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Fry's is done,hold the ketchup.

amirm

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The consumer electronics part of Fry's I always found too many annoying sales folk in.
That was their trademark: tons of inventory and tons of terrible sales associates. Story was that they copied their grocery store model of hiring anyone off the street and make them work there. If you did not know what you wanted yourself, you were toast.
 

Chrispy

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That was their trademark: tons of inventory and tons of terrible sales associates. Story was that they copied their grocery store model of hiring anyone off the street and make them work there. If you did not know what you wanted yourself, you were toast.

Let alone the food section in the store that was nearest me at the time (Palo Alto)....never was that brave :)
 

Raindog123

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We lived 5min away from one. The Space Shuttle themed one in Anaheim. Were frequent there with my son - from graphics cards and SSDs to Nintendo plushes and Skylander figurines... RIP
 
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valerianf

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It is very sad.
Radioshack was at 15 mn from my home in LA.
Fry's was at 1h from my home in LA.
MicroCenter is at 2h from my home in LA, for how long?

Evolution of electronic shopping is going weird.
It started as a proximity hobby opened to everybody and it is going to an elite work reserved to professional.
Now you are buying components at Digikey or Mouser.
Now you are buying speakers that you never listen before at Amazon or Ebay.
I am not surprised that the sales of audio devices are shrinking: nobody can listen to them.
We are living in the world of tablets, phones and soundbars!
 

sejarzo

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The Chicago area store opened in 2004, as far as I can tell. They ran an entirely separate 12 to 16 page color ad section every week in the Sunday Chicago Tribune for years after most other retailers had move away from lavish newspaper advertising. Was that typical for all of their markets? I

As that store and the one in the NE burbs of Indianapolis were the only ones I ever saw, I was surprised to see Fry's Food & Drug in Arizona with the similar-ish logo. A friend of mine there gave me the backstory on that.
 

Chrispy

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It is very sad.
Radioshack was at 15 mn from my home in LA.
Fry's was at 1h from my home in LA.
MicroCenter is at 2h from my home in LA, for how long?

Evolution of electronic shopping is going weird.
It started as a proximity hobby opened to everybody and it is going to an elite work reserved to professional.
Now you are buying components at Digikey or Mouser.
Now you are buying speakers that you never listen before at Amazon or Ebay.
I am not surprised that the sales of audio devices are shrinking: nobody can listen to them.
We are living in the world of tablets, phones and soundbars!

Even the "listening" opportunities in B&M stores are often limited. I haven't visited an audio store in ages either, no need, happy with internet choices that allow returns....
 

ta240

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It is very sad.
Radioshack was at 15 mn from my home in LA.
Fry's was at 1h from my home in LA.
MicroCenter is at 2h from my home in LA, for how long?

Evolution of electronic shopping is going weird.
It started as a proximity hobby opened to everybody and it is going to an elite work reserved to professional.
Now you are buying components at Digikey or Mouser.
Now you are buying speakers that you never listen before at Amazon or Ebay.
I am not surprised that the sales of audio devices are shrinking: nobody can listen to them.
We are living in the world of tablets, phones and soundbars!

Are the sales shrinking or just changing? Because what we didn't have back then were youtubers telling everyone "This product is so amazing!!!" about each new thing. We weren't reminded daily what we were missing out on with our lousy system.

Even the "listening" opportunities in B&M stores are often limited. .......

Remember when Circuit City and Best Buy had entire walls full of components you could switch through. Now just the ones with Magnolia HiFi have a smaller number you can try.

For the last several years the two Frys in our area were just a mess inside. Even before the shelves went empty the things setup to listen to rarely worked. They had a fancy theater room that they never did anything in and the little areas for the specific products just ended up with boxed items stacked there rather than things hooked up for demo. They had plenty of people standing around but nobody willing to straighten shelves or hook things up properly.
 
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watchnerd

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Are the sales shrinking or just changing? Because what we didn't have back then were youtubers telling everyone "This product is so amazing!!!" about each new thing. We weren't reminded daily what we were missing out on with our lousy system.

Sonos 2019 revenue was $519M.

Seems like certain segments of audio are doing just fine.
 

valerianf

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"Sonos 2019 revenue was $519M"
Better not to go to a B&M store to listen to it!
 

GeorgeBynum

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I worked a consulting gig in 1996-97 at a plant that had all IBM hardware and a brand new LAN....Token Ring.

When I asked the site IT manager why, he said "Ethernet is just an inherently unstable topology and it is unlikely to last."

o_O:rolleyes::p
I used ARCnet for its reliable token passing technology, better for control than the CSMA/CD of Ethernet, especially the 10Base2 of the day.
 

Ralph_Cramden

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Last time I was at Fry's was years ago - picked up one of those little Sony XDR-F1HD FM tuners that had been discontinued a few months earlier, but they still had on display. Still have it, sealed in the box. Worth a bit more than I paid for in now, to tuner collectors, it appears.

RIP, Fry's.
 

amirm

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My main use of stores has been to test out laptops. The quality of screen and keyboard/mouse is super important as is the ergonomics of the whole thing. Each store stocks a limited set of brands/models so was good to have a few stores around. While Frys had a lot of samples to test, man was it a nightmare to get a hold of a sales kid to write it up and then pick it up later. Still, was better than nothing.
 

suttondesign

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I believe Frys never built out either internal systems or external (web) systems to stay competitive. But the stores were truly depressing anyhow.
 

Berwhale

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I used ARCnet for its reliable token passing technology, better for control than the CSMA/CD of Ethernet, especially the 10Base2 of the day.

In the mid 90's, when I worked for a system integrator, I got called out to one of our largest customers as nobody could log on to the network. Our on-site 'engineer' couldn't find the problem and thought it might be 'something to do with the server'. Upon attending the site, I discovered that, over the preceeding weekend, said 'engineer' had taken it upon himself to tidy up the cabling in the computer room. This dude's version of tidying up the cabling involved going to the local Maplins store (similar to RadioShack) and purchasing a bag of BNC connectors, a crimping tool and making a bunch of 'nice short cables', well under 50cm/20" in length. He used the new cables to connect four 10BASE2 NICs in the server to four repeaters which connected to the 11 or 12 segments servicing the rest of the building (many of them overlength, but that's another story involving vampire taps *shudder*). This all looked very neat, but caused the collision lights on the repeaters to shine like the Sun, there was very little CSMA and a whole lot of CD going on.
 
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