We had a moment of silence during our Engineering meeting this morning.

Geeks and Nerds will be wearing black armbands today...

(Here in Silicon Valley, we all saw this coming. Lots of AS SEEN ON TV products on the shelves instead of electronics for more than a year now.)

Sad to hear this today. They have been a long time goto spot for electronics..esp after radio shacks seemed to disappear as well

I guess everything online is where we are heading

Hate to see them go for two reasons. In the past they were a source
of parts and tools. But more important (to me at least), the one in
Sunnyvale, CA hosted and excellent electronics swap once a month
thru the dry season. THAT will be missed!

I spent a lot of time and a lot of money there way back when, including lots of company money. It was a fun place to go for a while especially if you are a tech nerd/geek type. The degeneration started much longer than 5 years ago. Their business practices were the source of a lot of controversy and I believe lawsuits if I remember correctly. They were infamous for putting returned stock back on the shelves (as new) without even checking it out to make sure it was good. Lots of people got screwed over. They got me one time many years ago and after that I never went back. By then other sources were coming up including the internet.

In its heyday the one in Orange County was really something. You had to get there early just to get a parking spot and go buy something, and the lines would snake around for miles, especially in the holiday season.

Makers everywhere are in mourning... Fry's used to be the one place you could go and "maybe" pick something up you needed that day... Chances were slim the past 5 years but they used to be better stocked before that. They had no process to remove outdated stock from their shelves, either by choice or by neglect, but towards the end, the amount of truly useful stuff on the shelves went from 95% back in their heydays to probably less than 20% recently. The amount of useless junk they bought of closedout, overstocked, and past its prime retail goods would show up in bulk on the center isles and the shelves would sit empty of any worthwhile merchandise. It's no wonder they went downhill, they just became more and more less relevant as their charm and business practices slid from "Major Retailer" to "Bargain Basement Liquidator"

They changed there financial model about two years ago to ONLY stock products from manufacturers that would work on CONSIGNMENT! That means big names with latest items wanted nothing to do with them, so their shelves filled up with desperate and overstocked items from manufacturers that were willing to be paid AFTER a consumer bought something. Frys didn’t own ANY inventory for the past year or so.!!!

I used to love going there too. I was a kid in a candy store, but I got screwed a couple times and the place wasn’t right around the corner to easily exchange stuff so I just stopped going also. MicroCenter is my go to store now

I was just reminded by a friend that they had the worst customer service. I forgot about the time I got screwed during a return, the salesman said to me "Yeah, I don't care. We both know you will still shop here afterwards."

...Unfortunately, he was right...

I wonder if micro center might take this turn of events to expand a bit? They contracted years ago, but now in the vacuum of retail... there are no hands-on tech stores. Best Buy comes closest but they have become the mainstream player, but not for enthusiasts.

We've got an empty SHOPKO store here in Lacey, Washington that would make a great Micro Center store.

Another friend just reminded me:

"Oh and those stupid mail in rebates! Cutting the UPC Codes, copy the receipt, take out the 1st page of the manual, and don't miss the deadline! Oh dang, missed it by a day!"

I don't have any Fry's in my area, but when Radioshack went out of business around here i was able to buy tons of electronic components super cheap during their final days. Might be worth seeing if Fry's is going to be having any crazy sales soon.

I liked hitting up Frys after work to pickup transistors, diodes, “insert blown up board part here” to get my game back up and running that night

I think they closed/locked the doors today. Since they didn't own any of their inventory, there is no reason to liquidate anything. The manufacturers are being encouraged to come get their stuff. Take a look at frys.com for the exact words of who can do what. In any case, I think the doors are locked...

They have been circling the toilet for quite some time. I’m honestly surprised they held out this long.

I haven’t shopped there in years, but it used to be my favorite place for video games & movies. They used to carry the weird niche stuff that the other stores wouldn’t bother ordering.

Being from Canada where there have never been any Fry's stores, every trip I took to the US also involved a parts shopping trip to the nearest Fry's, wherever I could find them! Sad to hear it close.

Highland Superstore
CompUSA
Incredible Universe
Circuit City
Radio Shack
Fry's

Besides their great selection of parts once-upon-a-time, we loved their geeky decor, from the Alien Invasion stuff in Burbank to Alice in Wonderland in Woodland Hills to the Aztec version, etc. Where else will you ever see a replica of the launch track from When Worlds Collide or have a giant octopus or bug-eyed monster standing over you while you shop? I hope they auction off the decorations, I'm sure there are folks who'd pay good money for the memories.

What took them so long?

My local Atlantis-themed one had aquariums that were better stocked than their shelves. And the shelves just kept getting emptier and the employees kept getting more useless. And this has been going on for years.

