lot of the selves are barren in a no-shits-given sort of way. It doesn't seem like the store is cleaned too often, and most of the time it is worryingly empty. One would think fry's was doing everything they could to make themselves unappealing. Their online store is somewhere between useless and unusable, and is suck in some pre 2010's era. It looks like instead of trying to keep up and adapt with the times, they hunkered down and cut every corner they could until this inevitable demise.

They'll be missed, but I don't think my local fry's closing is going to inconvenience anyone. Best Buy basically ate their lunch: a brick and mortar store you can visit if you want a hands on (or ears on) experience, and not having to wait for shipping at the sacrifice of selection. Said selection is a lot worse than fry's, but at least being in Best Buy doesn't fill me with a sense of doom, dread and despair.

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#134

Post by tornato7 »

tanseydavid wrote: post #30
geocrasher wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only time I've ever been into a Fry's (due to not living near one) was around 2010 in the Sacramento CA area. It was so huge that I genuinely got dizzy and had to work hard to focus to see individual items (It's a thing that happens to me when there is a lot of "input" for lack of a better term). I suspect that the cavernous real estate (and its cost) only hastened their demise.

Going to Fry's without a VERY specific shopping list was always dangerous for me. I could blow 3 hours in a Fry's just browsing and barely notice the time that had passed.

I was in Bangkok and at one of the largest electronics stores in Southeast Asia, that place put Fry's to shame. I think I spent an entire day in there.

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#135

Post by TimTheTinker »

BoorishBears wrote: post #89
chris11 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really liked Fry's years ago. It was depressing to see inventory go down so quickly last couple years. I would like a local Microcenter. Their prices are decent and they have good motherboard/cpu combos.

Semi-off topic but Microcenter needs to fix their online presence. I have five Microcenters within an hour of me, the closest is practically walking distance, yet I was so turned off by the few times I've tried to use their online services I essentially boycotted them. The first time was using their site for pickup during the pandemic... then not being told until I reached the store that this wasn't curbside/contactl…

might be a legitimate complaint but I think it’s off topic in this thread.

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#136

Post by hctaw »

For the last three years I've had to use my phone's flashlight to peruse the shelves in the Burbank store because they couldn't be bothered (or afford) to turn the lights on.

Fry's saved my ass a couple times. Once it was because I was about to fly out of BUR to Vegas to meet colleagues at a trade show (CES or NAB, can't recall) and they had blown out a transformer we needed for our display, I bought one on my way to the airport. It lasted 6 hours the next day before we gave up.

Another time, after transporting a PC the stock CPU cooler had gotten loose and it needed replacement (the alternative was running a machine that didn't have a backup without any cooling, yikes), and Fry's was the only store that had any CPU coolers in stock other than the Microcenter in Torrance.

It's sad. Now I'll have to resort to pleading with wholesalers to sell me units out of their warehouses. I've had to do this for several classes of components and parts for the last decade. One day drones will be able to deliver stuff from Amazon as fast as I could drive to Fry's, but that isn't today.

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#137

Post by mjevans »

brundolf wrote: post #111
slg wrote: post #11

Every Fry's I have been to in the last decade has felt like the store was already in the process of going out of business. That said, I will miss the place. Sometimes you just need a piece of electronics today and Fry's had a much wider selection than stores like Best Buy.

"Last decade" is an exaggeration, I think, but certainly for the past 2-3 years. Though maybe it just varied by location

I can confirm; at least for the Seattle area (Renton, WA) location it opened to much fanfare, but went downhill years ago.

Elaborating; this must have been around the start of the consignment era. Looking back that's clearly what the deal bins and such at the front of the store were. It was a lack of new parts in the higher end sections that I initially noticed.

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#139

Post by jjav »

ZacharyPitts wrote: post #66

Frys was always fun to go to... but I can’t believe one of the first popular joke websites on the web not linked, only to be found in web archive... the frys employment application https://web.archive.org/web/20200130175501/http://homepage.s... Heck I think I first saw this in a newsgroup even, but memories are fuzzy

That employment application is seriously funny. So precise.

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#140

Post by _nothing »

It's cool to hear about everyone's good experiences with Fry's in the 90s; maybe they would have managed to stay in business longer if they'd ever updated since that period. I worked at a Fry's (the lone location near Chicago) for a few months in 2014 and it felt like they'd never upgraded anything since the 90s. Not the systems, not the decor-- nothing. If they were trying to make it seem retro, it failed. It just felt _stagnant_. Sad and tacky. I would understand trying to maintain the 90s tech shop feel for their nostalgic techie clientele, except that most of the customers were average Joes buying TVs, normal laptops, or toys for their kids.

All in all it created kind of a miserable environment for employees. After I'd left, I went to a different Fry's in San Jose to buy a laptop and the worker helping me just openly admitted, unprompted, that they hated working there.

Of course, maybe not upgrading anything is actually part of the reason they even made it this far. Everything technically worked, after all, so perhaps the savings were worth it, at the expense of the experience for employees (and likely, then, customers). Do deal-seekers really care what their shopping experience is like as long as they're getting good deals? Perhaps not.

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