Fry's Electronics Going Out of Business, Shutting Down All Stores (arstechnica.com) 305
UnknowingFool and scores of other readers have shared this report: Fry's Electronics, the decades-old superstore chain with locations in nine American states, appears to have gone defunct. Bay Area TV station KRON-4 was the first press outlet to confirm the news late Tuesday, saying that Fry's will shut down all 30 of its American locations. The retailer will reportedly make an announcement at some time on Wednesday via the Fry's website. Rumors began flying on Tuesday in the form of anecdotes from alleged Fry's employees, who all reported that they'd been summarily fired earlier in the day with zero notice. One anonymous report posted at The Layoff alleged that every remaining Fry's store in the US was "permanently closing tomorrow," and that statement was repeated hours later at a Fry's-related Reddit community. The Reddit post included the allegation that one store's staffers were tasked with shipping any remaining merchandise back to suppliers during their final day at work. Sacramento freelance journalist Matthew Keys followed these posts by citing an unnamed source -- someone who had worked at Fry's up until "this week" -- who claimed that the electronics chain would make a formal announcement "this week" about closing all of its stores and liquidating any remaining assets. As the wave of rumors exploded, the official Fry's website began serving failure notices -- yet some of its subsite content, particularly years-old press releases, remained active through Frys.com subdomains. As Tuesday wore on, the Fry's retail site flickered in and out of normal service, even letting customers buy products after KRON-4's report went live.
Remaining merchandise (Score:2, Insightful)
Lay off the entire company and then ask to ship back all the merchandise? Oh I'm sure it will all come back.
Re:Remaining merchandise (Score:5, Insightful)
" It is hoped that undertaking the wind-down through this orderly process will reduce costs, avoid additional liabilities, minimize the impact on our customers, vendors, landlords and associates, and maximize the value of the Companyâ(TM)s assets for its creditors and other stakeholders."
I.E. - screw out employees, we've got some 'stakeholders' we need to give some cash to.
Re:Remaining merchandise (Score:5, Interesting)
I keep hearing this, (Score:4, Informative)
I suspect this is just due to the usually factors:
1. Overall sales were down because the economy has been in a slump since 2008.
2. There's just plain less electronics to sell since cell phones do so much.
3. Supply chain issues. You might have actually been seeing some empty shelves lately. China makes all the electronics (more or less) and COVID shut them down for months. They're back up, but we don't have the capacity in our ports for all the ships to deliver goods.
Mix all 3 of those together and yeah, straw breaking the camel's back. But take COVID away and they'd probably have kept chugging along.
Re:I keep hearing this, (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I keep hearing this, (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think I've been in a Fry's since 2001. And even then, they had sparse inventory of what you actually needed or wanted.
Sure, they gave the appearance that there was plenty of inventory, but what I noticed was that a lot of it was the repackaged/returned merchandise, which (in my own experience) worked maybe 25% of the time. To me, it seemed they were just churning out bad inventory, counting on the fact that some customers didn't want to deal with the return process, especially when it probably wasn't actually worth the time to do so.
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I've returned almost as much stuff as I bought there. It's what made me stop shopping there.
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Adult section seemed to have gone out among the first :)
https://youtu.be/Wq2rUsUTL_0?t... [youtu.be]
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I haven't been to a Frys in years, but an article I read today said that they were selling on consignment (pay when paid) and thus were limited by who would agree to sell on those terms.
If so, then that indicates some real screwups.
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I suspect this is just due to the usually factors:
1. Overall sales were down because the economy has been in a slump since 2008.
Stopped reading there. Whatever planet you live on, it ain't Earth. [stlouisfed.org]
Re:I keep hearing this, (Score:5, Insightful)
But when Frys "went weird" it stopped selling its usual merchandise. A year ago I went into the North Phoenix location to pick up a UPS, a product area which used to have half an aisle to itself, and found the whole store full of oddly assorted non-electronics like gardening equipment and housewares. There were a few laptops still on sale, but not one UPS. I fired up my Amazon app and had one on the way to me before I left the parking area.
