I hope the Fry's pyramid in Campbell is turned into something awesome before it decays.
Fry's Electronics is closing all stores
171–180 of 316 posts
Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores
#172Fry's moved in when I was in primary school; I'd go there with my dad a lot. We bought all the parts for my first home built PC there -like many other commenters. Then, when I was of driving age, my friends and I would go to Fry's when we had extra money, and sometimes when we were broke and just wanted to walk up and down the isles and look at stuff. Friday's we'd sit on a curb outside school before the bell and read the big ad. "Ghost in the Shell's only 10 bucks on dvd! That RAM I wanted more of is on sale..."
I know it wasn't anything close to its former self these days, but I'll miss it. I'll miss running in at 8:30pm on a Tuesday night to grab a spool of cat5. I'll miss pooling cash on a Saturday to replace a hub for a LAN party. I'll miss pallets of huge spindles of CDRs next to pallets of air duster 3 packs. Standing out front for hours waiting for the Warcraft III midnight launch. I'll miss the inexplicable amount of snacks in the check out line, and the pointless and lazily adhered to receipt check at the door. No trip was complete without a receipt checker shouting a conversation over customers to his buddy in customer service, absentmindedly hi-lighting and pretending to look in carts and bags.
Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
At a point in my life I liked that place but that was a very brief moment. I saw they did everything wrong, they staff wasn't knowledgeable and you wouldn't expect them to be at minimum wage. The isles I cared about most, the electronics component and the test equipment isles were always shitty, if I bought something it would never get restocked again.
Sad to hear these stories. For me, Fry's was the opposite. I wouldn't call them experts, but they were more knowledgeable than the competition (Best Buy, etc). Also, no other place in this city that has some of the components they would sell. Now the only option is to buy online.
Yet now online has no product in stock either, just like Fry's.
Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores
#174RIP Fry's, you really shot yourself in the ass. Gonna miss you!
Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores
#175This 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 cam…
I went there in September 2019 to get an SSD and DDR3 to upgrade a friend's laptop, and they had neither - ended up getting both at Altex. Judging by the state of that store, I'm surprised it's taken this long for them to be going out of business.
Definitely.
Last time I went was probably around 2019 as well. They price matched a Ryzen CPU. When I went to pick it up, the shelves and empty stock throughout the store indicated a business that was no longer its former self. I remember feeling a little sad for them back then too.
Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores
#176Lots 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…
I knew some people that worked at one of their stores about 15 years ago or so, and that sounds about on the same level as their experiences.
Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores
#177After midnight in timezone of the alleged store, and still online, with deals listed until end of month. Will obviously check back, but so far not seeing proof.
Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was a lot of stuff going on in the corp level that really caused a lot of the problems with supply of goods. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Former-Fry-s-executiv...
Wikipedia has a lot more detail about him. Basically a Fry’s VP arranged for $65 million in kickbacks from companies that wanted to see at Fry’s, and then gambled away even more than that, and ended up $137 million in debt: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausaf_Umar_Siddiqui
That reminds me of how TigerDirect ended up [0]. There's another one I sorely miss, especially since there was one store that was a ten-minute drive for me.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TigerDirect#Founders_convicted...
Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores
#179Lots 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.
I remember taking my computer into repair at some Chinese shop. When I came to pivk it up, all their floor demos were showing the pictures and animations I had collected.
Re: Fry's Electronics is closing all stores
#180Lots 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?
Well I worked at the Zanker Rd location, which shared a parking lot with their corporate HQ, so imagine the neglect elsewhere.