Fry's Electronics is closing all stores
Lots of nostalgia about Fry’s here. Well, I have a different take. Fry’s was my first job, and my first introduction to wage slavery. They never at any point cared about employee health or well-being. Breaks were the state minimum. Pay was the state minimum. The entire staff (and there were hundreds back in the day, when the checkout line would back up into the store even with 20 registers open) shared one 7x7 beige break room. It looked like something from Prison Architect, just an old tube TV with bent bunny ears (you weren’t allowed to turn it on though, it was for training) and the stale smell of cigarette smoke. Knowledge was irrelevant, it was all about sales. SPIFs (bounty-style sales commissions) and revenue ruled the day. Aside from that, the owners didn’t care; cliques and in-groups ruled hiring and firing in the absence of leadership. Stores were always falling apart even when they were new. I don’t think anything over 7’ up was ever dusted; even 20 years ago, it was so thick in some places you couldn’t see the paint. The repair bar employees would regularly rifle through customers’ hard drivers and keep the juciest pictures.
Just another cynical retail empire, pumped hard and drained dry by its owners while the foundation rotted from below. May they build condos on its grave.
I’m not surprised, but this makes me feel incredibly sad. I built my first PC using parts from there. I’m going to miss it.
But once Fry’s pivoted to be a consignment store that was mostly empty and selling pallets of bottled water and perfume, it was obvious the business was about to die.
Curiously, Microcenter has managed to live on and seems fairly robust. I can’t help but think Fry’s tried to sell too many different products and had a massive amount of floorspace to keep up. Whereas my local Microcenter just sticks to electronics and the store is much smaller and feels cramped in comparison.
I graduated college in 1985 and moved cross country to Sunnyvale for work. Fry's was a supermarket chain, and at the time there was one and only one location that was trying out carrying computer stuff, on the east side of Lawrence Ave I think, before they moved to the west side of Lawrence.
They weren't yet fully committed to it. Half the store was produce and such -- milk, eggs, lettuce, etc, and the other half was rows of TTL parts, memory chips, diodes, capacitors, and resistors. It blew my mind. I bought a 68000 CPU, 128KB of DRAM chips (64Kx1 density back then), a perf board, wirewrap wire and a wrapping tool, EPROMs, sockets, and built my first computer all from parts I bought at that Fry's.
About 60 seconds away from Fry's was Computer Literacy -- a really great bookstore that, as the name implies, had nothing but computer related books. It wasn't 20 copies of "Computers for Dummies" books. The vast majority of inventory were single copies of the most arcane stuff -- all sorts of college level CS textbooks, and you could ask the desk to order just about anything if you knew the title of it.
I sent a lot of money and time in both locations. Silicon Valley felt like a magical place back then.
A nice tidbit: American Institute of Mathematics[1] is located somewhere in the offices of the Aztec-themed Fry's in San Jose (it's the HQ).
John Fry figured he'd sponsor some science, and math is cheaper than, say, physics. So a small library and a room was allocated; you'd get to it through the back entrance, passing secretaries and suits playing mini-golf, until you end up in a very university-like (though small) space.
I've attended a couple of workshops there for geometric group theory (my advisor invited me). It was a pretty solid math experience.
I wonder what will happen to this (I knew the store was a goner a year-ish ago when I couldn't even buy a USB stick there, but still...).
Lots of memories of Saturdays spent wandering the aisles of Fry's with my dad. He mostly wanted to look at the big TVs (this ritual started around the dawn of HD/flat TVs); I mostly wanted to look at the games and computer stuff. It was something we could reliably do to spend time together.
My home store - Plano, TX - was themed after the history of the city itself. Lots of hundred-year-old photos, blown up to 10 feet across and labeled for context. I always thought that was so strange, but cool, that a national chain would put so much effort into localizing itself.
When I moved to Austin after college I made my first big purchase with my own income at the Fry's here: a TV, and a PlayStation.
The last time I made a real purchase at a Fry's, I think, was years later when the VR headset I'd been eagerly awaiting finally came in the mail. My graphics card was too old to support it, and having already waited a long time I didn't want to wait for another delivery. So I ran out to Fry's first thing in the morning and bought a new card (and a breakfast sandwich!). That feels like a good, classical Fry's experience to put a pin in.
End of an era.
Every Fry's I have been to in the last decade has felt like the store was already in the process of going out of business. That said, I will miss the place. Sometimes you just need a piece of electronics today and Fry's had a much wider selection than stores like Best Buy.
I remember going to Fry's for the first time in the late 90s. Having grown up on the East Coast, I had only heard about this magical place where you could buy pretty much anything computer-related. It was truly an experience, especially when compared with from CompUSA and Best Buy.
