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 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.
I remember when the place started to go. It had been Mecca for all the components and switches and tools, and fun to visit. Then shelves were no longer full and as time went on, sported increasingly wide gaps. Toward the end, far more shelf than product. And the packages, as you said - there were always a few that were obviously previously opened, retaped sloppily, sometimes having a returned-item sticker. I don't recall if the returns were a lower price. It was depressing and I stopped going. I think I went to a closing sale but there was nothing I wanted.
> 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"
We once set out to make a local spreadsheet of components each of our friends had, we made the spreadsheet, but of course it was outdated as soon as it was finished. Meanwhile everyone has moved on, have other jobs and hobbies in different locations and the idea has faded away.
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.
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.
I used to enjoy going to them too. I remember price comparing though, and thinking that stuff seemed too expensive. Fry's started to seem run down over time.
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.
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 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!
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!”
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.
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 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.
>their primary market is completely eaten out by online competition, so they fill their retail space with cheap garbage to make ends meet
Two years ago I entered a Best Buy (bigbox US electronics retailer) shocked to see the main entry display was (presumably unshippable due to size) BBQ pits. My guess is that it was for reasons similar to your statement (although I wouldn't call it the GameStop effect, as they have a profitable secondhand market).
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).
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’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.
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.
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).
Not I. The same sales people I had talked to the day prior would pretend to not speak English the next day. Their employees would put all the returned items back on the shelf and to comply with the law they would put temporary stickers that said "returned item" but the stickers would very intentionally fall on the floor within an hour. Friends made videos in the stores regarding this behavior and the stores called the police on them every time. The police would always side with the store likely due to the delicious sales tax funding them. Employees would improperly handle RAM and repackage it as new. A couple of them interviewing at a company I worked for even admitted as much. In my opinion a swap-meet would probably have been a safer place to buy gear. This was in Fremont, California.
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.
I’m also from Sacramento and I also have fond memory of that same Fry’s location in the 2000s. It was an excellent place to buy new computer hardware and other electronics. I still have the Brother laser printer I bought there in December 2005 during winter break of my freshman year at Cal Poly SLO; not only does my printer still work, but I’m still using the original 20-year toner cartridge!
I live in the Bay Area now, and it was sad to witness Fry’s decline in the 2010s. I’ll never forget going to the Fry’s in Sunnyvale in late 2018 and seeing the near-empty parking lot, the spartan selection of merchandise, and already-opened boxes being resold. I ended up switching to Central Computers whenever I needed hardware that couldn’t wait for a Newegg shipment. I’m also glad that there is now a Micro Center in Santa Clara! Micro Center is the closest thing to peak Fry’s.
50 comments
[ 7.3 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadGood 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxPRkOdBmck
This was not a surprise
I’d beg my dad to drive me to them on a Friday night. Great times!
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.
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.
A term was coined for this: “re-Fryed.” As in, “don't buy that video card! It’s been re-Fryed!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two years ago I entered a Best Buy (bigbox US electronics retailer) shocked to see the main entry display was (presumably unshippable due to size) BBQ pits. My guess is that it was for reasons similar to your statement (although I wouldn't call it the GameStop effect, as they have a profitable secondhand market).
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.
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).
Not I. The same sales people I had talked to the day prior would pretend to not speak English the next day. Their employees would put all the returned items back on the shelf and to comply with the law they would put temporary stickers that said "returned item" but the stickers would very intentionally fall on the floor within an hour. Friends made videos in the stores regarding this behavior and the stores called the police on them every time. The police would always side with the store likely due to the delicious sales tax funding them. Employees would improperly handle RAM and repackage it as new. A couple of them interviewing at a company I worked for even admitted as much. In my opinion a swap-meet would probably have been a safer place to buy gear. This was in Fremont, California.
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.
I live in the Bay Area now, and it was sad to witness Fry’s decline in the 2010s. I’ll never forget going to the Fry’s in Sunnyvale in late 2018 and seeing the near-empty parking lot, the spartan selection of merchandise, and already-opened boxes being resold. I ended up switching to Central Computers whenever I needed hardware that couldn’t wait for a Newegg shipment. I’m also glad that there is now a Micro Center in Santa Clara! Micro Center is the closest thing to peak Fry’s.