I loved Fry's in their prime, probably the early 2000s. I think what made them special was largely a product of the time. Personal Computing was booming and new products you'd never seen before were coming out every day, and this one mega store had everything. It was fun just to walk around and survey what was going on in that moment in time.
From my perspective the main things that killed it were online shopping, as the article mentions, and computing just becoming more boring, at least from a hardware perspective. Once the iPhone came out, that became many people's primary computing device or computing peripheral. Everything you needed was just an app or software which you could download online. The great mass of consumers just need a laptop and a few commodity peripherals, and they can get all that at Walmart. Then Newegg came along and really ate the PC hobbyist market.
Eventually Fry's succumbed to the GameStop effect - their primary market is completely eaten out by online competition, so they fill their retail space with cheap garbage to make ends meet. The last few times I visited my local Fry's it was more empty shelves and cheap bargain bins than anything I was interested in buying.
It was a sad end, but not surprising. I just don't think you can justify having large specialty stores anymore when online shopping is so convenient and the options are so much more plentiful.
About the iPhone making computing boring: PC video game market got much stronger in the late 2000s and 2010s. Maybe the share of people using phones as computers went up, but also the number of people heavily using computers in general did. (Not saying that playing video games makes someone a PC enthusiast or that it's even a real hobby, but it means they buy the parts.)
I think it was just online shopping that killed Fry's, like you also said. Especially all those expensive parts that far outweigh the shipping costs.
Also idk how Gamestop was a thing once even all the console games went onto non-physical media.
The thing is computing has become fun again. Weird and wild cases, crazy water cooled setups, insane keyboards with new types of sensors being developed all the time (not only are analog keyboards a thing now, there are multiple types of analog keyboards!)
There was a lull in the market for a bit but IMHO the tech scene is interesting again.
I feel they failed to adapt to digital. If you look at Best Buy or Microcenter (the survivors), you can purchase in store or digitally or have it shipped and they make it quick.
It made no sense why they couldn’t provide a hybrid channel and expand their sales as opposed to forcing you to go in the store and failing to honor the online prices in-store or the in-store prices online.
Also, it’s incredible that they had embezzlement, because they seemed to have very tight internal controls when you shopped there.
I really miss it. It was a great place to shop and I drove to the entire otherside of the city to shop there. Although I’m told by people from the southwest that their northern expansion stores were much more beautiful and didn’t have a warehouse feel.
I would drive hours to get to the nearest Fry's to me, to pick up some new gear. Being able to browse everything and look around was great. For me, online ordering of parts probably hurt Fry's, but the real reason was after a while, you were never sure if the video card you were buying was new, or actually a return item, and after a couple times having to drive all the way back for something that was missing parts, the whole thing just seemed way too risky. Amazon and Newegg nailed that door shut.
Sacramento Fry’s off Northgate was my go-to store circa ’98. Whenever a friend wanted to build a PC, that’s where we went. The employees were great; the salespeople, not so much.
I still made the trip every holiday season until around 2017 but it had been going progressively downhill since about 2007. The expanded café, the drastic reduction in books and magazines, PC parts getting strip-mined and never restocked, audio/video media slowly disappearing; you could feel the shift.
I miss the SacBee flyer and the last-minute Christmas gift runs. Egghead Software, CompUSA, RadioShack, Borders (one of the only reliable places to find 2600), Tower Records...it was a different time.
There were just horrible in their last years. easily one of the worst places I've shopped at. Multiple locations too.
Microcenter is around now, they're not as bad but they suck. They force their cashiers to ask and demand for your personal information (phone number,address,etc..). At least online retailers won't give you dirty looks when you give them dummy info.
People are nostalgic about these places, but if they can't realize their disadvantage and at least provide decent customer experience in person, it's probably best if they went away. I wish there was a costco-like decent brick-and-mortar electronics store (costco is famous for treating it's employees well, and then having them treat customers well, as well as their wide range of high-quality items). I can order just about any piece of electronics, including things like resistors and get it within a day or two most of the times. it sure beats fighting traffic, and vying for salesperson's attention for help about an item, standing around a locked cabinet hoping someone would have the time to come and unlock it for you, so you can give them your money, standing in lines and the aforementioned cashier experience. These problems are not inherent. They are direct effects of mismanagement (except the traffic part).
Fry's had an interesting warranty program that I really enjoyed and their employees would build a PC for you with the parts you purchased for free or help you put it together. This made it really nice for someone who was about to drop $2,000 on some parts and didn't trust their hands to break some pins etc.
Their warranty was transferable and they let you know about it. They would print the warranty paperwork out twice and give you a sticker you could put on the inside of the case for whoever ended up having the PC later it was still valid as it was the parts under warranty.
This meant that if you had a part that later on went out, like a motherboard, you could tell them the warranty information or show up at the store with the PC and they would figure it out. I thought this would be garbage like how Apple or Best Buy just wants you to buy a new one and try to scam you out of warranty replacement, but they actually would replace the part as needed and if that part no longer existed they would replace it with a similar one. I took a PC back there that had a motherboard under warranty that stopped working and that motherboard no longer existed, so they dutifully went and found a motherboard that had those same minimum features and substituted it without a cost.
Fry’s would frequently accept returned items, and instead of returning them to the vendor to refurbish them, they would simply re-shrink wrap them and put them back on the shelf with a different colored price sticker. The item could be fine, or it could be damaged, have parts missing, etc.
A term was coined for this: “re-Fryed.” As in, “don't buy that video card! It’s been re-Fryed!”
You could watch people return items, them tossing them into a bin, and then some employee later taking that bins straight back out to floor to restock. No shrink wrapping needed. Learning how to detect refried parts was crucial to shopping there. In SoCal, Frys was just a place to get a part quick. Reliable or quality parts required going to a place like MWave or wait for newegg to ship.
Coming from the Midwest I visited Fry's for the first time in early 2020 weeks before COVID. I had always heard amazing things about the store, for years. It was on my short list of places to visit on the west coast. That place was not a healthy operation. Close to half the shelves were empty, the place was generally a mess and needed a deep clean, and worst of all the employees seemed entirely disinterested in helping me.
When news came that they had shut down I was entirely unsurprised.
COVID might have sped things up a little but that location at least was on its last legs.