When I moved to the Bay Area, I did enjoy going to Fry's and walking around ogling the hardware. Over time, I switched pretty much to buying things online. I guess everyone else did too.
Frys was always fun to go to... but I can’t believe one of the first popular joke websites on the web not linked, only to be found in web archive... the frys employment application https://web.archive.org/web/20200130175501/http://homepage.s...
Heck I think I first saw this in a newsgroup even, but memories are fuzzy
For the last three years I've had to use my phone's flashlight to peruse the shelves in the Burbank store because they couldn't be bothered (or afford) to turn the lights on.
Fry's saved my ass a couple times. Once it was because I was about to fly out of BUR to Vegas to meet colleagues at a trade show (CES or NAB, can't recall) and they had blown out a transformer we needed for our display, I bought one on my way to the airport. It lasted 6 hours the next day before we gave up.
Another time, after transporting a PC the stock CPU cooler had gotten loose and it needed replacement (the alternative was running a machine that didn't have a backup without any cooling, yikes), and Fry's was the only store that had any CPU coolers in stock other than the Microcenter in Torrance.
It's sad. Now I'll have to resort to pleading with wholesalers to sell me units out of their warehouses. I've had to do this for several classes of components and parts for the last decade. One day drones will be able to deliver stuff from Amazon as fast as I could drive to Fry's, but that isn't today.
It's sad to see them go. When I moved to the Bay area 20 years ago it was the place to go to see what was the coolest things in tech. I built my first PC from components that I got there, generally had a pretty good price. It was good talking with a lot of the store staff because they knew what they were talking about. They were generally younger kids who you knew were going to move into tech so it was fun chatting with them.
I went to the Palo Alto store about a year and a half ago and it was so empty it was depressing. I also stopped off at the San Jose store on Hamilton around the same time and there were more employees than customers, It was funny/tragic some older gentleman was walking his dog in the store and it took a s*. Someone almost walked on it and said I thought this place had gone to s* but I didn't think that they'd taken it this literally. I never went back again, it felt too painful.
My uncle used to care for Donald Fry (started Fry's original supermarket) at his mansion in Arizona. We got to visit and hang out with him and his wife. The place was a palace. And yet two of the nicest, down-to-earth people I ever met. They insisted on us staying the night and fixing us breakfast in the morning. This was a couple years before he passed, and he was already suffering from Parkinson's, but I'll always remember how sweet they were, and nothing like I expected.
It's cool to hear about everyone's good experiences with Fry's in the 90s; maybe they would have managed to stay in business longer if they'd ever updated since that period. I worked at a Fry's (the lone location near Chicago) for a few months in 2014 and it felt like they'd never upgraded anything since the 90s. Not the systems, not the decor-- nothing. If they were trying to make it seem retro, it failed. It just felt _stagnant_. Sad and tacky. I would understand trying to maintain the 90s tech shop feel for their nostalgic techie clientele, except that most of the customers were average Joes buying TVs, normal laptops, or toys for their kids.
All in all it created kind of a miserable environment for employees. After I'd left, I went to a different Fry's in San Jose to buy a laptop and the worker helping me just openly admitted, unprompted, that they hated working there.
Of course, maybe not upgrading anything is actually part of the reason they even made it this far. Everything technically worked, after all, so perhaps the savings were worth it, at the expense of the experience for employees (and likely, then, customers). Do deal-seekers really care what their shopping experience is like as long as they're getting good deals? Perhaps not.
So it’s now after midnight PST and the website is still operating. Is this a false alarm or do we have any new information suggesting that the website and stores will be closing on a specific date?
Because I’m starting to suspect that an unnamed employee at a single store might not be the most reliable source of information about the chain’s nationwide operations.
I went there about 2 years ago. It was a graveyard.
I just wanted a USB extension cable, and they only had one, and active extension cable that must have been languishing on the shelf for 10 years.
What I don't understand is how best buy has survived and Frys (I think a much better store) did not survive.
I'm in a state that never had Fry's, but I was amazed when I finally got to visit one. Motherboards plugged in and on display, whaaat! All those PC parts I always thought you could order online were right there on the shelves at Fry's. They also had sweet looking telescopes and the biggest TVs I'd ever seen at the time. There is something sad about our turn to websites and Amazon warehouses over visiting the store and seeing and handling the product you want before buying.
This makes me a little sad. I owe some of the fun and great learning experiences I had in my earlier days to Fry's.
Here are some memories I have from their Austin location that started around the early 2000s - a time when I was transitioning away from being a music major and just starting to dabble in programming and pc hardware:
- I had a basic Dell desktop that helped me through college. Back then, base models came with around 512 MB of RAM. It got awfully slow, and Fry's helped upgrade it to 2 GB of RAM! I was amazed at the difference that made.