I loved going there years ago and getting lost in all the stuff, but there's no use for them anymore when I can get what I need from Amazon delivered to my door in a day.

Sad. Bought my hakko from frys and countless connectors, wires, lamps, diodes etc, sttng dvds, wii games, TVs etc. Was my favorite store. Hard to believe they hosted a pga tour event as recently as 2015.

I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve been to their store in San Diego many times through the years and always enjoyed it.

I know I’m in the minority, but I’ll continue to purchase from brick and mortar shops whenever possible.

Good Guys

Same here, also, I try to buy anything I can not from Amazon. Yes I still buy stuff from Amazon, but if I can get it somewhere else for a good price I prefer that. One day Amazon will wipe out everything else and take over. Once that happens stand by for the fun times as free shipping evaporates, prices go up, etc. Actually even now there are lots of things that are priced a lot higher on Amazon than you can find in other places. You have to do your diligence and search them out. But most people don’t, they just see it on Amazon and order it because it’s convenient.

Another one bites the dust. It was fun to look at all the electronic components 7 or 8 years ago. The customer service was terrible. One time I had to wait for 15 minutes at the checkout just to have them approve a check for less than $100.

Yep. In the movie Demolition Man, they say that in the future "all Restaurants are Taco Bell". In actuality, in the future all retail will be Amazon.

a truly sad event. my first trip to Fry's was a visit to the Palo Alto store in 1994 was amazed by the place. Every electronic gadget and component you can imagine. I would visit every trip to the Bay Area, during the xbox playstation days I'd buy loads of stuff games and take them to the UK. when ever I took a new colleague to the US it was like a major event to take them there and see the wow reaction. was there two years ago and you could see it was just a matter of time...

Fry's was fun and interesting from 1988 thru 2008 or so. They had tons of stuff, lots of stuff you didn't even know existed, and prices were sometimes amazing (albiet rebates drove us all nuts). They had 20 years of being a one-stop shop for all things tech. But they lost their way after the 2008 crash. After that, they never seemed to have the right product at the right price. They didn't hire people that knew what they were talking about. They argued about the internet pricing and how they couldn't match it or how the items were somehow different so they wouldn't match it, and reduced their knowledge value to be tainted by what they had in stock that they were told to move.

It's quite an eye opener to compare Fry's 2020 to Fry's 2000.... 8-(

Fry's used to be our Saturday field trip spot to go when someone at work wanted to build a new pc. It was cool picking out all of the parts and going home to put everything together.

Going to the computer swap meets at the LA fairgrounds was a fun thing to do as well.

Ah, the good old days......and yet they really weren't that long ago.

Somebody has to pay for the prepaid returns and no restocking fee.

I would love to pick the Norwalk location and grab as much tiki stuff as i could.

I was thinking of that also - the swap meet at the Pomona fairgrounds. I went there so many times. That was THE place to go to get all sorts of computer stuff. So much fun wandering up and down the aisles. At its peak it was huge. Then, came the internet.

worse customer service ever,a couple months back I asked them why their shelves were empty,I said are you going out of business they replied oh no we are just remodeling.30 cash registers and 5 cashiers yet the line was out the door .and try returning something

Yeah, thankfully, I’ve never had to return anything.

My thought... what took so damn long.
I stopped going there about 3years ago... because I went and there was nearly nothing of value there.
No NTE components... nothing but garbage out of date computer components.
Seriously; I used to go in there "regularly" to buy stuff I needed for my computer or my pinball machines... but they stopped trying and I stopped going.

I wish I could say I'll miss them... but they "gave up" years ago.
I believe the only reason they waiting until now is they had to run a clock out of Covid loans or something.

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

We shopped at Fry's in the 80's and 90's with a company PO, but for personal stuff, nearby Halted Electronics was the place to go. Way cheaper and no long lines. I saw other pinball operators in both places, but more at Halted. Have run into Jeri Elsworth there more than once. Her shopping cart was always filled with interesting stuff. One of the owners of Halted was Jim Ellington, who used to post on RGP and regularly brought multiple games to CAX.

Halted closed a while back and Excess Solutions bought most of their inventory. On 7th street in San Jose near Spartan stadium. Amazon just bought most of the block, but ES' lease is through the end of the year.

The Las Vegas location's giant slot machine entry has been in disrepair for a few years now.

Ironically, just down the street from the Bally and WMS slot factory....

Las Vegas shuttered location just now....

47 744 (resized).jpg

8655 (resized).jpg

I had a nice conversation with a guy who used to work for Fry's and who currently works for Costco. He said that -- for most of Fry's run -- the selection, the highly competitive prices, etc. worked out to being a good experience for the customers. Not so much for the people who worked there though. In terms of compensation and how employees were treated, but also with basic business procedures like inventory tracking being inefficient and poorly designed or implemented.