I’m honestly surprised that they still exist. When they introduced all those mail-in rebates it pissed a lot of people off. Making your customers jump through so many hoops to end up with missing or denied rebates is one sure fire way to lose your base.
Insiders think otherwise:
"Bryan Boone, who left Fry’s a couple of years ago after nearly 20 years with the company, says he bets “they’re going to go out of business.” But the former facilities manager and construction supervisor thinks the owners of the secretive and privately owned company — the Fry’s family — are trying to keep the stores open as long as possible to avoid paying the costs associated with winding down the business." [1]
Lame. In my area, our only tech store is Best Buy, and I avoid it like the plague because it's overpriced and they don't even carry good stuff. There have been a lot of times where I need something quick (ideally same day), but I end up suffering through the waiting period for Newegg if at all possible.
For example, my wireless router started going out (one radio died completely), so I decided I should invest in higher quality equipment, but BestBuy only has the same consumer crap I'd see at Costco or Target, though maybe a couple more options. I also needed to replace drives and they only had desktop parts. Or I needed to get RAM and they have no ECC or even just high quality non-ECC RAM. Or I need some thermal paste, or a new desktop case.
I could find most, if not all, of that stuff at Fry's when I lived near one, but now I either waste money on a temporary solution at BestBuy or rig up a temporary solution at home until better equipment gets shipped to me.
Also, the eco conscious side of me hates making a delivery truck make a special stop at my house just to deliver a couple items, not to mention the extra packaging and whatnot sending a package entails.
That being said, even when I lived near Fry's, I shopped mostly online because it was more convenient, so I guess I'm at least partially to blame here. Lately, I'm trying to buy more from local sources so they hopefully stick around, and I buy extras of important things so I'm not dead in the water anymore.
Went to the Fry’s in Concord last weekend. All the shelves were bare. All the shelves in the cages behind the registers were bare. It literally looked like a store that was going out of business and marked all the remaining things to 70% off. You know the really crappy things. In this case all they had were karaoke machines, as seen on tv things, security cameras. It literally was depressing seeing only a dozen motherboards total in the PC components section.
Good to hear. It's still nice to shop through their aisles and see actual computer parts including motherboards and cases in-person. I even prefer purchasing these parts in the store as I had experiences with online retailers such as NewEgg where the parts get damaging during shipping. Frys has a great return policy and has never given me issues when receiving credit.
I went to the Plano tx location this month and it was incredibly depressing. Felt like a ghost town. It looks like they've stopped restocking everything, so it's felt pretty useless to go in person since anything I've needed they don't have in stock. Sound rooms to listen to different speakers in the back completely gutted, only cheap netbooks in the laptop section. None of the tablets I was interested in on display to try out in person. No motherboards as far as I saw. Entire isles 90% empty. Nothing even in the center big isle walking spaces to grab your attention and make going there to walk around and browse for fun worth it.
Was really sad because I grew up going to this store and it played a big role in my interest in tech. As a kid it felt like a technology mecca, I could easily spend hours wandering the store with my dad. It's where my dad and I bought everything to build our first PC.
That's a relief. I stopped into the Sacramento location over the weekend and was wondering what the heck was going on. Place looked damn near picked clean.