Re:I keep hearing this, (Score:4, Insightful)
It had been a couple of years since I last went into one.
They *used* to have whatever you would expect, and you could count on just stumbling across something cool or interesting. Just going in was interesting and an adventure.
Over the last few years, though, that ended.
The selection petered out, and the chances of finding anything interesting by accident dropped to zero.
Even at Christmastime! There was a time I could go in and find something interesting for everyone, but the last couple of years I tried, I left empty-handed.
Radioshack also went down that hole; instead of having amusing Christmas things, they just added more cellphones . . .
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Who cares about "losing ground"? Prosperity is not a competition. I probably don't even make enough to count as "middle class", but my house is paid off, and I'm doing fine. It's no skin off my nose what rich people have.
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Yup, I visited a store pre-COVID and it looked like a ghost town. No people, mostly empty shelves, and an air of sadness. When I saw the story this morning my reaction was "I thought they were already out of business"
Re: Remaining merchandise (Score:2)
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If you have been in a Fry's the last several years...
The last time I went to Fry's, I swore I would never come back. It was horrible. Minimal amounts of saleable merchandise, super high prices, terrible employees. I used to love Fry's but this was a predicable fate.
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Been dying for a while. (Score:4, Interesting)
From my standpoint they've been dying for a while.
What used to make them key for hacking was that they had all the components and systems necessary to build or configure-up what you needed - or at least all the common, glue-it-together, stuff and you might only need to get some mission-specific or cutting-edge core components elsewhere.
Starting several years ago they got into a policy of only carrying the current high-volume stuff. After this change you coudn't even get the upgrade components for big-ticket stuff you'd bought from them a year or two before - or sometimes even today. (At one point they were even out of terabyte laptop drives at the Sunnyvale store. When configuring a new laptop that came with Windows I had normally been swapping in a new disk and building from scratch.)
Now that they were no longer the "drop in for all the odd electronic/computerish stuff you suddenly discover you need" site (and I didn't know of other good candidates) I had to do mail order for most stuff. With Amazon Prime for the odd everything and several suppliers (DigiKey, Arrow, ...) for the major components, it became a way of life.
As the stock in the stores became sparse they also stopped being a site for asile-browsing and impulse-buying that gadget I'd been wanting (e.g. power supplies, modern soldering station, ...). Even before COVID left me housebound-by-doctor's-orders for the last year, I hadn't been to a Fry's for months - and the last several times I went they didn't have a decent version of some pretty basic stuff I wanted.
Now maybe it was Amazon and other online, fast-delivery vendors that started the stores down. But their own online operation wasn't competitive in price and selection, and if their store selection reduction was a reaction to the mail order competition, focusing on high-volume high-profit stuff, it had the effect of breaking what made them a draw.
It doesn't surprise me that they're going down. What is surprising is that, with the stores in such bad shape, COVID didn't last-straw them earlier.
Re:Remaining merchandise (Score:5, Insightful)
screw out employees, we've got some 'stakeholders' we need to give some cash to.
Yes, that's how it works. There is no such thing as a guaranteed income stream, whether you are employee, employer, stakeholder, or thief. Market conditions change every day. New disruptive businesses/technologies emerge, and old secure income streams dry up. Jobs vanish without warning for a variety of reasons.
It is not reasonable to expect that someone else should prioritize your best interest over their own. The execs at Fry's aren't any happier about losing their jobs than their workers are. And the owners aren't happy about going under, and the stakeholders aren't happy about losing stock in a profitable company and having to receive a bucket of leftovers instead. It sucks for everyone! But at no point does anyone in this hierarchy have any reason to go out of their way to protect those beneath them from the impact of this, and certainly not from the impact of their own poor planning.
It is "on you" to make sure that you have sufficient savings to weather storms like these. It is "on you" to create financial security in the face of a lack of job security. This is totally do-able, it just requires education and self-discipline.
