To All the Fry’s I Loved Before: An Elegy for the Best Electronics Chain in the West
Goodbye, old friend: With the closure of Fry’s Electronics, it’s the end of an era for PC and tech obsessives.
It’s a lazy Saturday morning, and I’m sitting in the passenger seat of my dad’s restored 1962 Ford Comet on the way from one end of my hometown to the next. Getting onto the freeway, I look to my right to see the familiar One Infinite Loop, with the Apple campus looming at the end of the lane.
There were many roads that led to Campbell, California, but if you were coming from Cupertino, you were sure to pass every manner of tech titan on your way over. Back then, giants of the Valley such as AOL, Compaq (before it was HP), Hewlett Packard, and Yahoo were all part of the tour, and they could just as easily be your next-door neighbors, as they were the primary employers of almost every parent at your school.
To serve the needs of the engineers who both built and programmed some of the earliest silicon-based semiconductors, dozens of electronics and hobby shops sprung up around the Bay Area. But none was as prolific, as recognizable, and as beloved among its customers (at least for a time) as Fry’s Electronics.
“Your Best Buys Are Always at Fry’s…Guaranteed!”
Started in Sunnyvale, California, in 1985 by three brothers and another partner, the chain’s first slogan was the “One-Stop Shop for the Silicon Valley Professional.” Perhaps not as catchy as modern marketing campaigns, but an effective statement of purpose nonetheless. The stores carried a wide variety of electronics, components, snacks, and even Playboy magazines.
Nearly every store (except the Wilsonville, Oregon location) retained a “theme,” one that extended both to the exterior and interior design elements. My local store in Campbell was draped in kitschy Ancient Egypt stylings, with huge mockup pharaohs and effigies to King Tut watching over the latest sales on graphics cards or air conditioners.
Massive faux-flame torches would light up the tip of the pyramids on the roof of the store at night, and booming speakers out front would play atmospheric sounds of crypts creaking as you walked through the front doors. If we ever felt like mixing it up, my dad could drive to one of the other locations within a few miles to transport us to the Wild West, the site of an alien invasion, or the ruins of the Aztec Empire.
By using unique design elements baked into the lore of each location, the company found a way to stand out in a sea of drab, utilitarian electronics stores by leaning into the “shopping experience,” only a vague notion in retail at the time of Fry’s rise to prominence. The store also gained fame in the area for its deep selection of seemingly cobbled-together inventory, carrying items like obscure PC parts and random pipe fittings in the same section.
These aimless aisles were flanked by the company’s signature “checkout row,” where big flashing siren lights would flag lines of customers to their waiting cashier, with the help of a sales-associate-turned-flight-controller directing traffic from a ladder on high.
During the good times (when exactly those were varies, depending on which generation of shopper you ask), nearly every member of the staff in their respective departments knew their category front to back, and you’d often walk out of a Fry’s knowing more about technology and electronics than you did going in. In the age of the early internet, before every product was already reviewed the same day it went on sale, the collective knowledgebase of your local Fry’s component department could mean the difference between owning a cutting-edge PC for the next four years or walking home with a lemon.
Sure, those folks worked on commission. But damned if they didn’t earn it by knowing the answer to nearly every question before you even asked it. My dad, a computer engineer himself, would often get into spirited discussions with senior sales staff about which graphics card was right for the latest game I was trying to play, or the merits of air cooling over this “new-fangled liquid cooling stuff” that was just starting to trend in the PC-enthusiast scene when I was entering high school. It’s like anyone you found on the floor was part of the Geek Squad, before Geek Squad was even a thing.
But specialty sales staff with specialized skill sets cost money, and in this country, paying extra for quality can run afoul of market realities.
American Retail, Codified
No company is immune to the pressures of a changing marketplace, and even the “Fry’s experience” wasn’t enough to keep the company afloat among rapidly growing competitors such as Best Buy, Newegg, and—of course!—the Amazon juggernaut. Like Radio Shack before it, Fry’s saw slimmer and slimmer margins on small items and hobbyist components, as electronics and semiconductor manufacturing left Silicon Valley to move overseas.
The race to the bottom (perpetuated by stores like Target and Walmart) hit specialty stores like Fry’s the hardest. In the years since Fry’s was founded, the market had spoken: Consumers overwhelmingly prefer the “fast food” shopping model. If a hamburger is going to taste the same in Kansas as it does in California, then a Micro Center, Target, or Walmart all need to be the same, too. Most people can barely handle learning new aisle numbers, let alone whether you need to take a left or a right at the statue of a Gold Rush-era pan miner to find a CD-ROM with some antivirus software on it.
The demand for soldering kits and DIY HAM radio parts gave way to easier, commission-friendly sales like TVs and appliances, and the sales staff’s expertise (and enthusiasm) seemed to fizzle out alongside it. And like Radio Shack before it, perhaps Fry’s was just that: a shining example of its era, both in victory and defeat.