- I always had fun browsing their isles. During one of my first trips, I came across Linux distros they sold via CD; those introduced me to Linux nearly two decades ago. I eventually became a full-time Linux user, and have been ever since.
- I bought my first mechanical keyboard from Fry's after feeling what it felt to type on display samples available on shelves.
- Back when I had a DVD collection, 25%-50% of it was likely from Fry's.
- I still have a PHP 4 book I bought from Fry's. It introduced me to my first PHP and Apache install. I remember the fun I had working through that book.
- Eventually, the vast hardware they used to keep in stock got the better of me. An old friend made the trip with me to help me buy parts I'd need to custom-build a pc. And over pizza and beer, we built my first desktop together. It replaced my old Dell mentioned above. I've built every one of my desktops since then, some of which used hardware from Fry's.
- And for a time, anytime I convinced myself I needed additional storage or a faster CPU, I immediately looked forward to going to Fry's.
Those may not sound spectacular, but I think others in this thread will relate to some of them. Personally, what I valued the most, in hindsight, was having a place I could go to and physically experience or navigate paths of my growing curiosity in programming and pc hardware.
The Fry's in Austin is still open, and I'm aware of it's barron nature, but even so, I might make one last trip.
I went to a Fry's in San Jose (jungle themed I think) on a Saturday afternoon at 3PM and there were literally 7 cars in the parking lot. I went inside and there were few people and the shelves were loosely stocked with junk from China and random crap like towel warmers.
I hope to read the management post-mortem.
Local Bay Area TV news channel says it has confirmed the story: https://www.kron4.com/news/national/frys-electronics-permane...
This is too bad. But, it's not surprising. In speaking with a colleague recently, I found out that his local Fry's Electronics was a shell of what it once was, and that they were doing some strange consignment sale things that weren't even through their normal retail channels. Another COVID casualty, I suspect.
This makes me so sad. I was just there not too long ago and it looked like a ghost town, the selection all gone, mainly just empty spaces. I think to experience a store like that ever again one has to travel somewhere like Shenzhen [0]
[0] https://yandex.com/images/search?text=shenzhen%20electronics...
I'm surprised no one is hosting funerals/wakes. Unless you're over 40 and from the West Coast, you probably can't understand how amazing Fry's was before, say, 2005. Fry's was my Disneyland. They had everything I wanted and more. Computers, Software, TVs, high end audio with demo rooms, car audio, electronics components, tools, test equipment, tech toys, geek culture, a well stocked music section, furniture, etc...
I think I first went to Fry's in the mid 90's in LA. The Anaheim store had a mock up of the Space Shuttle's flight deck. It was so cool!
Sure, they went down the tubes. Even 20 years ago, you had to watch out for restocked merchandise. But in their heyday it was a magical wonderland for young geeks like me.
Between this, Radio Shack closing a few years back, and small shops like Al Lasher's in Berkeley biting the dust, there's no longer a place where kids can just walk in and buy $3 worth of exactly what they needed for their project, and another $3 worth of parts they didn't need because they looked cool. Shenzhen and the dark corners of Akihabara are basically it now.
That's sad. When I tried to build my own wifi antenna (mid 2000s), I discovered that Radio Shack wasn't really a Radio Shack any more and that Fry's was the real electronics store. I don't even know where one would go to browse for electronic components anymore, especially if you're a newbie and don't know what's out there.
I'm very honestly surprised they lasted as long as they did given how empty the stores were. I wanted to shop there but they never had anything.
Fry’s was a junkyard for years, I’m not even sure how they lasted as long as they did. Playing the “Is this a returned item” game every time you went to buy something was never much fun.
I did get a few great deals there, but it seemed like a long ugly slide into oblivion and I haven’t wanted to go in there for years.
Even before a lot of locations were Fry’s, they were Incredible Universe, a big-box-store concept from Tandy who also owned Radio Shack
Everyone likes to claim that private equity firms strip their acquisitions down to the bone and ruin them. That is not an entirely unfair criticism. However, Fry's likely could have been saved by a smart, private equity-led operator, or, at least extended its life. Instead, it was family-run, in an increasingly challenging retail environment, all the executives last names are still "Fry." And now everybody loses: the owners, the employees, the customers, the landlords, the suppliers...
I hope this is fake. Few stores remain with a good selection of maker parts. Though the shelves have been pretty bare for a couple years now.
I have tried to support them recently with a few purchases. With limited stock it has been tricky, though, which I'm sure doesn't help when competing with huge online stores.
