Always had mixed feelings about the place. Customer service was a crapshoot, the lines used to be insane back in the early days at the location in Northern California I used to visit… But the place was Nerdvana, an enormous store with everything from computer parts to TVs to stereo equipment to gamer snacks. My Klipsch speakers will end up the last things I ever bought from there. The first thing was an early ISDN broadband modem in 1994.
This was the Renton Fry’s back in November 2019. They were using about 25-30% of the floor space at that point. Apparently the last two years have been spent having the world’s slowest going out of business selloff.
With Radio Shack long gone and now Frys, so goes one of the few places for electrical components in retail. You can’t go to Best Buy and get a breadboard and resistors. I’m not even sure there is a place to go for those outside of Amazon anymore.
Shame, it was something from another era. And I worked at the first one that opened in the Chicago area for a bit.
I used to shop at ours pretty frequently, for work-related stuff, but then they got into the habit of putting returned items back on the shelves, made to look as new.
I’d still go every now and then for odds and ends. Was in last month to get a laptop charger, and noticed they already had about a third of the store walled off.
I guess I’m lucky that I’ve got a hobby down the street that has an in-store Radio Shack section and a Microcenter in town. Bits and bobs and gadgets galore.
The microcenter near me only occasionally has the things I want, sadly. There are tons of non-Amazon places online, from the overpriced-but-hobbyist-oriented (e.g. Adafruit) to the professionally-oriented-ten-dollar-shipping-for-a-50-cent-transistor (Arrow, Newark, Digikey, etc etc).
There’s a business model to sell motherboards and such to geeks (Micro Center), but Fry’s stores are larger than Wal-Marts. I will remember the heady days of yore when I could find awesome B-movies from my teenage years on their extensive DVD shelves, and for just $5!
I always thought Fry’s going out of business was inevitable, (and it likely would’ve been anyway) but apparently a big part of Fry’s spiral was this executive that embezzled millions of dollars and gambled the money away in Vegas. It ruined Fry’s reputation with suppliers and left them crazy in debt so they had to shift to a consignment model. Most remaining vendors refused to sell to Fry’s on consignment, so that was the beginning of the end.
Bummer. I liked buying PC parts from them because returns were easy if something turned out to be defective especially for things like monitors. Got a dead pixel? Just take it back to the store. Nowadays Amazon makes returns painlessly simple.
I wonder how they’re going to sell those stores built around a theme. Mine has a steam engine locomotive plowing out above the entrance.
Man, I grew up near the Campbell store. When that thing opened, it was like Christmas all year around for me. I would spend hours browsing that store, just going up and down every (non-appliance section) aisle. I’m surprised they hung in this long—I can’t remember buying anything substantial there in the last 10 years, despite the occasional visit.
I’d never been to a Fry’s due to location but it sounds like they had a much wider selection than Micro Center. MC has tried to shift a bit from what I’ve noticed - the gaming section at the one here is basically down to some old boxed copies that never sold and those card/board game collection CDs you see at places like WalMart for ten bucks (and as recently as a couple years back they still had some PS1 greatest hits copies floating around). Replacing it is a decent Pi, Arduino, and all things related section. Nowhere near the breadth of what you’d get from a place like Radio Shack but I’m glad we’ve still got something.
Oddly enough I sent one of our techs to Frys yesterday to grab a console cable for an emergency dispatch. Closed 8 hours later. That sucks. I still got Microcenter at least.
That was the single biggest contributor to why I stopped going there. We used to end up going multiple times a week. Absolutely a love / hate relationship with them.