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And the cities aren't happy about having a huge piece of commercial real estate with an empty parking lot while the pandemic still rages. That Palo Alto location, especially. Incoming homeless with potential to burn the thing down by accident with a warming fire in 5, 4, 3...
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> It is "on you" to make sure that you have sufficient savings to weather storms like these.
This is a statement of natural fact, but is it a desirable state?
> It is "on you" to create financial security in the face of a lack of job security.
Is it impossible to ask for more? Remember, there are plenty of places where there are benefits for not having employment- all Americans are paying for "unemployment insurance", right? When you take a job, you are selling your time, but is it inherently unreasona
Re:Remaining merchandise (Score:4, Insightful)
>> It is "on you" to make sure that you have sufficient savings to weather storms like these.
>This is a statement of natural fact, but is it a desirable state?
Yes, people taking more agency in the outcomes of their own lives instead of demanding more regulation or goverment invervention is desirable.
They'll hire a 3rd party to do the shipements (Score:5, Insightful)
Also spare a moment to consider that our economy is so dysfunctional that we have an entire industry dedicated to shutting it down.
the third partys keep the old staff on for the sal (Score:2)
the third partys keep the old staff on for the sale
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The way I've seen liquidations work, all staff are terminated, and then the third party, either as an administrator in the event of insolvency, or hired if there's enough cash for a more orderly wind down, will hire back some of the staff on temporary contracts. The whole point in this case is to get rid of any potential employer obligations that may come when the business has fully shuttered.
Re:the third partys keep the old staff on for the (Score:5, Interesting)
Well anyone who has actually shuttered a long running business will tell you that they wish they would have gone that route if they did anything else. I am talking smallish private companies here too.
We got various tax advices, unemployment filings, legal claims, demands for various filings, and a host of other things for YEARS after we stopped operating some of our families companies as going-concerns. These things were huge hold ups to dissolving them as legal entities and actually cashing the partners out.
The quicker you can stop doing anything that generates taxable revenue, and the sooner you can get every last employee off the books the better it is for you. If you are selling off parts of the business get the buyers to take as much inventory and capital assets as possible in the deals. Even if you have to do it at a steep discount you'll be happy you did once faced with the accounting problems any longer running disposition of those things results in.
For the most part when you decide to stop operating a business even ones of positive net-worth and YOY balance sheet growth, the you really want to do it quick like pulling off a band-aid the alternatives are usually just a slow painful bleeding
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What do you think is dysfunctional? Retailers are closing down because people prefer online shopping. This was greatly exaggerated and sped up by pandemic-related restrictions. It is not surprising that people will specialize in efficiently handling an economy-wide shift in retail patterns, and it is not reflective of any dysfunction -- unless you mean the failure of government to facilitate recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
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If there are companies that spec
What's Fry's being replaced with? (Score:3)
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That's a problem I feel. I do not like shopping online, and I especially hate the predatory Amazon. Which leaves very few places to get simple tech stuff. Target has some small stuff, useful if you need an external hard drive, thumb drive, or a replacement Roku, but not too much else of interest to me. Best buy is similar but it's mostly bigger stuff. No one though will have PC video cards, cases, keyboards that aren't generic, power supplies (wall warts or programmable), soldering irons, more than one
Sears REALLY missed the boat. (Score:5, Insightful)
At one point in history, Sears was the largest retailer in the United States. It's since largely disappeared and with little effect on the overall economy.
Sears REALLY missed the boat on the online sales industry. They shut down their catalog operation just as that was starting up.
They were already set up for doing fulfilment of a product spectrum far beyond what could be handled in a bricks-and-mortar store by shipment to anywhere and pickup at a department in a nationwide network of big-box stores. All they needed to do was add online order entry and they'd have BEEN Amazon.
Instead their bean-counters decided the catalog sales were not profitable enough, didn't see the potential of fixing them up by supplying this newfangled missing piece, and phased them out just as Amazon started taking the niche.