For anyone who has never been, most (all?) stores are themed, with huge decorations, statues, and props. Somewhere I read they hired a Disney designer to come up with the themes.
I saw this coming a mile away. My local fry's (Renton) used to be a really fun place to visit. Over the past decade or so it has really gone downhill. It is such a depressing store to visit nowadays. A lot of the selves are barren in a no-shits-given sort of way. It doesn't seem like the store is cleaned too often, and most of the time it is worryingly empty. One would think fry's was doing everything they could to make themselves unappealing. Their online store is somewhere between useless and unusable, and is suck in some pre 2010's era. It looks like instead of trying to keep up and adapt with the times, they hunkered down and cut every corner they could until this inevitable demise.
They'll be missed, but I don't think my local fry's closing is going to inconvenience anyone. Best Buy basically ate their lunch: a brick and mortar store you can visit if you want a hands on (or ears on) experience, and not having to wait for shipping at the sacrifice of selection. Said selection is a lot worse than fry's, but at least being in Best Buy doesn't fill me with a sense of doom, dread and despair.
Finally. It has been 20+ years since they were anything like they were reputed to be (and actually were). When failure is inevitable, it's better that it happen sooner rather than later. They've been a sad shadow of their former self for a long time.
I would hope that something new and better might take their place, but it's too hard to be optimistic about any brick and mortar prospect.
No! I always loved browsing the isles at Fry’s, awesome memories.
I’d been asking the network engineers at my employer to set up a rack of routers and for months and the response was always no, too busy, can’t get parts, etc. So I bought a bunch of $2 Ethernet cards and a passive hub from Fry’s, wired it up with bright red Ethernet cable, told them I had a network now so they could take off. Four hours later a guy comes by with a hand cart full of the unobtainable routers and is ready to install.
Another memorable tale from Fry’s - one of my peers bought a CPU and managed to smoke it first try. He returned it to Fry’s and picked another off the shelf, got home - it was the same CPU. He returned it again, got another CPU off the shelf, got home - same CPU again. Third time he went and got a CPU off the shelf first then returned the old one, and was then able to go home and finish his server build.
At the Fry's in Fountain Valley California, I remember looking among the huge list of CPU price stickers for anything ARM-related, because I'd read on Slashdot that ARM was the future.
ARM, I glumly concluded, would be decades away. Now here I am with an M1; ARM is arriving, while Fry's fades.
Frys has a special place in my heart. It was where I got my first 80486 IBM laptop (with monochrome screen), my first Pentium CPU on its debut, where I got my first copy of Windows 95, and where I bought almost every PC parts for upgrades. I used to marvel at the motherboard and RAM that were displayed in the display behind the glass, and where I was able to get anything from soldering iron to cat5 cable to digital camera. I fondly remember watching Doom on a PC for the first time at Fry's with amazement. I'm saddened to see it go along with CompUSA, Egghead, RadioShack (original), Toys R Us, and even ComputerLand back in the 80's (where I bought Apple IIgs).
The last time I went to a Fry's was 2-3 years ago. I needed a very specific cable that was somewhat obscure. Their teenage employees couldn't help me and after searching it was nowhere to be found in their giant store. What's the point of having such a big store if you can't become the place for that kind of thing?
I bought the cable later that day on Amazon for $6. It came two days later and worked perfectly. That was when I knew Fry's was probably doomed.
Although it's interesting to me that Microcenter seems to be doing better. I think on average their stores are definitely smaller.
We never had Fry’s in my area, but I’d heard a ton about it in online communities growing up. I was spending a week last spring in San Francisco and decided to go check one out. The store was huge, but mostly empty. A lot of the merchandise they did have seemed really beaten up. The aisles seemed kinda dirty, like not horrible, but not great. The employees all seemed like they didn’t want to be there. It was generally a dark experience.
Contrasting that with the Microcenter near my house was stark.
I’ve only been to Fry’s once, and I’m honestly shocked it took them this long to shut down.
I'm surprised they made it this long. I went to the Downers Grove, IL store in December 2019, and it had looked like the apocalypse had hit. I felt downright freaked out as I walked the mostly-barren aisles, and, needless to say, didn't find anything to buy as a Christmas present.
Needless to say, the first thing I did when I got home was try to figure out what happened, and it wasn't pretty. I haven't set foot in there since then, in spite of several trips to Micro Center in that time.
Fry's moved in when I was in primary school; I'd go there with my dad a lot. We bought all the parts for my first home built PC there -like many other commenters. Then, when I was of driving age, my friends and I would go to Fry's when we had extra money, and sometimes when we were broke and just wanted to walk up and down the isles and look at stuff. Friday's we'd sit on a curb outside school before the bell and read the big ad. "Ghost in the Shell's only 10 bucks on dvd! That RAM I wanted more of is on sale..."
