In the '90s not only was every home supposed to have a “computer” somewhere, of which we were expected to upgrade the memory ourselves or whatever, but we were all supposed to have our own personal websites and edit every page in Notepad
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Fry’s had good decorations, and a good assortment - and was otherwise a dumpster fire. They would sell faulty equipment, and when it was returned (ok, they did have a good return policy) they’d just re-shrink-wrap it and put it back on the shelves. I can safely say my “went to Fry’s and had to go back because they sold me junk” was close to 50% of the time, but pre-amazon it was the only game in town for some of the more esoteric junk (16550 UART!) that I needed, aside from mail order. I will miss the decorations (my local one is Alice in Wonderland), but not the store at all…
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I think Fry’s (the grocery store, I think now owned by Kroger) and Fry’s (the empty building masquerading as an electronics store) are separate, although they were started by the same family.
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NYC also had J&R Computer World until the early 10’s. Along with the excellent record store, and the rest of the group.
I think Microcenter might have bought a chunk of the remains. First time I ever bought something from them they already had an email and address on file for me. But it was from when I lived in Brooklyn when I used that info for in-store pickup of work shit. Often at J&R.
The rumor is that they aren’t doing particularly well. Or at least weren’t, and recent expansions and increased online options are an attempt to fix that.
That makes a bit of sense in large part because it’s so inconvenient to pop by unless you happen to live near one of the few stores. They don’t have too many stores and until recently they were all in a handful of Midwestern states and Texas. Even now the stores are clustered around particular cities.
There’s 4 in New York, but they’re all in or near NYC, and nowhere else in the state. Most states with a location have just one or two. Much of what they sell is in store only, and the website prioritizes (or requires) in store pick-up.
If they are doing better than others in this space I’d guess that’s why. Very few locations, close to potential business/corporate customers, in high population density areas, without direct competition. Combined with all those crazy discounts and forcing everyone to retail.
I took the hour and a half drive to the nearest Microcenter once for a big purchase and a good deal. But since there’s been one that close I’ve spent a lot more on components from places like B&H and Adorama. Who technically specialize in camera equipment.
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Right? If you’re going to operate an unprofitable business anyway, might as well do something cool with it, like put in some arcade cabinets or something.
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Yeah, DG is still open, but barely. I was there two days ago. The store is easily 2/3 empty, and I had to go to MicroCenter anyway because Fry’s didn’t have what I was looking for.
fuckem - i remember horrible service ( campbell and san jose). long lines - not the part I wanted in stock, stunk, and the cashiers were mean.
this was in 2000. And I watched the long steady decline. Radio Shack closed.
Wierd Stuff closed. Frys stocked less and less on the shelves
more and more local electronics shops closed doors, - frys had every opportunity to step up and grab that bread… but no. they just stocked less and less, and hired, seriously, not good team members,
I want to be sad they are failing, but I just dont care.
I want a place I can walk in and buy resistors and lead free solder… but i just - can’t - care about them anymore
They were horrible to their customer base. — so long, and keep the fish
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When I was in grad school during the mid-90s, my non-driving mentor professor needed a ride to the Fountain Valley Fry’s. He commented that there was so much random crap that it had to be a front for the mob. I mentioned this to my brother who lived in Santa Clara and he explained the grocery store beginnings.
Fast forward to 2016 and one of my co-workers who was our web developer/tech help, mentioned that he worked for Fry’s during college. He had no clue about their provenance. He thought I was insane until he looked at their wiki page.
Yeah, it seems that their employee in-service left a lot to be desired.
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This. I worked near the Sunnyvale location in the late 90’s, and every point you raise is spot-on. It’s as if someone sat down and tried to figure out how to make the shopping experience as terrible as possible.
You could always do much better ordering from Computer Shopper, but that instant gratification is a helluva drug.
That’s good to hear. Every once in a rare while I’ll come up short on a tool that they’re most likely to have.
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That’s not all that odd given the context of the early computer market.
I mean at one point a leather goods manufacturer was the top manufacturer of home PCs in the US, and basically built the OG of nerdy tech stores.
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And look what happened when we didn’t all go that route.
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Yeah, whatever happened to that?
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The web happened to it, I guess. Back in Computer Shopper’s heyday, if you got online at all, it was either a local dialup BBS or a service like CompuServe. You couldn’t just punch something into a search engine, and print was king.
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I knew some of the people they hired, and some of the people they didn’t, and yeah, they weren’t exactly picking the best applicants from the pool.
I hated asking for help, because nobody knew nothin’. One time a few years back, I was building a computer and found a case I wanted; the closest Fry’s didn’t have one, but the north Phoenix one did, so I ordered it online and drove about 25 miles to pick it up. I asked if they had it behind the counter; the guy said they didn’t and proceeded to walk me around the entire store looking for it before eventually checking again, finding my order, and realizing that when I said “computer case” I didn’t mean a laptop bag.
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Theme? I can only guess that the theme for the Alpharetta, GA store was “Death of Retail”. The vibe in there was always oppressive and getting anything was a PITA. Always disorganized and always felt like the employees had no power to make a customer happy (or enthusiasm to do so).
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Nothing but dry eyes here: The one I knew of in the San Fernando Valley, CA, in the 90s had a habit of re-boxing returned defective products and putting them back on their shelves.
Both Tiger Direct and a couple others made it through. Mostly via volume business customers and I’m guessing because Amazon was pretty late to the cool computer shit game.
And didn’t bits of New Egg come from an old catalog service?
Still remember picking the parts for my first PC from a paper Tiger Direct catalog. I was 12 and if you wanted to buy components it was catalogs or a 2 hour trip to J&R. Dad said he’d get me a PC, but if he did I was gonna learn something.
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TigerDirect (at least in zombie form) still exists, but the brick-and-mortar stores are long gone now, including a detour where they had rebranded themselves as a zombie version of CompUSA for a stretch, only to return to the TigerDirect name. Naturally, there were shenanigans going on as well.
Newegg wasn’t former mall stalwart Egghead Software, though it would be easy to confuse the two.
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Didn’t they also have a stretch as a zombie version of Circuit City?
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I remember reading about Fry’s in Jerry Pournelle’s Byte columns in the 90s, and when I moved to San Francisco in 2000, I had friends visit from France with a Fry’s run being one of the star attractions on the trip. My last run was in 2016, and the writing was clearly on the wall.
Sadly, so many quirky electronics retailers in the Bay Area like Weird Stuff or Haltek Electronics (Steve Jobs worked att he latter) have closed down as the region shifted from its origins in computer hardware to dot-com hucksterism.
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