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Sears REALLY missed the boat on the online sales industry. They shut down their catalog operation just as that was starting up.
Wow. If I had mod points I would mod your post "Insightful".
You are so right about this. Back in the day, Sears made most of their money from mail-order sales. Sears started out as a pure mail-order business. And according to Wikipedia, Sears [wikipedia.org] stopped their mail-order business in... 1993!
I remember, in my childhood, my family would drive through some small town and there would be
Re: Sears REALLY missed the boat. (Score:3)
That's not how it works. Look up the "broken window fallacy."
Re: They'll hire a 3rd party to do the shipements (Score:2)
There's a few issues (Score:2)
2. Major retailers (Fry's had 31 stores) shouldn't be going tits up often enough to necessitate specialists.
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It does not skirt thing. It moves the calendar date up a bit sooner. It allows you to stop engaging in all kinds of administrative functions quicker. It does not make anyone employment contracts that contain severance agreements vanish. It does not mean you get stop providing benefits for the last month you are operating etc. It does not cheat anyone out of a final paycheck it just means for some the last paycheck is in April and not May. Either way there is a last one you have to stop operating sometime.
other stores did the sell off with an liquidated (Score:2)
other stores did the sell off with an liquidated keep local staff on for some time to sell things off.
Why ship back? you still have the stores for some time.
Re:Remaining merchandise (Score:4, Interesting)
What inventory? Fry's started dying four years ago. Fry's locations nationwide went near dormant. They had low stock, except cheap chineseium crap.
This actually started around 2008 or so. The usual mode of operation for stores like this is that manufacturers send their merchandise to retailers, and don't expect payment until it sells. But Fry's was having trouble paying creditors, and got slow about paying back manufacturers. So they cut Fry's off, and Fry's had to pay for merchandise in full, up front. The immediate visual result was that the top shelves all over the store, where they put boxes of excess stock, disappeared.
Then in mid-2017 or so, their normal stock levels started to decay. I eventually learned that they had gotten tired of nearly a decade of having to pay in advance for merchandise, and had severely reduced their in-store stock levels of stuff. This was also the rise of cheap crap from China to keep the shelves from being completely empty. The stores quickly looked like late in those "one month closeout" things. I noticed this within a few months, though it helped that I had just moved back from Austin, and had to make an effort to go to Fry's. (They'd had plans for a San Antonio location, but that was just before the 2008 crash.) Whenever I would mention this to people, they seemed to be in denial. But I did some searches and found that this was a chain-wide problem.
The Wuhan Flu came and they didn't change. Some people probably thought it was so empty because of the pandemic. All I can guess is that Fry's was waiting until they had less of a penalty for breaking store leases, and maybe also still hoping that manufacturers would give in. And those stores were big, you could probably fit two football (either type) fields in their typical store plan.
And here we are now. I find myself not able to care, they haven't been relevant to me for at least two years. Back in early 2017 it was still worth making a special trip, then Radio Shack died and I had to learn how to use Amazon to find electronics parts. Then there was no reason for a day trip to go to Fry's, even when they did have stuff in stock. My only surprise is that it took this long.
Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
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My first experience with Fry's was in 2007: I had been sent to an LA-Area office for an install, and it was suggested that I check it out. They were pretty damned impressive, even then.
And it was the first store I've seen with the serpentine checkout path lined with snack foods, small tech gadgets, etc. I now see that in a lot of stores.
As an East Coaster. Fry's was everything Micro Center ever wanted to be (And still doesn't achieve. . .)
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Commissaries on military bases are set up like that. Other than those, Fry's was the only other place I'd seen it. More stores should follow their example, as it gets the most people checked out in the least amount of time.
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I'm pretty sure that started as the "zip line" in banks, back in the '60s or so. Banks used to have separate lines for each teller - a
Re:Sad (Score:5, Interesting)
I was at the grand opening of the very first Fry's store in Santa Clara back in 1985. In addition to all of the electronics and software, the aisles were filled with essential nerd merchandise like potato chips and Jolt Cola.