I know it wasn't anything close to its former self these days, but I'll miss it. I'll miss running in at 8:30pm on a Tuesday night to grab a spool of cat5. I'll miss pooling cash on a Saturday to replace a hub for a LAN party. I'll miss pallets of huge spindles of CDRs next to pallets of air duster 3 packs. Standing out front for hours waiting for the Warcraft III midnight launch. I'll miss the inexplicable amount of snacks in the check out line, and the pointless and lazily adhered to receipt check at the door. No trip was complete without a receipt checker shouting a conversation over customers to his buddy in customer service, absentmindedly hi-lighting and pretending to look in carts and bags.
What is interesting, for me, I prefer to buy big ticket items such as TV’s and computers from a physical store. With Amazon, I am worried about getting an counterfeit. Even with other online stores, I worry about how it will be shipped and will porch thieves steal it, and will it be delayed.
With a physical store, I can go it, check out a model myself to see how it really feels to me, and walk out the store with my purchase.
With Frys no longer around, I am now limited mainly to Best Buy and Costco.
As a tween who would beg his parents to take him to the OG Fremont store (Mission @ Warm Springs) back in the early 90s, and as a pimpled 14 year-old who was rejected by Fry's for a job but got scooped as a novelty hire at NCA Computer (also RIP), and as someone who spent several thousand dollars of his allowance on games, parts, peripherals, and of course impulse section candy bars, this is the one vestige of my childhood foray into electronics and computing that's held out this long. Weird Stuff and CompUSA were great, but didn't have the same kitsch or, ahem, 'smell' as Fry's. The dime-a-dozen corporate park outfits you'd find ads for in Computer Currents (I'm looking at you, Laitron Computers) just didn't have the same "browsability" or relatively welcome vibe where you could literally spend hours in whichever store just looking for inspiration and guidance on future career paths in tech.
Sure, most of the open box items were used and vandalized, but they were cheap and worked great with a little elbow grease. Sure, 97% of the employees treated customers like shit and huddled in clique-ish corners mocking us for whatever stupid reason - but the 3% of employees that cared (and who were also horribly underpaid) were absolutely amazing at their job. Sure, the food was crap when they started adding cafes. But watching the oversized Tesla coil do its thing while you get a sugar rush from the Frappuccino was better than any Disney experience.
It was a long time coming, but I will miss you Fry's. I'm hoping MicroCenter, Central Computer, Jameco, Anchor, and the other "independents" stick around just a little bit longer.
Wilsonville, Oregon is home to Oregon’s only Fry’s location. I grew up there. I remember running into people from all across the state that would come down for its crazy deals.
The building is huge and prime real estate in a rather affluent town. I wonder who or what they will do with the property. Maybe microcenter could come in. More likely though BestBuy is the only retailer likely to want such a large place but there’s already a BestBuy one town north in Tualatin.
I really miss the weekly/month maker market that used to happen in the parking lot of the Palo Alto store. But this was a long time coming, last time I went to Fry's they had huge pallets of cosmetics and cheap junk in the middle of the store.
Are there even any good stores left in the bay area for small electronics? Best Buy usually only stocks popular items and even then a lot of the smaller items are vastly overpriced. ($20-40 for basic cables really?)
I live in a city in the midwest US. I like it here, but when it comes to electronics my only local shopping option is Best Buy. We used to have a Comp USA and RadioShack, but those are long gone now.
Whenever we travel to a city with a Fry's or a Micro Center, I always have to stop in just to browse. There's something exciting to me about having immediate access to so many computer and circuit components. On one trip we even needed a PC in a pinch and I was able to just grab everything I needed from Micro Center and have it together working in a few hours. That was a crazy experience for someone used to waiting weeks for everything to ship.
I get it. Electronics stores are a dying breed. When it comes to most of their products, people often prefer to wait for shipping to save a few bucks. Online retail has forced them to subsist on razor thin margins. Plus a lot of their inventory depreciates in value extremely quickly. And then there's the pandemic. In light of all that, they're also probably not great to work for.
I get why they're all disappearing. But I'm still disappointed. RIP brick-and-mortar electronics retail.
My biggest memory of Fry's will always be the first visit there.
My dad needed a new graphics card for our family computer (aka his computer). I think this right after we upgraded to XP. He spent the whole time trying to explain to 7yo me why anybody would want smaller pixels. I just wasn't getting that you smash more of them into a smaller space to get a prettier picture.