One thing I noticed at the Fry's in the Dallas-Forth Worth area, back when I lived there in the 2010's, is that it a lot of employees seemed like they were in the US on H-1B visas. Which often, not always but too often, means their employer is treating them poorly, perhaps underpaying them compared to what they would offer people with permanent residence or citizenship — because H-1B visa terms give you just one week to find a new job or leave the country if your current employer lets you go. (Or they used to in the early 2010's, at least; I haven't kept up to know if there have been changes since then. I took a job overseas in the mid-2010's, so I get a lot less first-person knowledge of what's happening in America now that I'm only there for short visits, usually at Christmastime.)
That, combined with a good friend of mine passing on rumors of the company treating their employees poorly (my friend said that he would choose to shop elsewhere rather than Fry's if he had any choice, and since the Fry's was near his house while the Microcenter was a 30-minute drive away, that meant he was giving up convenience for principle)... well, I started shopping at Microcenter too until I took this overseas job. So I wasn't too surprised to learn of Fry's demise: the writing had apparently been on the wall for years.
I just left a similar comment about my local Fry’s in California. They replaced all the employees, who had been knowledgeable and helpful, with people who knew absolutely nothing about the products. I thought maybe it was just at our store, shame to hear it happened all over.
I know it's a damn shame. Back in the day when we actually went out shopping in stores that was always one of favorite places to go, even if just to walk around and check out all the cool shit they had.
I recently went to Micro Center. It reminded me of Fry's in the good ways. Large store, all kinds of parts and tools. They had a case of Raspberry PIs and accesories. They had a whole section 3D printers. They must have had 100 kinds of cases. A big section of storage, GPUs, RAM, etc.... It was great! I wish it was closer.
Note: I went to the one in Tustin, CA. No idea what the SV one is like or the originals in Ohio.
I would have a hard time living far away from a Micro Center. Your first impressions are pretty much correct in that, yes, it is great.
They aren’t the best place to buy many categories of items, but for other categories, they are pretty amazing.
Their in-house brand Inland used to really suck 10+ years ago, but now they make some great product categories, like their SSDs and flash storage (sometimes branded Micro Center instead of Inland).
The 3D printing section is pretty legit, it’s come in handy when I’ve needed parts in a pinch, and they cost the same as online (actually, less, since Bambu charges shipping).
There are times when their PC parts are cheaper than elsewhere like if you buy motherboard and processor via a bundle.
They’re the best place to snag a GPU. When supply is low. You beat scalpers by going to Micro Center. They’ll only sell them in store and they check ID to make sure you don’t buy them more than once every 30 days.
They are, to my knowledge, the exclusive retailer of Bawls energy drinks.
Last I checked, they do price match with online retailers.
The salespeople are commissioned but usually aren’t annoying about it, and generally it makes them helpful more than not, and they tend to know exactly where everything is.
I wouldn’t really go to Micro Center for things like cables and other accessories where you get better selection online.
I wouldn’t expect a major difference with the original Ohio locations. I’ve been to locations in numerous states and they’re all generally the same, although I think there’s a location somewhere with a mechanized moving filament wall as something of a party trick.
Yeah, Micro Center is awesome. They have become my first stop when I'm buying PC hardware. They aren't always the cheapest, but they are never so much more that it's a big deal, and I value having a local shop so it's well worth paying slightly more. Heck, the staff is even reasonably knowledgeable and has been able to help me out on occasion when I don't know something. I never had the opportunity to go to Fry's, but Micro Center is what I imagine they must've been like.
I found a flip phone in the fry’s parking lot, my dad turned it in to security, who accepted it with a smirk. I had gone through it and wrote down the phone number belonging to the phone. We called the number a week later and the guy said not only did they not have it in their lost and found, so he had to buy a new phone, but he spent hours with Verizon to make some kind of charges that hit after losing it go away. Maybe 2002 - 2003.
The surge in laptops contributed, too. The opportunity or need for expansion cards, additional memory or storage upgrades, and peripherals disappeared or shrank.
I used to think of the sales staff as the United Nations of Fry's. It was always thrilling to see someone starting their American dream, even if the service was haphazard.
>The surge in laptops contributed, too. The opportunity or need for expansion cards, additional memory or storage upgrades, and peripherals disappeared or shrank.
We were once able to upgrade CPUs, RAM, video cards, HDD, network cards and replace batteries in laptops, too.
Pepperidge Farms, oops I mean Framework, remembers.
Bought this Framework 16 laptop less than a year ago so I haven't upgraded anything yet. But if I decide I want a GPU (I don't play games on this laptop so I bought it GPU-less) I can add one. If they come out with a new motherboard that I decide is worth buying, I can swap it out and keep the rest of the laptop. And I can customize all six of the side ports at any time; they're hot-swappable. Currently I have three USB-C slots, one USB-A for when I need a thumbdrive, one HDMI, and one SD card reader slot. I bought a second USB-A slot and an Ethernet slot, so if I need two USB-A ports or if I need to plug into Ethernet, I can just slide the physical locking tab on the appropriate side of the laptop, slide out one of the slots, and slide in the Ethernet or USB-A slot. Then relock the tab so the expansion slot fillers are physically held in place and I can carry on. No rebooting needed, but now I have two USB-C ports and two USB-A. Or three USB-C, no USB-A, and one Ethernet. Whatever configuration I need at the moment.
It's great. I currently don't have any plans to buy a new laptop in the near future (my wife's laptop is just two years old and has plenty of life left in it), but next time I need a new laptop, I plan to buy a Framework again.
P.S. No affiliation with Framework, just a customer.
Sure but I don't mind the current outcome. I want my laptop to be small and light and if the tradeoff is the ram and battery have to be glued, I'd take it.
> So when they finally closed, there were some people who were sad, but there were also people who were happy to see it go.
Good lord. The nearest Radio Shack (17 miles away) closed, so to get a resistor or cap, it's "order online". That's about as environmentally sound as nuclear testing above ground (perhaps a slight hyperbole there).