Fry's heyday was in the 1990s when shopping there was a real experience. Each store had a theme (Mayan ruins, Aztec Temple, Wild West, etc.) and often had interesting displays (the Fremont store had a giant operating Tesla coil and the Santa Clara store had displays of historic electronic equipment).
Customer service was never a strong point at Fry's. They only seemed to hire minimum wage workers who knew nothing about what they were selling, and they had a bad habit of re-shrink wrapping returned items and selling them as new. I once saw a Jaz disk (remember those?) on the shelf at Fry's that had a stick-on disk label attached with a hand-written note in ink (that was partially erased) that said "1997 Financials".
In recent years, Fry's began a death spiral with mostly empty shelves, dirty stores, and very few customers.
Re: Sad (Score:2)
Sad but not unexpected (Score:2)
I always enjoyed going to Frys but it has been years.
It is really hard to compete with a same or next day Amazon order for pretty much anything you find at frys ( even if amazons price is sometimes higher )
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Re:Sad but not unexpected (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Fry's had nothing to do with competing with Amazon. They never made the transition from being a "we buy X and sell it later" vendor to being a "we take X on consignment and pay you when it sells" vendor. That's what killed them, because they ended up stuck with huge amounts of really outdated merchandise that nobody wanted.
And they finally tried to make that transition near the start of the pandemic, but not enough vendors signed on, so they have basically been out of almost everything even remotely electronic for the past year. I tried to buy a UPS about six months back, and they were literally sold out of all UPSes across the entire Silicon Valley. I ended up spending that $300 from Amazon because Fry's had no inventory. At that point, I used up my gift cards on KN95 masks, printer paper, ballpoint pens, and whatever other consumables I could think of, knowing that Fry's would probably not be around in a year.
But that wasn't even when it started. The shelves at Fry's had been getting more and more sparse for about the three years prior to that. I'm not sure if the prepay-versus-consignment thing was an ongoing battle with vendors for a while, or if they just completely lost touch with reality and thought that the way to not burn so much cash was to have fewer products for sale and always be out of 60% of the products that they supposedly do sell, forgetting that customers don't go into a store if they assume that they will come out without finding what they need.
To use the word "gross incompetence" would be doing a grave injustice to the grossly incompetent of the world by drawing the comparison. Fry's management was clearly utterly inept at a level that is almost unimaginable.
Unfortunately, for anyone interested in actually building electronics from parts, Fry's left HUGE gap that NOBODY else fills. The only way to get electronics components now is to place an online order from DigiKey or Mouser or JameCo or whatever, wait a week or more to get the parts, and pay ten bucks in shipping on a three dollar order. Amazon usually doesn't offer those products at all, and if they do, you'll spend three hours trying to find them with their awful search engine, you'll buy them in ridiculous quantities, and they'll be drop-shipped from China, arriving in 3 to 8 weeks.
On the flip side, Fry's has been out of most of that stuff for so long that lately I've resorted to ordering on Amazon and waiting for weeks.
This sucks.
No gap exists (Score:5, Insightful)
Fry's left HUGE gap that NOBODY else fills. The only way to get electronics components now is to place an online order from DigiKey or Mouser or JameCo or whatever, wait a week or more to get the parts
I think you are vastly overestimating the size of that gap. Waiting a week to get parts when you every available component to choose from is better than taking time to visit a store in person only to find that they have not got everything you want and you have to wait to order something anyway.
The number of electronic components available today is too vast for a physical store to stock. Even before the web, I used to order parts from catalogues more often than I did from a physical electronics store and now everything is online so it is even more convenient. The last electronics store I went into in person was probably Harrogate Electronics when I was a teenage kid.
Re:No gap exists (Score:5, Funny)
Just pop into Radio Shack...
Oh... Nevermnd.