There was an iMac G5 display too, and I was captivated by that
I expected this news would come along at some point but I'm still quite sad to hear about this.
I could do a lot reminiscing but I will leave that to others.
Ah, Fry's...
Back in 2000ish, went to the Phoenix store to get parts to repair a friend's PC that had blown up.
I think it was around 2010, me and Grandpa went to the one in the Dallas area to build a PC "old school" because he'd built his ham radios from tubes and solder, it was time to stay current. Afterwards, he was a bit disappointed at how easy it was. He expected at least a spark from the power supply and we might have to buy new parts. On the other hand, he was pleased to see that the tinkerer and willing to make things was still running through the bloodline.
For the first few years here in CA, it was a great place to look at new toys and occasionally buy them. It was always good for buying a quick phone when one would die late night. Ingress kills phones, man, deal with it.
But yeah, the year before the plague was eerie and empty and "No, we're not closing." and now I'm sad.
When I moved to California in the early 2000s, i made my trip to Fry’s, but it was kind of disappointing, although I have no idea what I was expecting. I will say that Fry’s was the only nonsexshop I’ve ever been in that sold hardcore pornography DVDs. I always wondered how many they actually sold.
I find newegg's [1] faceted search a lot better than say, amazon's, for finding computer hardware. Couldn't Fry's have moved operations online and become a newegg's alternative?
End of an era for me.. for decades, Fry's has served as a regular weekend waypoint jaunt, in between stocking up on food and getting the laundry done.
I can't count the number of times I'd said to myself, over the decades "just gonna go see whats new at Fry's", and then .. a few months later, those gadget/widget/grommets I bought on an impulse while idling in the aisles turned out to be very, very fruitful for some project or another...
We definitely have a weird future ahead of us, where browsing aisles and getting exposed to weird stuff is no longer a physical event.
I don't think I will feel the same level of nostalgia for Amazon, when it closes some time in the next billion years ..
I just walked by the one in Woodland Hills, CA (Alice in Wonderland theme). I first started my career in IT and that store was my go to for parts. I went there in November and it was depressing, empty shelves, no customers, small staff. End of an era.
Here’s a nostalgic piece on Bay Area Fry’s https://www.sfgate.com/essays/article/Remembering-the-Disney...
No mention of the Campbell’s Fry’s which—although practically inaccessible by car—was always overcrowded in the 90s.
The themes, the crowds, the chaos, and the variety made the Fry’s experience what it was. That, and knowing you were destined to return the next day to return for replacement something listed on that checked-at-the-exit receipt. Good times.
I remember growing up seeing own in Atlanta, but never got a chance to visit one. A few years ago I was in KC and visited a Microcenter. It was neat, I was able to pick up a few things that otherwise would have taken shipping time. I live in Florida now and was surprised when I couldn’t find either of those in the entire state. The things I need are often extremely limited or non existent at consumer electronics / business stores and if it’s not available via Prime it means waiting a week or two to get.
Frys of 10-15 years ago was a fun, vibrant place. I can't even estimate how much money I dropped in those stores. Lately, however, I can't bear to go in. Empty shelves, sad employees wandering around who know absolutely nothing. The one in Sunnyvale closed their appliances area some time ago and have a big curtain strung to block off about 1/3 of the retail space. I can't say I'm sorry they're closing but I definitely will remember it for their glory days.
Slightly OT, but I remember Incredible Universe, which Fry's bought many years ago in the Dallas area. Friend and I would hangout in the store, play video games and eat Pizza Hut upstairs for lunch. In the video game department they even had a Neo Geo machine connected with popular fighting games, so there was even a line sometimes. Super Tecmo Bowl was the game then and I had a running competition with one of the employee's on who was the best.
You could buy practically anything at Fry's! I wonder if they'll have a going-out-of-business sale and sell off all those old dusty Miner 49er and donkey mannequins.
Article from Jan 2020 that first started to ask the question — Is Fry’s in trouble?
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Is-Fry-s-Electr...
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945492
Not surprised about the closing (if anything I'm surprised they haven't closed earlier) but very sad. Used to have a great time selecting gaming PC components and other high end parts from their shop.
I went just before COVID hit: half the shelves were empty - the only area doing business was the PC section filled with old and outdated machines at inflated prices. Sad to see it go, it's the end of a generation, but they should have shut it years ago.
I'm about 15 minutes from that store in the Tweet, but haven't been there in years. They always the strangest mix of merchandise. I remember their grand opening weekend, must've been late 90's when they mistakenly put a price on a car stereo in an ad for like $39 instead of $239. We got there first thing and they eventually relented on giving us the advertised price. College students weren't going to pass that deal.