But not all that far-fetched. One time, I visited my daughter's place and found a broken wire in the thermostat, so I drove to the Shack, got a cheap iron and solder and fixed it. (When there WAS a Radio Shack)
I replaced my old Nikon F2 with a refurbished FM that cost less than the repairs. Go to buy some color slide or black and white film. Same store (and lucky to have one within 50 miles). "We don't carry those"
> Good lord. The nearest Radio Shack (17 miles away) closed, so to get a resistor or cap, it's "order online". That's about as environmentally sound as nuclear testing above ground (perhaps a slight hyperbole there).
I wonder if this is true?
Let’s say you were to buy the item from a store. Suppose the store is five miles away. You drive to the store, buy the item, and drive home. You used 10 miles worth of gas, plus the wear and tear on the car (meaning it has to be replaced 10 miles earlier than it would have otherwise).
Now, suppose you order it from Amazon. A worker picks it off a shelf in the warehouse, puts it in an envelope, and puts it on a truck. The truck drives to your house to deliver it.
Even if they JUST delivered your package, it should be basically a wash in terms of energy, right? You had to drive from your house to the store, they had to drive from the distribution center to your house. There would be a bit extra packaging, but I am not sure how many gallons of burned fuel an envelope is equivalent to.
However, if you had say, an Amazon delivery, then that delivery truck is not just driving to your house. It is driving to dozens of houses along a route to deliver your goods.
If you imagine the alternative, where each of those deliveries instead has to have the owner drive to a store, that could be hundreds of miles of saved trips because of the delivery drivers only taking one trip.
You do not order electronic parts from Amazon. You order them from Digi-Key or Mouser. They're organized to ship efficiently from a huge inventory of small parts, and they buy directly from manufacturers, so the supply chain is solid. If you order a Panasonic resistor, you will get a Panasonic resistor, not some random floor sweepings.
(This does not apply to DigiKey's "marketplace", which is third party resellers. DigiKey does claim to monitor their resellers, and DigiKey, not the reseller, handles customer complaints.)
I was just using Amazon as an example, mainly because they deliver their own items from local warehouses, usually. Easier to think about comparing that to driving to the store yourself.
* I’m not making a trip downtown for just one item. I’m picking it up on my way somewhere else, usually one of a few errands. That delivery driver might be making rounds too but randomly and likely far less efficient, bouncing around various suburbs. (And the recipients of those packages are still out running errands too)
* most delivery vehicles, aside from the nice rivian EDVs, are gross polluters, noisy, driven like their lives depended on getting there as fast as possible. The drivers are abused workers, stories of pissing in bottles to make a quota. I prefer fewer of those in my neighborhood.
The bottom line though, regardless of delivery efficiency, is that communities have suffered when everyone shops online. The benefactors of that efficiency are the billionares.
I buy from stores that employ my neighbors. Where I can talk to a human when I need to return an item. Where they are treated less like warehouse robots being abused like sweatshop workers. Costco is my model for a good local warehouse, not Amazon or Newegg.
To a close approximation the prices of things are proportional to the "soundness" of the scheme. If Digi-Key can afford to put $20 worth of stuff in a box and send it to me overnight, that's their business, not mine. Someone is putting the fuel into FedEx planes full of Digi-Key boxes and somehow that cost is being amortized over all the boxes in a way that is acceptable to all parties.
Sure, but my point is that EVERYTHING you buy has to end up at your house somehow. If you buy it from a store, it has to be shipped to the store, and then picked up by you. If you you buy it online, it is shipped to a distribution center, and then delivered to you. No matter what, we have to get the item to the person who is buying it.
I am just wondering what the actual carbon footprints of the different methods are.
I get it. My point is it's rational to expect it to all be baked into the price. In your example I suspect that the cost of individuals driving to stores dominates, and this is in fact baked into the cost of driving, but individuals are largely blind to the operating costs of driving.
The various "components, available" of Radio Shack was quite interesting; we still had (have?) one in town long after they mostly went away, and they still had a dusty old collection of various components.
They replaced all the workers at our local Fry’s with people who knew nothing about the products, weren’t friendly, and often spoke little English. It was odd. I don’t know that it happened at all Fry’s our just ours.
But online shopping became so convenient, more and more of my purchases started going through Newegg and Amazon.
The Egyptian Fry's in Campbell was my local store. Fry's was amazing - you just had to know that the salespeople were on commission and avoid them. I never had one come up to me in line and try to get a commission, but that honestly doesn't surprise me. As a nerd, I would even sometimes go and just help random people there - the salespeople sure didn't help anyone there!
I’ve been missing the local Fry’s and recently learned that MicroCenter has opened a store in Santa Clara. It felt like heaven! It was pure fun to meet all fellow enthusiasts who would swarm the demo DGX Spark to figure out if a couple of those would be better than a Blackwell. That’s my happy place now and I didn’t even spend a dime on the first visit.
Found out they opened a Microcenter recently here in Phoenix, so nice to have a brick and mortar electronics store again now that Fry's is no longer around.
Honestly, I don't think any autopsy of Fry's Electronics can be complete without explaining why MicroCenter didn't follow Fry's in falling under. It seems that every story discussing the impeding end of Fry's had half of their comments be either "Fry's failing? How's MicroCenter doing?" or the reply "they're still doing gangbusters." And all of the easy exogenous factors that a simple analysis suggests (e.g., the rise of online retailing) should also hit MicroCenter equally well, but, well, MicroCenter isn't a failing company.
For my own speculation, I think one of the key differentiating factors is that every MicroCenter I've been to has always felt like it was slightly too small, and that probably helped insulate it from the empty store effect that seems to have hit Fry's hard.
In that sense, at least for me, it was a third place where we could roam to get inspired and connect. We lost that. I was in Akihabara last weekend. And its the same in a way. While there are still a few, most tech stores are now phone/laptop stores that don't sell parts. Making the hunt for tech really boring.
There are a few stores left that sell parts in Akihabara, but only a few and they're not that easy to find. Akihabara now is mostly a place to go to maid cafes.
This article completely fails to mention any of the horrific interpersonal dynamics of the family members who owned Fry's which, I suspect, was the primary reason why the chain had no way to arrest its downfall.
Fry's owner had a strange side business. It was called the American Institute of Mathematics.[1] Its headquarters was originally behind a small door in the Palo Alto Fry's Electronics building.
