No Frys in Ohio around me. We had a Gateway store close by and I visited it once and was surprised it was just there for showing machines and taking orders that shipped from a warehouse. Those stores didn't last much longer then a year or two and the leases caused quite a bit of damage to the company when they all closed. I think at the time they were pushing large TV's and even had some computer+ TV combos.
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End of an Era - Frys gone
- Thread starter Shadow Lord
- Start date
No Frys in Ohio around me. We had a Gateway store close by and I visited it once and was surprised it was just there for showing machines and taking orders that shipped from a warehouse. Those stores didn't last much longer then a year or two and the leases caused quite a bit of damage to the company when they all closed. I think at the time they were pushing large TV's and even had some computer+ TV combos.
VERAULT
Veteran Member
Yeah I agree about newegg. I dont even feel compelled to send anyone there anymore. Same with Directron.com
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Offered without comment:
charnitz
Experienced Member
In the mid to late 1980's, were Fry's and other computer stores like them places where you could buy generic parts and mid tier computers only, or did they also carry higher end PCs like those from IBM and Toshiba? Did they sell to the corporate market or just to hobbyists and/or general public? Did they carry game consoles of the time like the NES, or did they focus entirely on PCs? Apple?
krebizfan
Veteran Member
Fry's was rather the outlier providing everything a consultant might need to complete a contract while pulling an all-nighter: cables, computers, other parts, food and drink. No one mistakes computer engineers for nutritionists.
Other computer stores had parts to build a computer and low to mid-range pre-built systems from major manufacturers plus once clones got established, house brand clones. Different major brands at different stores. The corporate market was intended to be the bulk of sales but hobbyists and the general public were accepted depending on the store. Computerland wanted the high end money is no object customer only; some of the others were more welcoming of foot traffic.
PCs were a big focus with Apple often having a sizable space and items like disks would be be on shelves with pre-formatted disks for the less common machines off to the side. I suspect many of them had relatively small game departments; the retailers that sold most game systems could undercut the dedicated computer stores. If I remember the floor plan, the areas that had the products I wanted only took up half the space and I don't recall what occupied the half I never entered.
Shadow Lord
Veteran Member
Well wasn't the large TV part of the Gateway systems? That is, they were not selling TVs but had one of the first HTPC setups? I think they came with 29" CRTs. EDIT: I stand corrected. Apparently, according to Wiki, they were selling 42" plasmas as stand alone TVs but this was far past their hey day.
Shadow Lord
Veteran Member
I don't follow NewEgg that much any more. When they came on the scene they had excellent prices, free shipping. Then the free shipping went away and prices went up so that for those of us in CA it became actually more expensive to order from NewEgg (when taking in the 10% sales tax into consideration) then somewhere else. The customer service also went downhill - the return policies became super restrictive (I remember my last purchase was for RAM there and I had a hell of a time finding RAM that had free returns). Once they added the third party sellers it was the end for me. I could get better service at Amazon and dare I say it eBay.
ClassicHasClass
Veteran Member
I was in the Fry's in Fremont in 2019 and it was dead, dead, dead. More staff than customers. I figured this couldn't last.
VERAULT
Veteran Member
Shadowlord: yes they sold a computer system with large screen crt tv that was an entertainment system.. Forget the name.. But THEY DID try and just sell tvs tgier as well.
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Chuck(G)
25k Member
Well things change--remember when Macy's demoed leading edge consumer appliances? I bought my first (Panasonic) answering machine from them and was absolutely enraptured by the demonstration Laser Disc system they had.
Those were the days...
VERAULT
Veteran Member
I miss real "department stores" like sears, j.c. penney , and gfox.. Remember when those places were so elaborste they had professional vlerks running each department. I remember may family buying me my first suit so we could have portraits taken at sears. The hartford ct gfox byilding was the last of the 1950s 1960s fancy department stores wiyh balconies and elevator operators..... Its become executive housing now. I only vaguely remember my last seeing it in the 1980s
My Packard Bell 286 system was sold at SEARS back when I got it. Most major department stores competed with Radioshack to sell computers and electronics and then Applicance stores started selling them as well. I still recall playing with a Commodore 64sx at Hills department store while my mom was shopping for clothes or other household stuff.
Gateway Destination was the system with the 31" CRT VGA monitor (they had other sizes I think even 36")
Gateway Destination was the system with the 31" CRT VGA monitor (they had other sizes I think even 36")
dorkbert
Veteran Member
I still remember buying my Fluke meter from their original Sunnyvale store off Lawrence Expressway. Store then were staff by personnel that actually knows what they're selling.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
That was true only up to a point for selected sales people. Among junior staff, the ignorance was astounding.
Shadow Lord
Veteran Member
Yep, that was the one. They were way ahead of the time with that one. A few years later with WMC and XP and they would have had a real product... until of course MS killed it...
VERAULT
Veteran Member
Please I would take thier ignorance today over the uselessness of modern store workers. "Hello, Where is this item?" answer " I dont know, you can go ask someone else at the front desk"
Thanks Unknown K, Yeah the destination. I remember drooling over that thing. IT had the same chassis as their Pentium I Models but in black....