Dang, this is sad. It's important to have at least one physical store in a given category because you can easily see what's out there and get ideas on what to buy. I feel like I'm part of the problem because I haven't been in a couple years, but I built my three years old gaming desktop using components I cobbled together there. Now there's no significant computer component store that I am aware of. Wow.
I've never heard of fry's. Is it local to SF?
The last time I went to Fry's was four years ago. They had servo motors, gears, structural aluminum plates, and lots of electronics parts that you could use to build robots or other cool things. You can get the same parts online from stores like servocity, but browsing and buying stuff in real life without having to wait for shipping was awesome so sad to see it close :(
This makes me sad. When I lived in Phoenix in the early aughts, the Thunderbird Fry's was about halfway between the office and home. On bad traffic days I would pull off the freeway and kill time in there until things eased up a bit.
Today, the nearest store is about a 45 minute drive away and I've probably only been there a handful of times in the past 15 years.
This makes me sad. When I was working on a startup with a hardware component, Fry’s was the place where I was able to wander and find pieces that would help me build what I needed.
And then I’d find something else that would help inspire a fun personal project. There was so much geekiness there that inspired me to experiment a lot and learn.
I really don't think companies should be able to shut down abruptly like this without notifying employees.
Man this is a huge bummer! I’ll miss driving down to fry's and just hanging out at the cafe or browsing the isles; they had everything!!!
It would have been nice if they changed their buisness model to cater to online shipping and using their stores as quasi wear houses to meet logistical hurtles...
Fry’s you will be missed!
Dang, Fry's is one of the only stores in town to sell PLA filament. Beyond that, it's surprising that they've lasted as long as they have. Their electronic components are a huge ripoff, their computers are shitty and overpriced, and their stores have been decaying for decades.
Lot's of memories from Fry's and Weird Stuff too. Sad.
https://thesixfifty.com/these-photos-of-weirdstuff-warehouse...
I wonder how this affects the American Institute of Mathematics (which was started with John Fry’s money).
I only found out about Fry's in 2005 (living south of the border) and from then on, it was my must-stop every time I came to the U.S. Haven't ever seen a store that carried so many PC parts it was a dream come true for a young impressionable teenager as I was.
Fry's was great in its heyday. They had so much stuff!
Well, somewhat great anyway. Sometimes you would get a box that looked brand new - without one of their "discount" stickers that gave you at best 5% off on a returned item. I bought a modem that had the previous buyer's dirty old phone cord in the box.
I would sometimes stop in at a Fry's just to walk around and see if there was anything new and interesting. I'd leave empty-handed as often as not, but it was fun just to experience the place, and you never knew who you might see there.
One time I ran into Linus Torvalds at the Campbell Fry's and we compared notes on whatever it was we were both buying.
The worst part of shopping at Fry's - other than the returned items - was the salespeople who would try to make you follow them to their computer so they could print you a "quote". I am guilty of sometimes throwing these quotes away as I walked to the cash register, just because I was annoyed by this. Why waste my time printing a "quote" for the exact same price listed on the shelf tag when you didn't even help me pick out the item? At least give me a percent or two off the price in return for the hassle.
One time I was shopping for a case for a compact camera. The salesman hovered over me offering to help me find a case from the rack in front of me, until I said, "Look, I brought my camera to see how it fits in different cases and find one I like. I don't need any help." When he saw that I'd picked one out, he snatched the $20 case out of my hand: "I need to print you a quote!" He wrapped the quote around the case and put tape all over it so I wouldn't be tempted to toss it. That one time I didn't have the heart to throw away the quote and deny him his 20 cent commission.
But if I knew the exact item I wanted to pick up, I would wait until there was no salesperson in sight of the aisle, do a quick walk-by pickup, and make a beeline for the cash register.
The other bad thing was the person at the store exit with the pink pen who had to "check your receipt." I played along with this for years like everyone else, until I read that there was absolutely no legal requirement to wait for them to check your receipt. You'd paid for your goods, you now owned them, and you were free to go.
So the next time there was a long line waiting for the exit checker at the Campbell store, I just smiled and nodded with my item and receipt visible and walked on by. A few people in line looked shocked, but the checker ignored me - as he was trained to do - and told the next customer in line "I need to check your receipt."
I don't think it was just online shopping that did Fry's in. They did themselves in with these shoddy business practices.
And their website! I did occasionally buy something online for store pickup. That was pretty convenient if I knew the exact item I wanted. But if I had to search for anything... Forget it! They had the worst search algorithm ever. I think it just "or'ed" all the words, so if you searched for, say, "netgear cable modem", it would list all the products that included any of those words, without giving any priority to an actual Netgear cable modem.
