I really liked Fry's years ago. It was depressing to see inventory go down so quickly last couple years. I would like a local Microcenter. Their prices are decent and they have good motherboard/cpu combos.
Semi-off topic but Microcenter needs to fix their online presence.
I have five Microcenters within an hour of me, the closest is practically walking distance, yet I was so turned off by the few times I've tried to use their online services I essentially boycotted them.
The first time was using their site for pickup during the pandemic... then not being told until I reached the store that this wasn't curbside/contactless pickup like every other electronics store in the state was doing: you were simply having them being your item to the front, and you would then have to wait upwards of an hour to get into the store and check out manually. (Kind of defeats the 5 minutes you save over picking it up yourself and any possible safety benefit for you and their employees)
-
The second time was trying to built my new gaming PC a few months back. I specifically wanted to buy from Microcenter to support a brick and mortar store...
I added thousands of dollars of parts to my cart, went to checkout and it wouldn't let me. It declined my card despite no fraud alerts, confirmed billing address, etc.
After two tries it cleared my entire cart.
Go through my history, re-add everything, and it fails to checkout again and again until my cart is cleared again and I give up and go to Newegg.
When I brought it up people said this was common, and the fix was to use another card because sometimes it randomly wouldn't accept certain types (!)
-
I get Microcenter is "physically-oriented" but I don't get how long they can stay relevant with their abysmal online presence.
You shouldn't be losing sales because of a crusty checkout flow in 2021...