This was followed by a project to move the Institute into a replica castle in Morgan Hill with a private 18-hole golf course. Really.[2] "The plans for the four-level castle include a 76-car underground garage, large wine storage facilities, a library, a 145-seat auditorium, 20 guest suites, dining facilities, lecture halls and conference rooms, locker rooms and exercise facilities and a gift shop."
There was some construction, but the $60 million castle was never actually built. The private golf course was built, and there are a very few reports of play there, although it's so private that golf sites aren't sure if it's still operating.
In 2022, the Institute of Mathematics moved to Caltech.[3]
Whether the whole thing was a tax shelter for a golf course remains a good question.
Another important detail which the article glosses over is that, when Frys' supplier relationships started failing around 2019-2020, their product selection absolutely went to hell. When I visited a store in 2020, they had zero hard disks in stock - internal, external, mechanical, SSD, you name it, they didn't have it. I don't think they had any computer motherboards, CPUs, or memory, either. Plenty of cheap, generic shelf-fillers like hand sanitizer and light bulbs, though!
In that era I remember they had mostly fidget spinners. I think the staff were really bored at that point because half the fidget spinner inventory was in those clear plastic security boxes for what was a useless $10 toy.
I have a collection of photos from a trip I took to a Fry's shortly before its demise. Some of the things I saw on display were:
- Multiple aisles of nothing but cheap, no-name hand sanitizer (all the same kind, too - not a broad selection)
- Another entire aisle of pepper spray (again, a single item, just spread out really thin)
- Cheap LED bulbs (the screw-in kind, not components)
- Portable fans
- Bluetooth party speakers (really big ones that looked like oversized roll-aboard luggage)
I don't remember seeing any fidget spinners - but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the shelf-filler items were stocked on a store-by-store basis. It certainly didn't give me the impression of a carefully planned operation.
I had seen a rumor that personal finance issues of one of the family members lead to loss of business credit which lead to the consignment model which lead to no inventory which lead to the end.
I learned early on not to trust anything with a sticker that claimed warranty supported by Fry's (that meant it was a return and tested No Problem Found and sold as is).
Too many return trips eats up any profit reselling parts to my clients.
But it was a blast back in the day when I could get shrinkwrap tubing, RAM modules, individual electronics components (resistors, capacitors, etc.) personal care items like combs, brushes, snacks, etc.
And then there were the books... With a cafe built into the store. I spent a lot of time and money at a number of the Silicon Valley Frys locations.
Re: Campbell, CA location (King Tut themed). Their PC component prices were often haphazardly high and tended to not to be the latest/greatest compared to ISVs down the street like Pixel USA. Central Computer Systems was more expensive but had/has almost everything. The funny thing is they had perpetually old and overpriced items on the components "menu" wall. And don't forget the shoddy signage and the antique POS system. Fry's Electronics was like a flea market seller got $400M, built some stores, and then hired random people from Circuit City to run it while they sipped piña coladas in absentia. I think they traded on the half-assed outlet appearance plus sensory overload like a Vegas casino to hit people with randomly high prices except for loss leaders and promos. I'll never forget that their San Jose Mercury News promo for OS/2 4.0 spelled it "WRAP" instead of "WARP" in a ridiculously giant, red font on the last page of the business section.
PS: I worked at Egghead Software until it closed (killed by Fry's and CompUSA) before starting my own IT consulting company that put me through college.
My dad and I would journey 'over the hill' from Santa Cruz just to go to Frys in the early 90s. Computer hardware, chips to program AND chips to eat. It felt like the future. Of course you had to always make sure they didn't pawn off a refurb on your for a new price, or worse a couple times bulk memory for retail memory price, but that made it all the more of a cyberpunk bazaar. I can still see those wooden display boxes with ram stick, CPUs, etc and just a chaos mess of people trying to get parts.
The last years of Fry's were weird. I remember the huge baskets full of strange USB gadgets, handheld fans, flashlights, batteries, and cables. Nothing nearly useful. Every Fry's store was like that.
I remember all three incarcerations of the original frys location on Lawrence. The first one was the most magical. Nothing like it apart from Akihabara (also now not like it once was).
After Fry's went out of business for a while I thought I missed them. What I really missed was the 2000-2009 era Fry's.
In that era the stores (the ones I visited at least) had surprisingly robust stock. Well into the 00s I found SCSI cables, ADB devices, and even old software from the 90s. If I needed pretty much any random component for a PC, Mac, or electronics I could probably find it at Fry's. No other stores had that sort of selection.
By the 2010s Fry's was far inferior to NewEgg and the like. Trying to shop there became a frustrating experience. Even just browsing the aisles got worse. When they went consignment only there was no reason to step foot in one. It was aisle after aisle of nothing.
I'm kinda shocked to see MicroCenter surge again. The one on Steven's Creek feels like a mini, less seedy, Fry's (I may be biased from Fry's terminal years).
Nevertheless, it still took me 10 minutes to get the attention of the otherwise omnipresent salespeople to let me pick up a UCG, and I ended up getting the rest of my setup at Central Computers.
Edit: I'm ragging too hard. I'm glad MicroCenter exists and the in-person selection they offer.
I loved Fry's in their prime, probably the early 2000s. I think what made them special was largely a product of the time. Personal Computing was booming and new products you'd never seen before were coming out every day, and this one mega store had everything. It was fun just to walk around and survey what was going on in that moment in time.
From my perspective the main things that killed it were online shopping, as the article mentions, and computing just becoming more boring, at least from a hardware perspective. Once the iPhone came out, that became many people's primary computing device or computing peripheral. Everything you needed was just an app or software which you could download online. The great mass of consumers just need a laptop and a few commodity peripherals, and they can get all that at Walmart. Then Newegg came along and really ate the PC hobbyist market.
Eventually Fry's succumbed to the GameStop effect - their primary market is completely eaten out by online competition, so they fill their retail space with cheap garbage to make ends meet. The last few times I visited my local Fry's it was more empty shelves and cheap bargain bins than anything I was interested in buying.
It was a sad end, but not surprising. I just don't think you can justify having large specialty stores anymore when online shopping is so convenient and the options are so much more plentiful.
About the iPhone making computing boring: PC video game market got much stronger in the late 2000s and 2010s. Maybe the share of people using phones as computers went up, but also the number of people heavily using computers in general did. (Not saying that playing video games makes someone a PC enthusiast or that it's even a real hobby, but it means they buy the parts.)