Nowadays, people come to sites like ours for advice on which tech product is the right fit for the job. Entire networks of websites and packs of YouTube review gurus in 2021 stand in the shoes of those staff members of yore, and even though the job may not be so similar, the goal remains the same: to recommend the best products and warn against the worst.
To add insult to injury, the company suffered a major blow when it was discovered that an executive, Ausaf Umar Siddiqui, had embezzled (and promptly gambled away) roughly $87 million that was meant to go to store vendors and suppliers. Though this is still the subject of speculation, it’s suspected that many of the vendor relationships that Fry’s had spent decades building were broken as a result of suppliers not being paid, which could have (though again, this remains in the world of theory) led to the empty shelves that became indicative of the Fry’s experience in its later years. If you visited one in the waning days, you know what I mean.
One More Time
“I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” — Andy Bernard
I remember my last trip to the Campbell location around seven years ago (though of course I didn’t know it would be my last, at the time), and noting how much it had stayed the same while the rest of the world had changed around it. Perhaps as an omen of the times, the parking lot for the Home Depot next door was a free-for-all, packed with high-end trucks and luxury SUVs in a line waiting to get in from around the corner. Meanwhile, I managed to snag a spot at Fry’s right next to the old escalator, now deactivated and dusty, to roam the halls for an FM transmitter with a 3.5mm headphone jack. Easy enough for Fry’s, right?
Was the trip nostalgic? Sort of, at least in the way one must feel when visiting a town where the steel mill closed down 30 years ago. But did I get what I came for? Not even close.
On the hunt for a transmitter I could use to connect an iPhone to my car stereo (the AUX port had sheared off), I saw that the store’s shelves, previously packed to the point of spillage, sat barren, and just finding a person who could point me in the right direction proved to be an adventure all its own. Long gone were the bustling throngs of customers, the music from six different game menus blaring at once, and the seemingly endless rows of TVs and laptops next to one another other, screens aglow with the latest movie trailers or rolling advertisements for products in the store. Instead—just row after row of near-empty shelves, pockmarked by the occasional tchotchke under $10.
It felt cold, empty, and lifeless. Nothing was where it used to be, including many of the old hobbyist-only aisles that would have had the part I was looking for, had I been in that same spot ten years earlier. As I walked out of the store empty-handed (and on my way to the Micro Center down the road, where I did find what I was looking for), I felt a twinge in my heart. Somehow I knew, even then, that Fry’s was never coming back, and the all the styrofoam sarcophagi in the world weren’t going to change that.
In writing this piece, I’ve periodically checked Facebook, and the outpouring of both grief and love that I’ve seen from friends back home, all over a little regional electronics chain that barely left California, says more than this article ever could. It’s clear that Fry’s Electronics meant a lot to many people in Silicon Valley. For me, although it’s impossible to completely pin down what helped where, I know I owe a big part of my lifelong obsession with technology to the staff members of Fry’s.
For those of us who were there during its heyday, Fry’s Electronics was a shopping experience unlike anything else. Sure, Best Buy was cleaner, and Micro Center usually had more stock in the back, but Fry’s had everything a burgeoning tech-obsessive needed to find a new hobby, learn about a new game, or see how desktop PCs get built in real time. If you didn’t love tech walking into a Fry’s Electronics store…well it was just a little bit hard to hate it once you were on your way out.
So, Who’s Gonna Buy an Old Fry’s?
On the night of February 24, 2021, Fry’s announced on its now-defunct website that the company would be shutting down all its operations effectively immediately, both physical and digital, pointing to the pandemic as the final twist of a very long knife.
So the only question left is this: What will become of the highly proprietary buildings Fry’s was known for? When a Walmart goes out of business in the region, a giant, empty warehouse is left behind that can have any old name slapped on it (possibly a Home Depot, if the company were so inclined).
But who’s going to rent a building with an alien ship crashing through the front of it? In a way, the demise of Fry’s speaks to larger trends in America—the rise of monoculture in retail, the fading away of regionally relevant customer bases, and ultimately, the lesson of what happens when you try to do something a little bit different in a country dominated by Amazons, Targets, and Walmarts.
Micro Center, the closest thing we’ll have to Fry’s for the foreseeable future, learned this lesson a while ago. Selling the same obscure PC parts and home appliances side by side, the company has also scored big points for hiring sales staff that know their categories. When I moved to New York City, I found that Micro Center is as close to a Fry’s as the East Coast ever came, and even though some of the charm might be washed out by the well-organized shelves and static fluorescent lighting, it still fulfills the role of “your local well-stocked electronics shop” dutifully, albeit with a lot less flair.
Why has Micro Center endured where Fry’s failed? That’ll ultimately be up to the historians to decide, but either way, I can’t say I’d feel the same grief if Micro Center announced a same-day closure at some point down the line. Sure, they had my FM transmitter…but they didn’t have that spark, and it may be a long time before any other retail store matches what Fry’s brought to thousands of kids and parents while it was still around. Farewell, old friend.
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com.
