RIP Fry’s?

I was in the Seattle-area Fry’s last month and was shocked by the huge amount of empty shelves. Turns out it’s not just that store.

Yeah, the store in Palo Alto is closing.

The Chicago area ones (or at least one I recently visited) are looking sorry as well.

Wilsonville OR is super empty, near zero stock.

I miss the themed stores dotted around SoCal. The one here is just a boring warehouse. I guess if you squint you could imagine a Borg ship, but you’d have to squint pretty hard.

Yeah, this is sad but unsurprising. I used to love the occasional visits as a kid, but the times I’ve been there recently it was a shadow of its former self.

Man, and I kept hoping we’d get one too. They had great deals all the time. This is really unfortunate.

Must be heartbreaking for CA techies, Frys was a way of life.

I remember walking into one of the Silicon Valley stores and they had a pianist on a grand piano playing Nintendo music that was piped all over the store. Had a stupid grin on my face.

Plus, it was like the UN in there. Just huge amounts of nerds from all over the world.

It’s sad. Hopefully they own the land the stores are on, because that’s worth a massive amount of money in Silicon Valley.

This is accurate. It was comforting to know they were just up the road in Burbank or Manhattan Beach if I suddenly needed a hard drive or some such.

I LOVED Fry’s as a kid and throughout my college years and early adulthood.

I probably haven’t spent more than $100 bucks at Fry’s in the last decade, despite living near several and having gone in them at least a few times a year. That $100 is nearly all minor electronics stuff (e.g., soldering material, wiring) that I got there after Radio Shack closed down.

Their inventory sucks, there employees are terrible, their prices are just okay. There’s not a lot reason that I could find to buy at Fry’s rather than online. Basically, I loved Fry’s earlier in life because there weren’t good alternatives. Not the case any more.

I can’t remember the last time I went to Fry’s but yeah, that was like my toy store for years. I’ll miss them if they fade away.

I asked an employee about the empty shelves at the Tempe Fry’s and she said they were remodeling!

I remember working at the Downers one when it opened.

I always hoped that one would open in Michigan. I was constantly seeing great in store deals posted in Slick Deals, that Fry’s ran. But the reality of it is that places like Fry’s need to either rediscover themselves as an online presence or fade away.

I had a technical training class this week and everyone in the class was lamenting Fry’s closing down. It was a geek mecca back in the day. You could find anything there. RIP, Fry’s.

I imagine they could survive in some form, but they would need to downscale. Their stores are enormous. Bigger than most department stores, and we all know how they’re fairing.

It’s a bummer, but the writing’s been on the wall for them for awhile now. My local is huge and half-empty.

There’s just no reason to buy there other than having it the same day, and how many things do you really need the same day when you can get most things the next day with Prime?

That’s the only way I could ever order from them, and I did because their prices were great on a variety of things, and they don’t have a counterfeit problems Amazon can have.

Would be a shame to see them go, but I can’t say I would be surprised. They’ve been offering more and more stuff at MSRP every time I’ve visited in the last few months. And their website is terrible.