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Just pop into Radio Shack...
Oh... Nevermnd.
I have actually seen one of the original Radio Shack stores, which long before digital electronics was a bat cave of ham radio gear and discrete components hanging from the walls and ceilings. Hobbyists used to spend all day in one of those places.
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Fry's left HUGE gap that NOBODY else fills. The only way to get electronics components now is to place an online order from DigiKey or Mouser or JameCo or whatever, wait a week or more to get the parts
I think you are vastly overestimating the size of that gap. Waiting a week to get parts when you every available component to choose from is better than taking time to visit a store in person only to find that they have not got everything you want and you have to wait to order something anyway.
Yeah, but between them and Radio Shack, I could usually find the parts to do whatever I was trying to do, back before Radio Shack disappeared, and probably 75% of the time even after that.
The number of electronic components available today is too vast for a physical store to stock. Even before the web, I used to order parts from catalogues more often than I did from a physical electronics store and now everything is online so it is even more convenient. The last electronics store I went into in person was probably Harrogate Electronics when I was a teenage kid.
If you mean every possible component, sure, but 99% of the time, the things you need end up being standard connectors (DC in particular), resistors, capacitors, bog-standard switching transistors and diodes, common zener diodes, voltage power supplies, breadboards or PCBs, solder, wire, etc., all of which any decent electr
Re:Sad but not unexpected (Score:4, Informative)
I have never been to a Fry's before, but I think Micro Center [microcenter.com] fills the same niche. They have the basic boring computerish stuff like laptops and printers and TVs, but also the geeky stuff like Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, individual LEDs, soldering irons, Sparkfun and Adafruit stuff, DIY arcade cabinets, and 3D printers. To me it is even better than visiting CompUSA back in the late 1990's.
Maybe they'll open one in Silicon Valley? (Score:3)
I have never been to a Fry's before, but I think Micro Center fills the same niche.
Followed the link: The store picture looks much like Fry's at their peak, but maybe better. (The hanging department signs look very similar.)
They only have one California outlet listed. Maybe, as we come out of COVID and Fry's is dead, they'll open a store(s) in Silicon Valley.
(Maybe even buy or rent old Fry's outlets, fill them with merchandise, and operate them properly? One can only hope...)
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My recent DigiKey orders have usually been under $5 to ship, and they usually make their way through the mail in 2-3 days.
One way to get more out of your shipping charges is to order extras of common components (passives, "jellybean" semiconductors, etc.) so that maybe next time you need them, you
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San Mateo electronics has a lot of that basic stuff.
Re:Sad but not unexpected (Score:5, Insightful)
One could walk down the isles, see a variety of gizmos and devices, and actually touch stuff. Am I a nostalgic geezer or is there some inherent satisfaction in actually being able to touch and feel stuff before buying? This is especially true of keyboards, mice, game controllers, office furniture, etc. The feel matters.
And they often had returned or scratched knick-knacks heavily discounted that one could rummage through. If version N of any software title or book was out, I could often get version N-1 at 1/4 the price.
Ah, the good 'ol days. I'm gonna go touch my lawn after kicking the kids off. Future generations will only have iLawns.
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I loved going to Frys and it was still doing pretty well, from casual observation at least the last time I went, but that was about four (five?) years ago now, I think. Time flies.
I've only been to Fry's a few times (Score:3)
Mostly because I live on a different coast. Their prices were pretty good, I eventually found the things I was there to buy, and tried to not buy too many other things I didn't even know I needed.
I don't know why they didn't just go all mail order. The cost of a few warehouses and shipping stuff has to be a lot lower than a bunch of brick and mortar sites. Maybe Amazon competition?
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Damn... there goes my boxed Linux (Score:2)
End of an Era... (Score:2)
I purchased so many computer components, DVDs, electronics repair supplies, and impulse-buy munchies there. I remember the field trips with college roommates. Even after I started getting parts more consistently from online retailers, I would still stop in from time to time just to walk around.
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What's next? (Score:2)
Radio Shack, Circuit City, Fry's Electronics. What's next?
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Radio Shack, was a case of bad business. They had moved away from technology, and electrics towards Cellphones and Cellphone accessories. Being that every carrier held the same stuff, and were just as convent often more so, than a Radio Shack store. I would have made Radio Shack a mainstream maker space, with 3d Printers for sale or at least to use for a particular job. Where you may pay a profit generating rate an hour to print something. As well sell additional electronics especially audio equipment.
For
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
About time. (Score:2)
That store had been walking dead since at least August 2019. The shelves were empty and they clearly weren't restocking. There was an article early last year(?) where it said they were trying to change their inventory buying methods and were letting things intentionally run low (yea right). The writing was on the wall back then.
I'm wondering why they held on that extra year when it was so obvious to everyone else that they were going out. That's a year plus of paying rent, salaries, etc when they could
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The only surprise (Score:2)
The only surprise abut this is why didn't it happen before?
Pre-pandemic, I used to drive past a Fry's store during my commute. For a long time, the car park has been almost empty. On the very rare occasion that I went into the store, I felt like I was the only customer there.
I remember going into the first Fry's store in Sunnyvale: it was cramped and they already had the final insult at the door as you left. Later on, I just walked right past the door security who asked to see your receipt. They never attem
I don't remember HP buying them ? (Score:2)
Or did they go bust all by themselves ?
Thanks Bezos (Score:2)
I used to by cheap Chinese made junk with no warranty and often mislabeled from my local Fry's Electronics. But then you came in with even more cheap junk of dubious quality at roughly the same price, but I didn't have to deal with Fry's staff or drive anywhere.
Remember when Amazon was a bookstore and far inferior to Computer Literacy (aka Fatbrain), until the it became a casualty of the Amazon vs. Barnes & Noble wars.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
They sold me my Atari ST (Score:2)
And the RAM chips I soldered on to take it to 1MB.
And its 80 MB hard drive.
Gotta love a place where the impulse buys next to the cash registers were:
* Junk food
* Long-handled Torx screwdrivers for opening the original Mac case
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Not a relevant part supplier for 20+ years (Score:2)
I wouldn't consider Fry's to be a place where I would consider buying parts from for 20+ years.
They just never stepped up to the service level of Digi-Key, Mouser and now AliExpress/Alibaba. I can get basically anything within 48 hours (24 hours when we're out of Covid).
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"Anything" 20 years ago != "Anything" today (Score:2)
I can get basically anything within 48 hours
At the time I'm talking about, Fry's had everything you'd need in stock and you could walk in and get it anytime, day or night.
I don't think that's possible with the variety of electronics available now. In the '80s & '90s if you had the most popular TTL logic, standard 8bit MPUs (ie 6502, 6809, Z80 and *maybe* the 80(1)88), EPROM, SRAM & DRAM, LEDs, common bipolar transistors, a selection of passives along with tools, common wires and prototype PCBs you could say that a customer could get "everything" they wanted and basically get away with it. At the time, most Radio Shack stores had all of these parts available (often
Wait what? (Score:2)
and yet sears is still some how not dead yet! (Score:2)
and yet sears is still some how not dead yet!
Surprised it took this long (Score:2)
Fry's has been circling the bowl for some time now. Stores have been empty. Fry's has been in full zombie mode for a couple of years. Even before that, Fry's in-store experience was crap. Who wants to be treated like cattle and then questioned like a thief on the way out?
I suspect that Fry's was making more money on candy and other impulse buys than any of the products they were actually there to sell.
Wont take long (Score:2)
"Reddit post included the allegation that one store's staffers were tasked with shipping any remaining merchandise back to suppliers during their final day at work."
My guess is it will take them about a day to clear our store. LOL.
At least at my Fry's, they've only had about 10% of the shelves stocked, if that. And thats been the case for the past 2 years. I'm surprised they werent already closed.
I was wondering when.... (Score:2)
Pre covid (Score:2)
This makes me sad. Pre Covid, the stores were ghost towns, but the past few times I ventured into one the stock levels were actually coming back up and I was able to find what I needed: an HD, some keyboards, and oddly some masks as well.
I have fond memories of them opening their store in Woodland Hills, CA and having a huge grand opening: even then grand openings weren't really a thing. We conned our boss into letting us go to pick up some supplies, and they were selling hot dogs outside.
This is really mos
Kind of a weird atmosphere (Score:2)
I went to my first and only Fry's in about 2001. I though it was kind of amazing to see so much stuff (Microcenter and CompUSA were my only other "superstore" electronics experiences) in such a big place.
However, the whole place had a weird vibe. I was in a location in Orange County (the more industrial, inland part) and it seemed strange. I didn't buy anything and I kind of thought they were going to detain me when I was trying to get out. Odd, hostile employees, like being in some foreign country with
Makes me a little sad (Score:2)
The nearest store was about an hour away and I didn't get out there much, but they helped me build my ZFS server a few years ago. And it was fun walking around before the decline, I saw a popcorn maker that I would like to have but it was too expensive.
Thanks for the memories (Score:2)
I remember shopping at the original Kern Avenue store and being blown away.
Then they grew. I was excited when they opened stores in Seattle and Portland, much easier for this BC resident to access.
Then they lost their way. The last time I was at Fry's (Renton, summer '18) it was hard to find anything worth buying. Or anything at all, for that matter.
Goodbye, old friend.
...laura
Re: (Score:3)
"I remember shopping at the original Kern Avenue store and being blown away."
The Kern Avenue location was the second location of the Sunnyvale store. The original store, which opened in 1985, was a few blocks away on Oakmead Parkway.
Hasn't fit in today's tech world for 15+ years (Score:2)
I have great memories of Fry's going back to the late '80s when we went to the store off 101 in Mountain View (California) - I always loved that the building was painted like a chip. Along with (decently priced) electronics there was AV Equipment, games and groceries. Not a huge amount of floor space, but well organized and was really perfect then for both work and hobby needs.
The last time I was in one, it had turned into a kind of huge bastardized Best Buy, trying to do everything (with little regard
What took 'em so long? (Score:2)
For at least a *year* pre-pandemic, so like 2 years now we've been anticipating this. Why? Because when you walked in to Fry's half the shelves were bare. The writing was painfully on the wall.
It really is sad--the passing of an era.
I'm glad I actually got to go to the Old West electronics store while they were still selling the ropes with which they hanged themselves.
Obvious for years (Score:2)
For the last 3 or 4 years it's been looking like Fry's stocked the stores to the brim for the Chrismas season and spent the rest of the year selling off what they couldn't move over the holidays.
There is a Fry's right down the road from me, and it's a shame to see what's happened over the last 5 years. Hitting Fry's was like going to a fair when I was growing up. I guess even Fry's cant compete with the ol' Amazonians
Now? (Score:2)
Only now?? (Score:2)
A year ago I went to a Fry's store. Rows of empty shelves, out of stock on basic supplies (I wanted a power cable for a computer), you could see in employees' eyes that they see the end coming.
I'm surprised they lasted this long.
Can't wait (Score:2)
Caught them on the way out (Score:2)
I found them late in life, maybe in 2016 or so. It literally took my breath away the first time I walked in - it was like everything Radio Shack wanted to be in the 70s through the 90s, and more, and it felt even more so at the time, since Radio Shack was gone by then. I hadn't seen so many semiconductors and such in one place in... ever. Unfortunately every visit afterward underwhelmed me a little more. Kind of a shame, but they couldn't roll with the market and it got them in the end. RIP
Re: (Score:3)
Not the internet, not Covid-19. BestBuy, MicroCenter, CentralComputers doing fine.
Never heard of Central Computers, but next time I'm in the Bay Area I'll have to check them out.