I think it was just online shopping that killed Fry's, like you also said. Especially all those expensive parts that far outweigh the shipping costs.
Also idk how Gamestop was a thing once even all the console games went onto non-physical media.
The thing is computing has become fun again. Weird and wild cases, crazy water cooled setups, insane keyboards with new types of sensors being developed all the time (not only are analog keyboards a thing now, there are multiple types of analog keyboards!)
There was a lull in the market for a bit but IMHO the tech scene is interesting again.
I feel they failed to adapt to digital. If you look at Best Buy or Microcenter (the survivors), you can purchase in store or digitally or have it shipped and they make it quick.
It made no sense why they couldn’t provide a hybrid channel and expand their sales as opposed to forcing you to go in the store and failing to honor the online prices in-store or the in-store prices online.
Also, it’s incredible that they had embezzlement, because they seemed to have very tight internal controls when you shopped there.
I really miss it. It was a great place to shop and I drove to the entire otherside of the city to shop there. Although I’m told by people from the southwest that their northern expansion stores were much more beautiful and didn’t have a warehouse feel.
I would drive hours to get to the nearest Fry's to me, to pick up some new gear. Being able to browse everything and look around was great. For me, online ordering of parts probably hurt Fry's, but the real reason was after a while, you were never sure if the video card you were buying was new, or actually a return item, and after a couple times having to drive all the way back for something that was missing parts, the whole thing just seemed way too risky. Amazon and Newegg nailed that door shut.
Sacramento Fry’s off Northgate was my go-to store circa ’98. Whenever a friend wanted to build a PC, that’s where we went. The employees were great; the salespeople, not so much.
I still made the trip every holiday season until around 2017 but it had been going progressively downhill since about 2007. The expanded café, the drastic reduction in books and magazines, PC parts getting strip-mined and never restocked, audio/video media slowly disappearing; you could feel the shift.
I miss the SacBee flyer and the last-minute Christmas gift runs. Egghead Software, CompUSA, RadioShack, Borders (one of the only reliable places to find 2600), Tower Records...it was a different time.
If you find business autopsies interesting, YouTuber Michael Girdley does pretty decent videos about them. Here's his Fry's one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxPRkOdBmck
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There were just horrible in their last years. easily one of the worst places I've shopped at. Multiple locations too.
Microcenter is around now, they're not as bad but they suck. They force their cashiers to ask and demand for your personal information (phone number,address,etc..). At least online retailers won't give you dirty looks when you give them dummy info.
People are nostalgic about these places, but if they can't realize their disadvantage and at least provide decent customer experience in person, it's probably best if they went away. I wish there was a costco-like decent brick-and-mortar electronics store (costco is famous for treating it's employees well, and then having them treat customers well, as well as their wide range of high-quality items). I can order just about any piece of electronics, including things like resistors and get it within a day or two most of the times. it sure beats fighting traffic, and vying for salesperson's attention for help about an item, standing around a locked cabinet hoping someone would have the time to come and unlock it for you, so you can give them your money, standing in lines and the aforementioned cashier experience. These problems are not inherent. They are direct effects of mismanagement (except the traffic part).
Fry's had an interesting warranty program that I really enjoyed and their employees would build a PC for you with the parts you purchased for free or help you put it together. This made it really nice for someone who was about to drop $2,000 on some parts and didn't trust their hands to break some pins etc.
Their warranty was transferable and they let you know about it. They would print the warranty paperwork out twice and give you a sticker you could put on the inside of the case for whoever ended up having the PC later it was still valid as it was the parts under warranty.
This meant that if you had a part that later on went out, like a motherboard, you could tell them the warranty information or show up at the store with the PC and they would figure it out. I thought this would be garbage like how Apple or Best Buy just wants you to buy a new one and try to scam you out of warranty replacement, but they actually would replace the part as needed and if that part no longer existed they would replace it with a similar one. I took a PC back there that had a motherboard under warranty that stopped working and that motherboard no longer existed, so they dutifully went and found a motherboard that had those same minimum features and substituted it without a cost.
Fry’s would frequently accept returned items, and instead of returning them to the vendor to refurbish them, they would simply re-shrink wrap them and put them back on the shelf with a different colored price sticker. The item could be fine, or it could be damaged, have parts missing, etc.
A term was coined for this: “re-Fryed.” As in, “don't buy that video card! It’s been re-Fryed!”
You could watch people return items, them tossing them into a bin, and then some employee later taking that bins straight back out to floor to restock. No shrink wrapping needed. Learning how to detect refried parts was crucial to shopping there. In SoCal, Frys was just a place to get a part quick. Reliable or quality parts required going to a place like MWave or wait for newegg to ship.
I used to love visiting their store when I lived in California. Sad to see that they no longer exist.
Coming from the Midwest I visited Fry's for the first time in early 2020 weeks before COVID. I had always heard amazing things about the store, for years. It was on my short list of places to visit on the west coast. That place was not a healthy operation. Close to half the shelves were empty, the place was generally a mess and needed a deep clean, and worst of all the employees seemed entirely disinterested in helping me.
When news came that they had shut down I was entirely unsurprised.
COVID might have sped things up a little but that location at least was on its last legs.
It was not healthy in 2015 either, which is around the last time I visited.
One thing I noticed at the Fry's in the Dallas-Forth Worth area, back when I lived there in the 2010's, is that it a lot of employees seemed like they were in the US on H-1B visas. Which often, not always but too often, means their employer is treating them poorly, perhaps underpaying them compared to what they would offer people with permanent residence or citizenship — because H-1B visa terms give you just one week to find a new job or leave the country if your current employer lets you go. (Or they used to in the early 2010's, at least; I haven't kept up to know if there have been changes since then. I took a job overseas in the mid-2010's, so I get a lot less first-person knowledge of what's happening in America now that I'm only there for short visits, usually at Christmastime.)
That, combined with a good friend of mine passing on rumors of the company treating their employees poorly (my friend said that he would choose to shop elsewhere rather than Fry's if he had any choice, and since the Fry's was near his house while the Microcenter was a 30-minute drive away, that meant he was giving up convenience for principle)... well, I started shopping at Microcenter too until I took this overseas job. So I wasn't too surprised to learn of Fry's demise: the writing had apparently been on the wall for years.
