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Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

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Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#151

Post by zxcvbn4038 »

No! I always loved browsing the isles at Fry’s, awesome memories.

I’d been asking the network engineers at my employer to set up a rack of routers and for months and the response was always no, too busy, can’t get parts, etc. So I bought a bunch of $2 Ethernet cards and a passive hub from Fry’s, wired it up with bright red Ethernet cable, told them I had a network now so they could take off. Four hours later a guy comes by with a hand cart full of the unobtainable routers and is ready to install.

Another memorable tale from Fry’s - one of my peers bought a CPU and managed to smoke it first try. He returned it to Fry’s and picked another off the shelf, got home - it was the same CPU. He returned it again, got another CPU off the shelf, got home - same CPU again. Third time he went and got a CPU off the shelf first then returned the old one, and was then able to go home and finish his server build.

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#152

Post by brundolf »

ericbarrett wrote: post #125

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…

Do you have reason to believe this was endemic to the whole company, or could it have just been your store?

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#153

Post by aesyondu »

ericbarrett wrote: post #125

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…

> The repair bar employees would regularly rifle through customers’ hard drivers and keep the juciest pictures

Pretty creepy. And this is from a well known company/establishment.

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#154

Post by mzarate06 »

This makes me a little sad. I owe some of the fun and great learning experiences I had in my earlier days to Fry's.

Here are some memories I have from their Austin location that started around the early 2000s - a time when I was transitioning away from being a music major and just starting to dabble in programming and pc hardware:

- I had a basic Dell desktop that helped me through college. Back then, base models came with around 512 MB of RAM. It got awfully slow, and Fry's helped upgrade it to 2 GB of RAM! I was amazed at the difference that made.

- I always had fun browsing their isles. During one of my first trips, I came across Linux distros they sold via CD; those introduced me to Linux nearly two decades ago. I eventually became a full-time Linux user, and have been ever since.

- I bought my first mechanical keyboard from Fry's after feeling what it felt to type on display samples available on shelves.

- Back when I had a DVD collection, 25%-50% of it was likely from Fry's.

- I still have a PHP 4 book I bought from Fry's. It introduced me to my first PHP and Apache install. I remember the fun I had working through that book.

- Eventually, the vast hardware they used to keep in stock got the better of me. An old friend made the trip with me to help me buy parts I'd need to custom-build a pc. And over pizza and beer, we built my first desktop together. It replaced my old Dell mentioned above. I've built every one of my desktops since then, some of which used hardware from Fry's.

- And for a time, anytime I convinced myself I needed additional storage or a faster CPU, I immediately looked forward to going to Fry's.

Those may not sound spectacular, but I think others in this thread will relate to some of them. Personally, what I valued the most, in hindsight, was having a place I could go to and physically experience or navigate paths of my growing curiosity in programming and pc hardware.

The Fry's in Austin is still open, and I'm aware of it's barron nature, but even so, I might make one last trip.

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#155

Post by drudru11 »

heleninboodler wrote: post #87
taurath wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah weirdstuff is gone? I suppose the only businesses left along those lines are the startup graveyard furniture stores

You haven't lived the life of a late 90's bay area nerd if you've never grabbed your copy of Computer Shopper and hit Fry's, Weird Stuff and Central Computer in a single afternoon. With friends. :D

Truth

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#156

Post by drudru11 »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #118

I graduated college in 1985 and moved cross country to Sunnyvale for work. Fry's was a supermarket chain, and at the time there was one and only one location that was trying out carrying computer stuff, on the east side of Lawrence Ave I think, before they moved to the west side of Lawrence. They weren't yet fully committed to it. Half the store was produce and such -- milk, eggs, lettuce, etc, and the other half was…

That was probably an amazing decade for the Bay Area. I wish I was there then to see it.

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#157

Post by hctaw »

wishysgb wrote: post #145
hctaw wrote: post #136

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…

not a single whole seller ever let me get something out of their stock. I must learn your secrets. but yeah it was a shit show

call the warehouse or walk into it

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#158

Post by Fezzik »

brundolf wrote: post #152
ericbarrett wrote: post #125

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…

Do you have reason to believe this was endemic to the whole company, or could it have just been your store?

I was never employed at Fry’s, but regularly shopped at the Oregon and Washington stores, and to this day I always remember thinking that the employees looked more bedraggled than at any other store I had or have ever shopped at. There was a feeling of defeat, abuse, and under-appreciation in the air.

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#159

Post by libraryatnight »

BeetleB wrote: post #150
snapetom wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are thinking of this (owned by Kroger's): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fry%27s_Food_and_Drug Similar logo, but different store, although they do share an origin.

This was a source of confusion for me as a kid. My dad, somewhat excitedly, saying "They're opening a Fry's here!" "...what's wrong with the one that just took over Smitty's?" "No, for electronics!" "They're putting in an electronics section" "No it's a Fry's Electronics. Computer and electronics parts." "Oh, cool..." And until we went I think I still had in mind a grocery store with some computers just past housewares.

Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores

#160

Post by snapetom »

BeetleB wrote: post #150
snapetom wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are thinking of this (owned by Kroger's): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fry%27s_Food_and_Drug Similar logo, but different store, although they do share an origin.

Yep, but at some point, the Fry's in Palo Alto did become solely a Fry's Electronics.
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