Going by my store (Austin TX) there wasn’t much to liquidate.
The last time I was there, most of the aisles were empty. Those that had any items at all were very lightly stocked and/or totally unorganized.
That was several months ago.
I’d heard that since then, they had barricaded off whole sections of the store and turned off the lights there.
I wonder how much of their failure was COVID/Amazon and how much was Micro Center.
Never had a Fry’s near me, but I do have a Micro Center… They match or beat Amazon prices on a lot of things and if you need it now they’re a good option.
Micro Center is my instant-gratification store. Even Mrs. Bashful seems to really enjoy shopping there.
The truest definition of 'retail hell" both for customer and employee alike.
P.S. The only store I shopped at that I was guaranteed to return the substandard item within a fortnight. Great business model…
Sorry to see them go, but the fact they’d given up on making it continue had been evident for a year or more. I loved to browse there and find tools and tech gizmos I didn’t know I needed. I remember going there once in 2000 or so to buy parts to build a server, and having a salesman say, “Look, this’ll be quicker if I just get what you need,” and having me follow him around the store as he put together motherboard, case, processor, disk drive, etc. That wouldn’t happen at Best Buy.
Our San Diego store never got “themed” the way the others did. I wonder if the company owned/owns the real estate, and that’s why they hung on so long? Weren’t all the stores free-standing?
ABSOLUTELY! you hit it square on with this clear, concise statement.
Retail Hell
The one in Tempe Az was my Son’s first retail job, he begged me to help him find anything else, I put him to work in a cafe I was managing, best employee I ever had to this day, hard worker.
This makes me worried with what will happen to Microcenter at this rate. I like going there to get solder and cheap electronic kits.
I just picked one up [soldering iron starter kit] at Harbor Freight, it was like $10 US, did the trick too.
Even during the pandemic, Micro Center has generally been hopping any time I’ve been there. They do have some critical advantages: their stores are smaller and more focused on computers and electronics, and they have a much larger presence out east than Fry’s ever had. They also now have the “last store standing” advantage, at least in my area, for whatever that’s worth. At this point, I’d only be worried about them in the general sense of brick-and-mortar retail. If they play their cards right, they should be able to keep going.
I’m a tech nerd that has built a lot of computers and I honestly hated going to Fry’s. I would go to Microcenter just for a better experience. Fry’s was an awful experience overall.
I legit can see a scenario where they don’t have the money to pay their employees. They’ve been a consignment shop for a bit now, so they don’t own any inventory. They reverse mortgaged most of their properties awhile back for cash flow reasons (IIRC ) so that money’s gone and they don’t own their properties. Even with all that they’ve been running in the red and taking loan after loan. There simply may not be anything to pay people with after yesterday.
Hopefully people get paid. But I don’t know with what money.
The magic of finding something you needed in the weekly ad flyer.
The horror of searching for a -specific- solution in the store.
Harbor Freight came to West LA relatively recently - they took over the Ice Capades Chalet building in Culver City. I got a rolling tool chest there, probably after reading about the deal here. Bought the wood planer, unsure if/when I’d use it to unify scrap wood - very happy having used it and not suffered any injuries… Only “regret” - I got their low cost dividers for the tool drawers that have too much sloping and space in between. I need another solution to maximize use of the drawer space. I should really seek out @markfrauenfelder’s articles on this - it’s summoning the “I made a bad decision” decision that needs doing. I’m quite sure Mark tipped about the portable magnetic tray which I did get and that’s a game changer. The most obvious maker thing I haven’t acquired is a cutting mat and cutter or parts to get me really going on the Raspberry Pi currently sitting in the corner.
It was a crapshoot. When you found someone knowledgeable about the latest (or ideally for one’s finances, -second latest-) PC build, you could also see their talents were going to waste in retail. Had a co-worker doing important stuff on, say, bleeding edge adjacent storage/SAN dependent web infrastructure who habitually said “When I worked at Fry’s” and we’d all roll our eyes. Dude, you’ve graduated from Fry’s, no need to make us all relive the nightmare. 
Was that the Sacramento one? Or the Roseville one? The Sacramento one had been a shell of its formal self for a long time, but until a year or two ago, the Roseville store seemed to still at least pretend at vitality.
Your best buys are always … at Frys! GUARENTEED
There is a more dramatic version with a different deeper voice and some laser sounds, but I couldn’t find it.
Originators (?) of “The Final Insult”, where after spending time in line you had to wait to exit the store bc a worker had to verify that you indeed had paid and weren’t just stealing their goods.
Well, unless the owners are destitute, then someone has money here.
Apparently the castle project ran up against a nightmare of stubborn California regulators. Whether it will eventually exist or not is still up in the air. (I was always hoping that it wouldn’t, since the San Jose site, and the Palo Alto site before that, was good for evening socializing with workshop colleagues. The castle site would be isolated, and force everything including meals to be onsite, a model which works well at the institute in Oberwolfach but I think would be stifling at AIM.)
I think they will probably be washed away by the big river like everyone else.
When Radio Shack closed lots of people shrugged their shoulders or were positively gleeful, but it was a real problem for people in states like mine without a Microcenter or Fry’s; it is really irritating to have to wait for days for that specialty battery or fuse to get there by mail, and expensive when a 20 cent fuse has a $5 shipping cost attached.
That’s not how it works. One of the major policy reasons we have limited liability for business entities is specifically so that owners aren’t personally liable for the debts of the business. As long as the appropriate formalities have been followed, creditors (whether unpaid employees or lenders) can’t “pierce the veil” of limited liability and go after owners’ personal assets. The theory behind this is that if individual owners were on the hook for businesses that could fail, they would never take the kinds of risks necessary to build big dynamic companies; and that investors should make informed decisions about the likelihood of a company’s profitability based on its merits, not the likelihood of recovering from the people running it (of course small business lenders often circumvent this by requiring personal guarantees, but that’s not the norm for larger companies).
Usually business leaders have a fiduciary duty to avoid undercapitalization, ensuring that there is enough in the bank to cover ordinary operating expenses- but that only prevents business owners from intentionally siphoning funds off to reduce exposure in the event of a lawsuit- it doesn’t prevent them from running their companies into the ground.
Ordinarily when a company as big as Fry’s goes under, their debts would be discharged in bankruptcy or liquidation and whatever was left in the company would be sold to pay off debt, but here it turns out that Fry’s doesn’t actually have any assets- their properties are already mortgaged, their inventory wasn’t their own, and there isn’t exactly a line out the door to buy their trademarks and goodwill.
The closest thing there is to good news here is that employees would certainly have seen this coming. I stopped into the local Fry’s a couple of times in March- most of the shelves were bare and displays dismantled, and in both instances I was the only person in the store who didn’t work there.