I just left a similar comment about my local Fry’s in California. They replaced all the employees, who had been knowledgeable and helpful, with people who knew absolutely nothing about the products. I thought maybe it was just at our store, shame to hear it happened all over.
I know it's a damn shame. Back in the day when we actually went out shopping in stores that was always one of favorite places to go, even if just to walk around and check out all the cool shit they had.
I recently went to Micro Center. It reminded me of Fry's in the good ways. Large store, all kinds of parts and tools. They had a case of Raspberry PIs and accesories. They had a whole section 3D printers. They must have had 100 kinds of cases. A big section of storage, GPUs, RAM, etc.... It was great! I wish it was closer.
Note: I went to the one in Tustin, CA. No idea what the SV one is like or the originals in Ohio.
I would have a hard time living far away from a Micro Center. Your first impressions are pretty much correct in that, yes, it is great.
They aren’t the best place to buy many categories of items, but for other categories, they are pretty amazing.
Their in-house brand Inland used to really suck 10+ years ago, but now they make some great product categories, like their SSDs and flash storage (sometimes branded Micro Center instead of Inland).
The 3D printing section is pretty legit, it’s come in handy when I’ve needed parts in a pinch, and they cost the same as online (actually, less, since Bambu charges shipping).
There are times when their PC parts are cheaper than elsewhere like if you buy motherboard and processor via a bundle.
They’re the best place to snag a GPU. When supply is low. You beat scalpers by going to Micro Center. They’ll only sell them in store and they check ID to make sure you don’t buy them more than once every 30 days.
They are, to my knowledge, the exclusive retailer of Bawls energy drinks.
Last I checked, they do price match with online retailers.
The salespeople are commissioned but usually aren’t annoying about it, and generally it makes them helpful more than not, and they tend to know exactly where everything is.
I wouldn’t really go to Micro Center for things like cables and other accessories where you get better selection online.
I wouldn’t expect a major difference with the original Ohio locations. I’ve been to locations in numerous states and they’re all generally the same, although I think there’s a location somewhere with a mechanized moving filament wall as something of a party trick.
Yeah, Micro Center is awesome. They have become my first stop when I'm buying PC hardware. They aren't always the cheapest, but they are never so much more that it's a big deal, and I value having a local shop so it's well worth paying slightly more. Heck, the staff is even reasonably knowledgeable and has been able to help me out on occasion when I don't know something. I never had the opportunity to go to Fry's, but Micro Center is what I imagine they must've been like.
I found a flip phone in the fry’s parking lot, my dad turned it in to security, who accepted it with a smirk. I had gone through it and wrote down the phone number belonging to the phone. We called the number a week later and the guy said not only did they not have it in their lost and found, so he had to buy a new phone, but he spent hours with Verizon to make some kind of charges that hit after losing it go away. Maybe 2002 - 2003.
This was not a surprise
The surge in laptops contributed, too. The opportunity or need for expansion cards, additional memory or storage upgrades, and peripherals disappeared or shrank.
I used to think of the sales staff as the United Nations of Fry's. It was always thrilling to see someone starting their American dream, even if the service was haphazard.
>The surge in laptops contributed, too. The opportunity or need for expansion cards, additional memory or storage upgrades, and peripherals disappeared or shrank.
We were once able to upgrade CPUs, RAM, video cards, HDD, network cards and replace batteries in laptops, too.
Does anyone remember?
Pepperidge Farms, oops I mean Framework, remembers.
Bought this Framework 16 laptop less than a year ago so I haven't upgraded anything yet. But if I decide I want a GPU (I don't play games on this laptop so I bought it GPU-less) I can add one. If they come out with a new motherboard that I decide is worth buying, I can swap it out and keep the rest of the laptop. And I can customize all six of the side ports at any time; they're hot-swappable. Currently I have three USB-C slots, one USB-A for when I need a thumbdrive, one HDMI, and one SD card reader slot. I bought a second USB-A slot and an Ethernet slot, so if I need two USB-A ports or if I need to plug into Ethernet, I can just slide the physical locking tab on the appropriate side of the laptop, slide out one of the slots, and slide in the Ethernet or USB-A slot. Then relock the tab so the expansion slot fillers are physically held in place and I can carry on. No rebooting needed, but now I have two USB-C ports and two USB-A. Or three USB-C, no USB-A, and one Ethernet. Whatever configuration I need at the moment.
It's great. I currently don't have any plans to buy a new laptop in the near future (my wife's laptop is just two years old and has plenty of life left in it), but next time I need a new laptop, I plan to buy a Framework again.
P.S. No affiliation with Framework, just a customer.
Sure but I don't mind the current outcome. I want my laptop to be small and light and if the tradeoff is the ram and battery have to be glued, I'd take it.
Sure, but it would be nicer to have both kind of laptops so everyone can pick what it suits him best.
The other kind still exists, just very few people buy that
I miss them. Spent lots of time looking at stuff and always found something neat. Plus, the store facades were fascinating: https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2021/02/so-long-frys.html
> So when they finally closed, there were some people who were sad, but there were also people who were happy to see it go.
Good lord. The nearest Radio Shack (17 miles away) closed, so to get a resistor or cap, it's "order online". That's about as environmentally sound as nuclear testing above ground (perhaps a slight hyperbole there).
But not all that far-fetched. One time, I visited my daughter's place and found a broken wire in the thermostat, so I drove to the Shack, got a cheap iron and solder and fixed it. (When there WAS a Radio Shack)
I replaced my old Nikon F2 with a refurbished FM that cost less than the repairs. Go to buy some color slide or black and white film. Same store (and lucky to have one within 50 miles). "We don't carry those"
"America Online" ... indeed.
> Good lord. The nearest Radio Shack (17 miles away) closed, so to get a resistor or cap, it's "order online". That's about as environmentally sound as nuclear testing above ground (perhaps a slight hyperbole there).
I wonder if this is true?
Let’s say you were to buy the item from a store. Suppose the store is five miles away. You drive to the store, buy the item, and drive home. You used 10 miles worth of gas, plus the wear and tear on the car (meaning it has to be replaced 10 miles earlier than it would have otherwise).
Now, suppose you order it from Amazon. A worker picks it off a shelf in the warehouse, puts it in an envelope, and puts it on a truck. The truck drives to your house to deliver it.
