Fry's Electronics out of business

Fry’s was a fun place to go, I remember rounding up friends once in a while and taking a trip to ours, about an hour away. We’d spend hours there, looking at stuff we couldn’t buy, eating at the cafe, sometimes we’d splurge on something. It was also a place to go if you had a hardware failure and needed a replacement ASAP.

But for the most part, building a new PC, or upgrading, it makes so much more sense to just order online and have it delivered to your door cheaper. You don’t have to worry about stock levels, deal with salespeople.

I bought a wireless keyboard there once, and I’d picked it out and was just making my way to the checkout when a salesman stopped me and asked if anyone had helped me. I told him no, I knew what I wanted. He said, “come over here, we have a special on that, just take this to the register”, and he printed out a slip with his name on it, but nothing about a discount/savings. He just wanted to score a commission on something he had nothing to do with.

The Walmart of tech (stuff) for years… I’d go there to buy parts for PC’s, etc. But internet sources got more REAL on pricing and when Fry’s lost that “lost leader” edge (on a few key new items they’d sell cheap), there was no need to waste time looking at overpriced tech from last year (when one could indeed buy it for 1/2 on the net). If they just sold toilet paper, diet coke and pampers… they’d still be around :stuck_out_tongue:

Radio Shack was a victim of poor management, failing to capitalize on market trends and changes in consumer habits (e.g. 5he Internet, ecommerce), and drifting into vertical markets that required more investment and diversification than they were prepared for. Plus they didn’t mange their core inventory well either. 2 bankruptcies abs 4 CEOs later its curtains.

I spent some happy hours in the Fountain Valley Frey’s 20 years ago. The selection and prices were great. They had all kinds of great gadgets I didn’t know I needed until I saw them, I would actually leave my credit cards at home and take cash for what I needed. I didn’t see the decline as I was out of the country. It is sad for Freys but it also makes me sad for all we’ve lost with our changing way of life due to technology and now the pandemic. I feel we are poorer for it.

Wellp, when was the last time anyone went to a brick’n’mortar store? Ever actually need a salesdrone? You’d think it was strictly self-service.

Oh, you might get assailed by 3 separate drones asking about your cellphone plan and wanting you to switch, but want help with tweezer-polish and you’re SOL.

Im surprised they lasted as long as they did. Last time I was there was for a PC fan I needed and they had 1-only 1 in stock. I could hop on Amazon and they had 10 different brands and varieties to choose from, shipped to my door in 2 days. However, when you need it right now, it’s good to have a place you can go to other than a specialty store that may not have it, and charge you double if they did. Sadly, that convenience is gone.

I remember my first visit to Radio Shack in 1999, somewhere north of Miami, probably Ft. Lauderdale. My dad needed some rare component to fix his ham radio. Since that specific component was nowhere to get in Germany in 1999 we used the opportunity to order it during our vacation in Florida. Radio Shack managed to get this cheap part from Japan within a couple of days and back home my dad fixed his ham radio and was happy again. :-) I was totally fascinated what they had for sale in their store.

Later, in 2004 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama I visited a Radio Shack store in some shopping mall again. My former fascination was more or less gone, only finding cellular phones and notebooks for sale that were also offered at Walmart.

I remember the days when CompUSA, CircuitCity were still around, and Fry’s was the reigning king of PC and electronics retail. It was packed with everything you could want for your PC and stuff that was hard to find anywhere else locally. My decade old PC has half of its parts from Fry’s.

I lived quite close to one, so I’ve seen the decline over the years. Even 3 years ago, the shelves were starting to look bare. It was a ghost town the last time I visited it in 2019. The writing was on the wall for a long time.

Was at Microcenter just last week to buy parts to build a new PC. I did need a sales guy to unlock the higher priced parts from their cages. If only I could find a new GPU in stock and at MSRP!