My last visit to a Fry's was the Sunnyvale store in 2019. I had a store credit for about $10, and I was in the neighborhood and figured I ought to stop in to buy something and use up the store credit. I found a USB extension cable that I could use that was marked at $10.99, so I figured that would do.
When I got to the register (the only one out of 20 that was staffed, because there were only a few customers in the store), it turned out that the cable was on sale for $7.99. Even with tax this was less than my store credit. I guess they could have given me another store credit slip, but the cashier asked for a manager to approve a cash refund. This angry looking manager walked up, scowling at the cashier and me all the way, and approved the refund of a buck and change.
Despite all of this, I will miss Fry's. At one time there was no other place like it.
As others have said, it's sad to see them go. What I'm more sad at is that it feels like the end of an era for the valley and the spirit the made it great. Still, it's time has passed, and I won't actually miss it, I'll miss what it stood for.
What replaces Fry's? We still have a MicroCenter that overlaps many functions. And it is very crowded on weekends with covid restricted capacities.
Last time Radio Shack reopened it was mainly a cellphone dealer.
Best Buy, Targets and Walmarts are limited home electronics stores.
Online retailer like Newegg and Amazon is killing it. i remember when i was a kid there's CompUsa, circuit city...etc.
one by one they all fall. Bezos is correct to pick e-commerce and build his empire on top of it. lets see if BestBuy and Micro center can hold out.
Fry's used to take out full back-page ads in the San Jose Mercury News to show their loss-leader sales. On the release of OS/2 Warp, the Fry's ad spelled it "WRAP" in about 64 pt. font multiple times. Whoopsie.
website is still up.
I remember when they took over outpost.com, and then mucked it up. Went from overnight shipping, and in my case sometimes 3 hour shipping (and this was almost 20 years ago), to nothing.
They've mucked up so many of my online orders through the years that it feels like they messed up every one of them. From bait and switch, cancelled orders, to cheap chinese knockoffs, not as advertised. And the 2 month - 2 MONTHS wait on backorders, over and over.
This from outpost that could deliver in 3 hours. And fry's still owes me a $20 rebate, from a "different" company that was oddly enough just next to them in actual address.
cheap, horrible, terrible online experiences.
I’m going to miss this place. The Burbank location was always a fun trip on a weekend.
I’ll be very sad to see them go. I enjoyed spending time in that location (OR), as well as visiting other locations in SV. I tried to always give them my business, but it’s hard when the shelves don’t have anything on them... :(
Okay, so how is everyone feeling about MicroCenter now? I used to live in Allston and would ride my bike to the one in Cambridge, it was sick. I live 45 minutes (in no traffic conditions) away now and rarely make the drive.
Fry's closing would not be in the least surprising, but is there a more legitimate source for this? Currently it's just a random person on Twitter quoting what a random salesperson supposedly told them.
Damn, I have fond memories of going to fry's with my dad as a kid. I'd always run straight to the video game section. Going to be sad to see them go, what experiences do kids have these days I wonder?
There was an electronics surplus shop near Caltech in the 70's. It was full of cool stuff. I wish I'd bought a couple of the core memory modules. A mesh of wires woven through little magnetic rings :-)
RIP Fry's, you really shot yourself in the ass. Gonna miss you!
I will miss Fry's for all the nostalgic reasons, but recently we found home at Micro Center. Still, nobody can match the variety Fry's once had for the enthusiast!
Is this all of frys or just the electronics stores? Those have been whithering away for a long time but the last time I went to a fry’s grocery store it was running as normal.
After midnight in timezone of the alleged store, and still online, with deals listed until end of month. Will obviously check back, but so far not seeing proof.
I immediately tried to unsubscribe from their newsletter, but it seems all their IT infrastructure's gone too.
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I hope the Fry's pyramid in Campbell is turned into something awesome before it decays.
This explains a lot. I recently, as of October, was building a new workstation and _tried_ to buy things from Fry's but there was quite literally _nothing_ for sale. I was confused if was just because of covid (temporary closure) or permanent... really bummed it's permanent.
Fry's was awesome. I always wanted to go to one of their more epic looking stores (the one closest to me wasn't), like this bad mamajama https://i2.wp.com/www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/201...
Sometimes a little capitalism is fun, even if it is corny. RIP, Fry's.
There were some serious positive externalizations from Fry's.
Wherever there is a Fry's there are smart people enabled by doing smart things.
Not exactly a socialist but man, we should try to save Fry's. It's one of the few retail entities I really wish was near me.
Y'all remember Incredible Universe?
All hail our new Microcenter overlords
Branch covidians are an anti-america death cult.
The war on america business MUST STOP.