Even if they JUST delivered your package, it should be basically a wash in terms of energy, right? You had to drive from your house to the store, they had to drive from the distribution center to your house. There would be a bit extra packaging, but I am not sure how many gallons of burned fuel an envelope is equivalent to.
However, if you had say, an Amazon delivery, then that delivery truck is not just driving to your house. It is driving to dozens of houses along a route to deliver your goods.
If you imagine the alternative, where each of those deliveries instead has to have the owner drive to a store, that could be hundreds of miles of saved trips because of the delivery drivers only taking one trip.
> Now, suppose you order it from Amazon.
You do not order electronic parts from Amazon. You order them from Digi-Key or Mouser. They're organized to ship efficiently from a huge inventory of small parts, and they buy directly from manufacturers, so the supply chain is solid. If you order a Panasonic resistor, you will get a Panasonic resistor, not some random floor sweepings. (This does not apply to DigiKey's "marketplace", which is third party resellers. DigiKey does claim to monitor their resellers, and DigiKey, not the reseller, handles customer complaints.)
I was just using Amazon as an example, mainly because they deliver their own items from local warehouses, usually. Easier to think about comparing that to driving to the store yourself.
I always buy local if I have a choice anymore.
* I’m not making a trip downtown for just one item. I’m picking it up on my way somewhere else, usually one of a few errands. That delivery driver might be making rounds too but randomly and likely far less efficient, bouncing around various suburbs. (And the recipients of those packages are still out running errands too)
* most delivery vehicles, aside from the nice rivian EDVs, are gross polluters, noisy, driven like their lives depended on getting there as fast as possible. The drivers are abused workers, stories of pissing in bottles to make a quota. I prefer fewer of those in my neighborhood.
The bottom line though, regardless of delivery efficiency, is that communities have suffered when everyone shops online. The benefactors of that efficiency are the billionares.
I buy from stores that employ my neighbors. Where I can talk to a human when I need to return an item. Where they are treated less like warehouse robots being abused like sweatshop workers. Costco is my model for a good local warehouse, not Amazon or Newegg.
To a close approximation the prices of things are proportional to the "soundness" of the scheme. If Digi-Key can afford to put $20 worth of stuff in a box and send it to me overnight, that's their business, not mine. Someone is putting the fuel into FedEx planes full of Digi-Key boxes and somehow that cost is being amortized over all the boxes in a way that is acceptable to all parties.
Sure, but my point is that EVERYTHING you buy has to end up at your house somehow. If you buy it from a store, it has to be shipped to the store, and then picked up by you. If you you buy it online, it is shipped to a distribution center, and then delivered to you. No matter what, we have to get the item to the person who is buying it.
I am just wondering what the actual carbon footprints of the different methods are.
I get it. My point is it's rational to expect it to all be baked into the price. In your example I suspect that the cost of individuals driving to stores dominates, and this is in fact baked into the cost of driving, but individuals are largely blind to the operating costs of driving.
Walmart has you covered at least for cheap soldering irons: https://www.walmart.com/ip/EverStart-Soldering-Iron-Model-51...
The various "components, available" of Radio Shack was quite interesting; we still had (have?) one in town long after they mostly went away, and they still had a dusty old collection of various components.
> environmentally sound
Don’t they just put in an envelope? The mailman comes by anyway
Spending $3 to ship a $0.05 part across the country should give you an idea of what a waste of resources it is.
That’s less than the cost of a 34 mile round trip to and from Radio Shack, especially these days.
The IRS says it costs $0.50 (maybe more now) per mile to drive your car. $3 will get you 3 miles away, round-trip.
It's far more efficient and environmentally-friendly to mail you components in small envelopes.
They replaced all the workers at our local Fry’s with people who knew nothing about the products, weren’t friendly, and often spoke little English. It was odd. I don’t know that it happened at all Fry’s our just ours.
But online shopping became so convenient, more and more of my purchases started going through Newegg and Amazon.
The Egyptian Fry's in Campbell was my local store. Fry's was amazing - you just had to know that the salespeople were on commission and avoid them. I never had one come up to me in line and try to get a commission, but that honestly doesn't surprise me. As a nerd, I would even sometimes go and just help random people there - the salespeople sure didn't help anyone there!
I’ve been missing the local Fry’s and recently learned that MicroCenter has opened a store in Santa Clara. It felt like heaven! It was pure fun to meet all fellow enthusiasts who would swarm the demo DGX Spark to figure out if a couple of those would be better than a Blackwell. That’s my happy place now and I didn’t even spend a dime on the first visit.
Found out they opened a Microcenter recently here in Phoenix, so nice to have a brick and mortar electronics store again now that Fry's is no longer around.
Honestly, I don't think any autopsy of Fry's Electronics can be complete without explaining why MicroCenter didn't follow Fry's in falling under. It seems that every story discussing the impeding end of Fry's had half of their comments be either "Fry's failing? How's MicroCenter doing?" or the reply "they're still doing gangbusters." And all of the easy exogenous factors that a simple analysis suggests (e.g., the rise of online retailing) should also hit MicroCenter equally well, but, well, MicroCenter isn't a failing company.
For my own speculation, I think one of the key differentiating factors is that every MicroCenter I've been to has always felt like it was slightly too small, and that probably helped insulate it from the empty store effect that seems to have hit Fry's hard.
Fry's was mentioned in Douglas Coupland's "Microserfs". I loved that book and thoughts Fry's was cool even before I set foot in one.
Years later I entered a store, and somehow it was already nostalgic then :)
So weird, I haven't thought Fry's for the past 20 years.
> There was something about wandering the aisles and seeing the merchandise and getting ideas
That. Exactly.
In that sense, at least for me, it was a third place where we could roam to get inspired and connect. We lost that. I was in Akihabara last weekend. And its the same in a way. While there are still a few, most tech stores are now phone/laptop stores that don't sell parts. Making the hunt for tech really boring.
There are a few stores left that sell parts in Akihabara, but only a few and they're not that easy to find. Akihabara now is mostly a place to go to maid cafes.
In Portland Oregon back in 2000s we had - Incredible Universe - CompUSA - Fry’s (later on)
I’d beg my dad to drive me to them on a Friday night. Great times!