KuoH

End of an era… Fry’s was a great store chain once upon a time - far superior to radio shack - and most stores were three to four times the square-footage of a giant food market… everything from resistors, capacitors to solder supplies, oscilloscopes and DMMs - as well as motherboards and computers… When I lived in California - it was THE place… Great memories…

In the last several years however, they no longer stocked anything on-line that I wanted to buy… imo, they became cheap and ordinary in their stocked goods as diy circuit prototyping fell out of favor… so Digi-Key and Mouser took their place for me…

The notice of the closure was in this morning’s paper. They opened the one store in Las Vegas perhaps 7 years ago just a few miles away from my home. Storefront theme was a slot machine. How did I miss that? I last visited the store about 2 years ago looking for a desktop computer. I didn’t find anything I liked so ended up at Best Buy. When it came to components I bought most of them directly from China on eBay. Much easier and cheaper to buy online and up until Postmaster NoJoy got hold of the USPS delivery times for Chinese parcels were cheap and fast.

There certainly was no warning. The article had the story of a guy who spent $1,300 on a computer he was to pick up yesterday. They even tried to sell him the store-backed warranty and this was one day before the store shut down. He had driven from Arizona only to find the store shuttered.

They had the biggest in-store flashlight collection in Oregon. Panoramic photo from Feb 2018 (Wilsonville Oregon store), only a few months after I got into flashlights. That store has been dead for over a year, with 80% of the usual inventory gone.

They’re still okay, but definitely suffered quality-fade from when the one near me opened to now.

Initially, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone who worked there wanting to help you out and get you what you needed, but that devolved into Just Another Store where you gotta wander the aisles to find someone in The Uniform (blue button-downs and tan pants) to ask for help.

I missed the last freebie of a 32gigameg flash-thingy, but it’d cost me in gas what the price of the doodad would be, so…

Still wouldda been nice to browse around, but…

Think I got more RPis of all types than I know what to do with.

agree,the atlanta one was always empty

Yep. I remember the inventory slowly drying up. In 2019, last time I visited it was all pretty much gone. The last time it was more or less stocked was 2013 (before I was into this hobby). Sad.

Yes, very sad for nostalgia sake. I remember painstakingly picking out all the components for my first PC build back around 2000 at the Wlsonville Frys. Still remember how amazed I was that it all worked when I flipped the switch.

It was a really interesting space to wander around and find technology that you had no idea was available or even existed.

You could leave that place with your head swimming with ideas.

I probably haven’t been to a Fry’s in close to a decade, but so many memories…

  • I never went to the original location, but went to the second site on Lawrence a lot. A co-worker at my first job would stop by my cube at least every other week and ask “St. John’s?” - i.e. “How about blowing off a couple hours for burgers and wandering around Fry’s?”
  • At a few of my early jobs in the Bay Area, if you royally screwed something up - i.e. _rm rf .*_ without a backup you could expect to find a Fry’s application on your chair the next morning.
  • Steve Wozniak was a common site at the Campbell store
  • I’ve read a number of comments over the last few days about Fry’s slow processing of returns, but for my friends and I, they were the place to go to borrow a camera to record an event, or a dual tape deck to dupe a bootleg show, etc. because they never questioned the returns.
  • The Campbell and Brokaw (north San Jose) stores’ parking lots were my standard meeting spots for CPF-related exchanges, craigslist sales, etc.
  • The flashlight sections weren’t great, but they were big and they had the best selection of Maglights that I was aware of.
  • I think every Inova light I own/owned was purchased at a Fry’s because I felt guilty about the amount of time I spent wandering their isles without buying anything
  • Fry’s was a great source for batteries - always stocked Energizer E2 lithiums, were a good initial source for Eneloops, had a great deal on the Rayovac LSD NiMH AA cells for a while, etc
  • The first time I saw Fenix lights in a brick-and-mortar was at a Fry’s, and that felt like a watershed moment for a flashaholic

Did anyone notice that Radio Shack was recently purchased by Tai Lopez? https://blog.adafruit.com/2021/01/11/adafruit-interviews-tai-lopez-new-owner-of-radioshack-tailopez-radioshack/

I haven’t even opened this yet, so I hope everything inside is correct and works.

Sad to think this will be the last Fry’s box I ever receive :frowning:

You may want to keep it sealed, like a time capsule :smiley: could be worth money some day :wink: