Fry's Electronics permanently closing Feb 24, 2021

The last Item I got from them was a psu.

Enermax Revolution-X't II ERX550AWT​

(55$ was my backup psu)

Works really well, It's powering my kids 1080ti/2700x rig. My old Seasonic bronze 650 wouldn't even keep my old rx 470 stable.
 
Krenum said:
Yeah they could have weathered the storm, but my impression especially these last couple of years is that they just didn't care.
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One rumor is that, for the properties they actually owned, they were looking to pull a Sears. They were milking the retail company for everything they could and funneling that money into a separate property company as rent/etc.
 
BlueLineSwinger said:
One rumor is that, for the properties they actually owned, they were looking to pull a Sears. They were milking the retail company for everything they could and funneling that money into a separate property company as rent/etc.
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Wouldn't surprise me.
 
I only got to visit a Frys once. It was back in 2010. Absolutely awesome. However they basically handed online sales to other companies, and their stores were just...too big.
 
Man, where am I going to get shitty 50¢ hot dogs now? mmm cold greasy delicious shitty 50¢ hot dogs.
 
vegeta535 said:
Amazon and walmart are going to own the world soon anyway. Why do you think them of all buisness are supporting the $15 min wage. It is to shut down all small business and put a hurting on bigger ones like Best buys. Honestly walmart probably isn't safe either. They will be the last standing B&M store.
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Sounds like the storyline for Wall-E B&L Stores to me.
 
I already mentioned this in the other thread... but I won't shed a tear for Frys. Went a few times when I lived in Houston but MC was my go to- better selection, denser store that's more organized, more focus on core products instead of trying to carry everything under the sun, more knowledgeable (and numerous) staff, more consistent inventory levels, I could go on. I do wish when I lived down there I had gone to the Frys out by NASA that looked like a space station on the outside, passed it a bunch going to the beach and always got a smirk at the off-the-charts kitch level.
 
Rip Frys. Long live microcenter. Honestly it’s packed every single time I walk into Microcenter.
 
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Retsam said:
Probably because its a small store and only 1 in the state? Just guessing...
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That. And there’s nothing like it around. I drive 2 hours to get there and still don’t complain. I get online price matched parts then an additional discount for combos. I’ve used them for every build since... probably 2006 or so. Which had been many.
 
1_rick said:
I never saw any of this in Dallas, but those were the only Fry's I've been to. I do recall seeing a lot of returned stock on the shelf, but it was always marked... with, like, a 5% discount.
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This is true. I worked for a couple of years and we'd always mark returns with an orange sticker with a price reduction.
 
itsGEE! said:
This is true. I worked for a couple of years and we'd always mark returns with an orange sticker with a price reduction.
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For a long time (I've been going there since the very early '90s) Fry's would simply throw opened returns back on the shelves. Actually tagging them as such didn't some until much later.
 
I miss radio-shack-that-was. The last time I went into one looking for parts to repair... something. An old AC adapter I think? Just one of those things you think to do as a project to test soldering skills or whatever.

I went in looking for parts and was shocked to discover I’d walked into a cell phone store by accident. All that remained of radio shack’s former self was a few poorly organized shelves in a back corner.

sad thing is, I think with the popularity of SBCs and the maker hobby, it would have been a perfect fit for them today. Well, pre-pandemic. But they couldn’t ignore the siren call of cell phone sales commissions, and so they turned into every other generic cell phone reseller shop before they just gave up.

I’m not surprised to see Fry’s be the next to go in this long line of retail chain closures. I don’t blame Amazon for it - not with big chains at least - but just shortsighted management. So many of them decided to branch out and chase those “everything dollars” that Amazon had. It wasn’t even limited to tech shops - I remember my local compusa selling stationary and other random knickknacks, not the kind of stuff you buy at a gadget shop, and I also remember the Borders next door selling the exact same crap, along with cell phone chargers, etc. not the kind of thing you buy at a book store.

the few chains that survived didn’t change much, they just stuck to what they were good at - Barnes & Noble is still the same, Microcenter hasn’t changed - and hopefully they’ll stick around for a while yet.
 
deruberhanyok said:
I miss radio-shack-that-was. The last time I went into one looking for parts to repair... something. An old AC adapter I think? Just one of those things you think to do as a project to test soldering skills or whatever.

I went in looking for parts and was shocked to discover I’d walked into a cell phone store by accident. All that remained of radio shack’s former self was a few poorly organized shelves in a back corner.

sad thing is, I think with the popularity of SBCs and the maker hobby, it would have been a perfect fit for them today. Well, pre-pandemic. But they couldn’t ignore the siren call of cell phone sales commissions, and so they turned into every other generic cell phone reseller shop before they just gave up.

I’m not surprised to see Fry’s be the next to go in this long line of retail chain closures. I don’t blame Amazon for it - not with big chains at least - but just shortsighted management. So many of them decided to branch out and chase those “everything dollars” that Amazon had. It wasn’t even limited to tech shops - I remember my local compusa selling stationary and other random knickknacks, not the kind of stuff you buy at a gadget shop, and I also remember the Borders next door selling the exact same crap, along with cell phone chargers, etc. not the kind of thing you buy at a book store.

the few chains that survived didn’t change much, they just stuck to what they were good at - Barnes & Noble is still the same, Microcenter hasn’t changed - and hopefully they’ll stick around for a while yet.
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God, I miss Borders.
 
Last time i drove halfway across dallas to go to fry's, it's this massive giant store, with nothing in it. Completely empty. This has been coming for 2 years.
 
jmilcher said:
Rip Frys. Long live microcenter. Honestly it’s packed every single time I walk into Microcenter.
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Retsam said:
Probably because its a small store and only 1 in the state? Just guessing...
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Pretty much how it is here. One MC about half an hour away, and another twice that. Always crowded. I do miss CompUSA. Think there were four or five within reasonable driving distance. Never did care for CC much. Overly aggressive sales staff pushing deal of the day. No I don't want your watered down celeron rig. Show me the Thoroughbreds baby!
 
You guys didn't know "aggressive sales practices" until you walked into The Wiz in the 80's in the NorthEast, it was like walking into a store run by the Mob.......asshole salespeople walking around with little clipboard type things who basically said "are you here to buy or just waste our time. So can I ring you up, how many you want? Look I have other customers...". Never had Frys, so won't miss it, but CompUSA was like Toys R Us..."where a nerd could be a nerd"....was like my grandfather walking into a lumberyard and spending 45 minutes looking at a pile of 2x8's with the same look in his eye that I had browsing a stack of USB HST external modem boxes.......
 
I used to have Randy Fry's kids as my clients back when my family and I ran a chain of music schools out here in the Bay Area.

He was a super nice guy, always laid back. Really sucks to see them go down like this.

I jumped into him about a year and half ago when they were doing the Facebook live streams. That didn't pan out too well.

RIP
 
well I am amazed it didn't happen sooner... I'm sad to some extent... I remember how stoked I was when i first went the the one near Portland OR, in like 2000~ or something.. it was mind blowing at the time they had so much stuff I hadn't seen in person before..

but the last 2yrs it was so bad, It was just depressing.. The stores in Oxnard and in woodland hills basically looked like they were just clearing out what they could in 2019.... I haven't been since the pandemic started certainly.. I went one time to both of those stores in 2019 however and it was truly depressing..
 
Frys was honestly dead long before covid hit, they had embarrassingly barren shelves for quite some time. Great memories though, our store always had some particularly attractive returns employees.
 
I used to work there in sales and man they had knuckle heads running the company at HQ. Long long ago they should have reduced the store size and used half of it as storage, move to online order + local delivery and streamlined their product offering long long ago.. Still they still fucking wasted so much paper on tags it was mind boggling. I kept saying why the fuck doesn't this company put up digital screens with pricing showing what they show in glass cage with price. Its nuts how we manually cut signs and put them in glass cages for memory pricing and yellow big ass sings for everything.

It was an example if inefficiency and sticking to the old ways. Wasted so much space demoing motherboard. Who the fuck wants to see motherboards on the wall when someone building a system knows what they are getting. Its not a TV.

The leadership just didn't know how to streamline and cut fat. Stick to your identity. The website was so pathetic my co worker actually helped them update he design and they still would refuse to implement his further ideas to make it more appealing. But it did make it much better when it came to searching and shit. He was frustrated how backward thinking everyone was at the home office and lazy as hell.

Bestbuy, Microcenter survived. Fry's didn't because they never changed with time and they just fell behind. It was too little too late.

This was 10 years ago and I can't believe how far I have come from those days lol. I used to always ask my management. You guys don't have enough employees and the stores are too big to cover. Its time they cut the fat, streamlined shit and made shit smaller. Microcenter is a great example, you don't need to stadium size store to have a lot of product and put sales closer to customer. Shit people would be like where is the podium for the department lol.
 
Nimisys said:
Fry's was also well noted for their truly horrible customer service, absurdly high return rate (30+%) and common practice of putting returned items back on the shelf. You then had very long check out lines and receipt checks to leave. They gave you plenty of reasons to not want to spend money there
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Returns took time, but they always took returns, IME. Did they resell returns? yes, but they marked them with stickers, so you knew they were returns and they had some discount. I’ll add, that some open box items were likely never opened by the customer. I returned something that was NIB/Sealed (don’t recall what) and they opened it before accepting the return (I was shocked)

Yes the lines were long, but they moved quickly.

My gut says what did them in was they never downsized their stores. 20 years ago, a huge place like Fry’s was fine, but today, a walmart sized RadioShack/Best Buy (And probably a few other stores) is too much. They just didn’t get the traffic that they‘d gotten in 2005, or even 2010.

But Fry’s often had incredible deals on software, though it normally required a rebate, but I can’t count the number of times I bought AV software for $0.00 AR.
 
1_rick said:
Circuit City, home of the 6 rebate computer, maybe not as much.
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CC was great for buying CDs. For the most part, they were something like 13 bucks, which was about as good as you could get, even if you shopped online, but other than that, I dont recall buying much there. I did buy a nice file cabinet from them for 25 bucks. If I’d had the space I could have bought a massive 4 drawer one that was probably 4’ wide for the same price. Also bought some speaker stands really cheap, which I then resold for about 4x as much on Amazon.

But as an actual place to buy electronics, I think the only things I bought were a VCR and a cassette deck. I still have them, but they’re in a box and haven’t been used in ages.
 
PurduEE said:
Loved those ones where all rebates needed to be sent in within 5 days of purchase and each required the original UPC.
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Compusa did that too. I had that with an HD once, and they tried very. Hard to keep me from getting the 2nd rebate. At least Fry’s got the multi rebate bit right and different rebates required different things.
 
NKD said:
I used to work there in sales and man they had knuckle heads running the company at HQ. Long long ago they should have reduced the store size and used half of it as storage, move to online order + local delivery and streamlined their product offering long long ago.. Still they still fucking wasted so much paper on tags it was mind boggling. I kept saying why the fuck doesn't this company put up digital screens with pricing showing what they show in glass cage with price. Its nuts how we manually cut signs and put them in glass cages for memory pricing and yellow big ass sings for everything.

It was an example if inefficiency and sticking to the old ways. Wasted so much space demoing motherboard. Who the fuck wants to see motherboards on the wall when someone building a system knows what they are getting. Its not a TV.

The leadership just didn't know how to streamline and cut fat. Stick to your identity. The website was so pathetic my co worker actually helped them update he design and they still would refuse to implement his further ideas to make it more appealing. But it did make it much better when it came to searching and shit. He was frustrated how backward thinking everyone was at the home office and lazy as hell.

Bestbuy, Microcenter survived. Fry's didn't because they never changed with time and they just fell behind. It was too little too late.

This was 10 years ago and I can't believe how far I have come from those days lol. I used to always ask my management. You guys don't have enough employees and the stores are too big to cover. Its time they cut the fat, streamlined shit and made shit smaller. Microcenter is a great example, you don't need to stadium size store to have a lot of product and put sales closer to customer. Shit people would be like where is the podium for the department lol.
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I mostly agree, but I rather liked looking at the MBs (though TBH, I only bought them their when it was part of a deal for a CPU). I’ll also add, that I don’t notice a huge difference between MC today and 20 years ago. I think maybe they don’t have as many magazines as they once did, but it’s largely the same. Someone else can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d swear that 5 years ago you could buy online and pick up and for some (all?) items they’d also deliver. I never used that option, but if I’d bought a TV while I was in the area, I would have looked hard at Fry’s, because they were price matching online stores and covering the Sales Tax.
 
jthomas said:
Man, where am I going to get shitty 50¢ hot dogs now? mmm cold greasy delicious shitty 50¢ hot dogs.
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Costco?

Halon said:
God, I miss Borders.
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Borders and Waldens were the last true big retail book stores. I probably spent $5k in books when Borders was closing....with a total retail value at least 3x that. Now I buy from the smaller stores online if I can find them. I dont give any money to Bezos for books. Barnes and Nobles isn't a book store, its a coffee shop that happens to have books.

I will not miss Frys - never was a very good store in my area.
 
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Mail-in-ripoffs, I only ever cared walking out the door price.
One of many ways those cluetards stuck it to themselves.
Who specifically made such decisions? I want names...
 
Sad news.
I really liked the cpu and mobo deals they had way back in the day. I'm talking about the ECS deals they had back in the Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 X2 days.
Their big print ad would be in the Sunday paper. I would be rummaging through it quickly to get to the computer parts section to see what deal they had.
Those were some fun days.
 
nilepez said:
I mostly agree, but I rather liked looking at the MBs (though TBH, I only bought them their when it was part of a deal for a CPU). I’ll also add, that I don’t notice a huge difference between MC today and 20 years ago. I think maybe they don’t have as many magazines as they once did, but it’s largely the same. Someone else can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’d swear that 5 years ago you could buy online and pick up and for some (all?) items they’d also deliver. I never used that option, but if I’d bought a TV while I was in the area, I would have looked hard at Fry’s, because they were price matching online stores and covering the Sales Tax.
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They were but they were way way way behind everyone else. Problem is majority of the people didn't want to walk the who damn store to get somewhere. Times were changing. Microcenter didn't change much but they benefited from being smaller store but they did carry inventory to the point.

Everything they did was slow and behind time. When they didn't have the foot traffic they should have moved faster. They wasted so many man hours on mounting and cutting shit it was crazy lol.
 
pgaster said:
Sad news.
I really liked the cpu and mobo deals they had way back in the day. I'm talking about the ECS deals they had back in the Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 X2 days.
Their big print ad would be in the Sunday paper. I would be rummaging through it quickly to get to the computer parts section to see what deal they had.
Those were some fun days.
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Hahaha same here.
 
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