When I would go there for many years I wondered what the hell that giant globe was for!
This article completely fails to mention any of the horrific interpersonal dynamics of the family members who owned Fry's which, I suspect, was the primary reason why the chain had no way to arrest its downfall.
Fry's owner had a strange side business. It was called the American Institute of Mathematics.[1] Its headquarters was originally behind a small door in the Palo Alto Fry's Electronics building.
This was followed by a project to move the Institute into a replica castle in Morgan Hill with a private 18-hole golf course. Really.[2] "The plans for the four-level castle include a 76-car underground garage, large wine storage facilities, a library, a 145-seat auditorium, 20 guest suites, dining facilities, lecture halls and conference rooms, locker rooms and exercise facilities and a gift shop." There was some construction, but the $60 million castle was never actually built. The private golf course was built, and there are a very few reports of play there, although it's so private that golf sites aren't sure if it's still operating.
In 2022, the Institute of Mathematics moved to Caltech.[3]
Whether the whole thing was a tax shelter for a golf course remains a good question.
[1] https://www.ams.org/notices/200511/fea-aim.pdf
[2] https://morganhilltimes.com/frys-golf-in-rough/
[3] https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/american-institute-of-mat...
Another important detail which the article glosses over is that, when Frys' supplier relationships started failing around 2019-2020, their product selection absolutely went to hell. When I visited a store in 2020, they had zero hard disks in stock - internal, external, mechanical, SSD, you name it, they didn't have it. I don't think they had any computer motherboards, CPUs, or memory, either. Plenty of cheap, generic shelf-fillers like hand sanitizer and light bulbs, though!
In that era I remember they had mostly fidget spinners. I think the staff were really bored at that point because half the fidget spinner inventory was in those clear plastic security boxes for what was a useless $10 toy.
I have a collection of photos from a trip I took to a Fry's shortly before its demise. Some of the things I saw on display were:
- Multiple aisles of nothing but cheap, no-name hand sanitizer (all the same kind, too - not a broad selection)
- Another entire aisle of pepper spray (again, a single item, just spread out really thin)
- Cheap LED bulbs (the screw-in kind, not components)
- Portable fans
- Bluetooth party speakers (really big ones that looked like oversized roll-aboard luggage)
I don't remember seeing any fidget spinners - but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the shelf-filler items were stocked on a store-by-store basis. It certainly didn't give me the impression of a carefully planned operation.
I had seen a rumor that personal finance issues of one of the family members lead to loss of business credit which lead to the consignment model which lead to no inventory which lead to the end.
No idea if that's true, but it seems plausible?
I learned early on not to trust anything with a sticker that claimed warranty supported by Fry's (that meant it was a return and tested No Problem Found and sold as is).
Too many return trips eats up any profit reselling parts to my clients.
But it was a blast back in the day when I could get shrinkwrap tubing, RAM modules, individual electronics components (resistors, capacitors, etc.) personal care items like combs, brushes, snacks, etc.
And then there were the books... With a cafe built into the store. I spent a lot of time and money at a number of the Silicon Valley Frys locations.
Re: Campbell, CA location (King Tut themed). Their PC component prices were often haphazardly high and tended to not to be the latest/greatest compared to ISVs down the street like Pixel USA. Central Computer Systems was more expensive but had/has almost everything. The funny thing is they had perpetually old and overpriced items on the components "menu" wall. And don't forget the shoddy signage and the antique POS system. Fry's Electronics was like a flea market seller got $400M, built some stores, and then hired random people from Circuit City to run it while they sipped piña coladas in absentia. I think they traded on the half-assed outlet appearance plus sensory overload like a Vegas casino to hit people with randomly high prices except for loss leaders and promos. I'll never forget that their San Jose Mercury News promo for OS/2 4.0 spelled it "WRAP" instead of "WARP" in a ridiculously giant, red font on the last page of the business section.
PS: I worked at Egghead Software until it closed (killed by Fry's and CompUSA) before starting my own IT consulting company that put me through college.
My dad and I would journey 'over the hill' from Santa Cruz just to go to Frys in the early 90s. Computer hardware, chips to program AND chips to eat. It felt like the future. Of course you had to always make sure they didn't pawn off a refurb on your for a new price, or worse a couple times bulk memory for retail memory price, but that made it all the more of a cyberpunk bazaar. I can still see those wooden display boxes with ram stick, CPUs, etc and just a chaos mess of people trying to get parts.
Amazon
The last years of Fry's were weird. I remember the huge baskets full of strange USB gadgets, handheld fans, flashlights, batteries, and cables. Nothing nearly useful. Every Fry's store was like that.
I remember all three incarcerations of the original frys location on Lawrence. The first one was the most magical. Nothing like it apart from Akihabara (also now not like it once was).
After Fry's went out of business for a while I thought I missed them. What I really missed was the 2000-2009 era Fry's.
In that era the stores (the ones I visited at least) had surprisingly robust stock. Well into the 00s I found SCSI cables, ADB devices, and even old software from the 90s. If I needed pretty much any random component for a PC, Mac, or electronics I could probably find it at Fry's. No other stores had that sort of selection.
By the 2010s Fry's was far inferior to NewEgg and the like. Trying to shop there became a frustrating experience. Even just browsing the aisles got worse. When they went consignment only there was no reason to step foot in one. It was aisle after aisle of nothing.
Around 2005 the Lawrence (Arques) location had every length of every color of Cat5 patch cables, on hand.
Now do MicroCenter.
I'm kinda shocked to see MicroCenter surge again. The one on Steven's Creek feels like a mini, less seedy, Fry's (I may be biased from Fry's terminal years).
Nevertheless, it still took me 10 minutes to get the attention of the otherwise omnipresent salespeople to let me pick up a UCG, and I ended up getting the rest of my setup at Central Computers.
Edit: I'm ragging too hard. I'm glad MicroCenter exists and the in-person selection they offer.
CentralComputers is worth visiting, if you were into Frys.
Most of the employees of Frys were from Bangladesh. Now the connection is clear-> Ausaf Umar Siddiqui
He was a Pakastani-American, so I'm not sure that really explains it, nor do I recall that being the case.
He was born in Pakistan when Bangladesh was part of Pakistan, so possibly?