And speaking of sears, I remember being with my buddy when he bought a laptop (the first of my friends to ever buy a laptop) from sears. It was an Ibm Thinkpad 486 DX 33mhz. I was so amazed by that thing. But he was a spoiled rich kid and it was stolen from him within the year for not taking better care of it. Funny, I remember seeing the doom shareware on the rack the day we bought the laptop.
creepingnet
Veteran Member
I was late to the Fry's thing. When I lived in Seattle people used to tell me about Fry's a lot, especially early on. I think theirs went out of business well before I moved in 2018. After moving to Reno I've been to Fry's three times at three different California locations and I have to say I have gotten to witness a decline.
The first one I went to was in San Jose. I think it had sort of an Egyptian Pyramid-like theme of sorts. This one was pretty awesome. This was around the time I was buying a LOT of components for various projects including guitar pedals. I also picked up my SATA to IDE converter there -t he one I use with Creeping Net 486 to run modern drives on it. So of course, I planned to go back.
Second time was on the way back, don't remember what town, this one was Trains/Railroad themed and the theme was a lot more obvious than the other. But this one seemed to be a lot more picked over. They had a lot of musical instrument stuff. I think I spent over $200 there on that trip, because I Bought out all of the project enclosures for making guitar pedals with.
The last time I went to a Fry's was on the wya back from Carmel when we took a detour somewhere off 680 and went to one that seemed to have no theme to it at all as far as I could tell. It was huge. However, I was really dissappointed in that trip because they had almost no components, no enclosures, no SATA or IDE adapters, tools were crazy expensive, and the computer department was depressing for parts for modern stuff too. My wife on the other hand had a ball, bought cologne and perfume there.
I was not surprised given the last trip that Fry's was going out of business sometime soon. I'd also watched Shango66's video on it and it seems it had been circling the toilet bowl of failure for years. Kind of a shame because these places look like they would have been really cool in their heyday.
The first one I went to was in San Jose. I think it had sort of an Egyptian Pyramid-like theme of sorts. This one was pretty awesome. This was around the time I was buying a LOT of components for various projects including guitar pedals. I also picked up my SATA to IDE converter there -t he one I use with Creeping Net 486 to run modern drives on it. So of course, I planned to go back.
Second time was on the way back, don't remember what town, this one was Trains/Railroad themed and the theme was a lot more obvious than the other. But this one seemed to be a lot more picked over. They had a lot of musical instrument stuff. I think I spent over $200 there on that trip, because I Bought out all of the project enclosures for making guitar pedals with.
The last time I went to a Fry's was on the wya back from Carmel when we took a detour somewhere off 680 and went to one that seemed to have no theme to it at all as far as I could tell. It was huge. However, I was really dissappointed in that trip because they had almost no components, no enclosures, no SATA or IDE adapters, tools were crazy expensive, and the computer department was depressing for parts for modern stuff too. My wife on the other hand had a ball, bought cologne and perfume there.
I was not surprised given the last trip that Fry's was going out of business sometime soon. I'd also watched Shango66's video on it and it seems it had been circling the toilet bowl of failure for years. Kind of a shame because these places look like they would have been really cool in their heyday.
Chuck(G)
25k Member
Computer stores were a thing for a time after the introduction of the PC. I remember the Sears computer store on El Camino in Sunnyvale (they sold the AT&T PC6300)--go over to Mountain View and Jade even had a store for a time. I think I still have a few bits of furniture I purchased at the Xerox computer store going out of business sale. Control Data had a retail operation in the Midwest; I still have a SCSI hard drive purchased from their "clearance" sale. Computerland is just a faint memory, like Egghead Software.
I stil use several NOS Model M keyboards purchased for something like $30 each from Surplus Software in Portland--I even have a couple of their $1 serial mice.
Eudimorphodon
Veteran Member
Looking back it feels like Christmas 2018 was their last Hail Mary attempt to pull back from the Event Horizon of the black hole that had been inexorably tugging on them for years. They were decently stocked in December (in fact I wonder if they may have gone overboard trying to stock up on "hip" items like Raspberry Pi-based retro arcade kits, they had a ton of them that didn't seem to be moving), but when I went back only a month or two later to pick up a small list of computer-related bits I ended up walking away with only about half of what I came for. Last time I went to one, the Sunnyvale location, probably around June or July 2019?, to look at their toy section to find a present for a birthday party one of the kids was going to it was tragic. Empty shelves everywhere. It staggers me that they held out for almost another two whole years before throwing in the towel.
Fry's had a lot of problems even back in its heyday; everyone familiar with the place remembers the ridiculous customer service weirdness, the arcane rebate pricing shenanigans, their bad habit of taking broken and incomplete returned items and just sticking them back on the shelf... but I am still going to miss them. If it was 7:50 PM and you suddenly found yourself needing to do an emergency build of a six-disk RAID box to back up your startup's data after the Sun box they trusted it to live on with no backup threw a drive you knew exactly where to go with the company credit card to get the parts to save the day and ruin the rest of your night. R.I.P.