Where else could you simultaneously purchase through-hole transistors, a gaming motherboard, a 19" rack, a leafblower, a loudspeaker disguised as a plastic rock, pornography, a taser, a sandwich and a decent cup of coffee while surrounded by fiberglass cowboys and aliens... sad to see
classichasclass 9 hours ago [-]
Sandwiches, too. Ate at the cafe a fair bit. When my buddy was living on Victory and Hollywood we hit Burbank on a regular basis.
Of the Burbank, Fountain Valley, San Marcos, San Diego, Anaheim Hills, Roseville, Sacramento, Fremont, Las Vegas and Sunnyvale locations, I think I liked the San Diego one most for selection (it was a former Incredible Universe), but the Roseville and Las Vegas ones had the wildest themes, even more than the Burbank UFO. But the Fremont location when I ended up there in 2019 was deader than a doornail, and it was like waiting for the next hit to kill them. The next hit came sooner than I thought.
Cerium 7 hours ago [-]
I used to stop by the Fremont location for a sandwich when traffic on the Sunol grade was bad.
donio 8 hours ago [-]
And a decent tiramisu.
JKCalhoun 6 hours ago [-]
When I first moved out to the Bay Area in 1995 and discovered Fry's it was wire-wrapping tools, sockets, enclosures, electronic components, porn magazines, junk food, soft drinks, Computer Shopper magazines....
hbarka 5 hours ago [-]
The Computer Shopper magazine. How it was 3/4” thick full of content every edition just amazed me.
corysama 3 hours ago [-]
5/8” of that was ads. But, before the consumer internet, those ads were as interesting and valuable to readers as the articles.
ghaff 2 hours ago [-]
The articles in Computer Shopper were pretty much fairly low effort filler. Not that there weren’t tons of ads in things like PC Magazine but the articles/columns/reviews were of pretty good quality for the most part.
AStonesThrow 5 hours ago [-]
You could literally purchase a bag of chips (SIMMs) on one aisle, and a bag of chips (Fritos) in another!
I must admit that “Big Boob Babes” was my favorite CD-ROM purchase in 1994. No, it was not a DVD
This morning, I was just watching the video of “The Distance” by Cake, and I vividly recall when that was released and played on my car radio, and the metaphor of corporate slavery was not lost on 24-year-old me.
My favorite store was the one with the Mesoamerican temples and stuff.
Fry's American Institute of Mathematics built and operated a 192-acre golf course in Morgan Hill.[1] There was some suspicion that was the real purpose of the Institute. They'd been trying to build a large clubhouse (er, "headquarters") on the site, built to look like the Alahambra castle and equipped with guest rooms, a wine cellar, and "a gourmet-industrial kitchen with master chefs from a San Francisco seafood restaurant and a Napa Valley resort." That was not, apparently, built. Here's what it was supposed to look like.[2]
Not to mention the history of having been an Incredible Universe on Tandy drive in the case of the Sacramento one
unclebucknasty 9 hours ago [-]
And each one of those items would somehow have a dead pixel.
01100011 6 hours ago [-]
I loved Fry's and shopped there often in the 90s and 00s but it did seem like half of the things I bought there had to be returned for one reason or another.
flomo 6 hours ago [-]
Once I was returning something at the Palo Alto Fry's and the couple ahead of me had a laptop where someone had removed the battery and replaced it with a sandwich. Only at Fry's.
martinpw 3 hours ago [-]
I once returned a product that was not working to the Burbank Fry's location. I walked around the store for a bit, then passed by the section where that product was sold - and saw the product I had returned back on the shelf. Could tell by the way I had torn it open - they had just wrapped it back up and put a small discount on it.
LeoPanthera 9 hours ago [-]
Don't forgot the knock-off cologne!
charcircuit 5 hours ago [-]
Ebay? Amazon? Temu?
timewizard 5 hours ago [-]
[before those existed]
rmason 8 hours ago [-]
Whenever I was out in the Valley I'd visit one or more Fry's. Then there was Weird Stuff Warehouse and Computer Literacy Bookstore. There probably wasn't any area the size of Silicon Valley that had stores that even remotely compared. Always spent more than I budgeted but never felt bad about it.
Gibbon1 6 hours ago [-]
There was Halted and this other one I liked better Alltronics? run by an old amateur radio guy. Originally it was in Los Gatos. But then moved north new Zanker Rd.
Just being able to look at all the various components was a good education.
MrTrvp 7 hours ago [-]
porn magazines! haha man
jrapdx3 4 hours ago [-]
I remember when Fry's opened in the Portland, OR area (actually ~15 miles south). It occupied the former Incredible Universe site. We considered it a notable upgrade.
Fry's was like a museum of common and obscure electronic parts, devices and strangely miscellaneous stuff (mundane office supplies, home appliance accessories, etc.). It was definitely the go to place for computer building blocks and related supplies.
It was amazing what could be found there. One really great thing was relay racks and all kinds of shelves and attachments for them. Too good to pass up I bought one. It was used in my office (for webserver and LAN) and still houses my home server.
Like everywhere else Fry's closed unceremoniously. I guess the chain couldn't withstand the growing online competition and waning interest in desktop machines. Too bad they had to go, now and then it would be so convenient if neighborhood purveyors of "exotic" electronics were still around.
vanchor3 3 hours ago [-]
I had gone there a few times probably several months before they closed. It was quite sad how empty it was. Product hangers were lined up in a single row with one item on each hanger. The only shelf that looked full was the one aisle filled with just the same two pack of canned air, nothing else.
walterbell 3 hours ago [-]
> it would be so convenient if neighborhood purveyors of "exotic" electronics were still around
Speed up electronics prototyping in support of future manufacturing.
jedberg 3 hours ago [-]
One of the things I loved most about Fry's was that clearly an engineer designed their checkout line. It's the only retail checkout line I've ever seen that fully embraced queueing theory.
They had one long line that everyone got into, and a load balancer up front that would direct you to an open check stand, and at least at the store I went to, in their hayday they had 30 registers open at once!
aembleton 3 hours ago [-]
Aldi in Market Street, Manchester, UK had that for many years. It worked really well. I think it might have put some people off when they saw the length of the queue, but it moved so fast, and you never felt like you'd chosen the wrong checkout as there was only one queue.
Unfortunately, they redesigned the shop a few years ago and got rid of that.
Tempest1981 2 hours ago [-]
Which gave the checkers a 20-30 second break as the customer next-in-line briskly walked from the queue, past register 30, 29, 28, past more impulse items, ... down to register 4.
bartread 3 hours ago [-]
This sort of queuing system is also widely used in Post Office and bank branches in the UK since at least the 1980s.
aresant 10 hours ago [-]
Drooling over PC part reviews in magazines that I could never afford, checking the weekly printed Fry's ad in the local paper to find deals, convincing my parents to drop me at the electronics-nerd-utopia for a lazing weekend afternoon - "Won't you get bored?" . . . "No Mom!"
Iconic building, nostalgic time.
johnvanommen 8 hours ago [-]
> convincing my parents to drop me at the electronics-nerd-utopia for a lazing weekend afternoon - "Won't you get bored?" . . . "No Mom!"
I had a traveling job for a while, I was away from home every single week.
When you first start doing a job like that, you imagine that you'll be doing all kinds of sightseeing. I thought I'd be traipsing through Central Park and eating Cubanos in Miami.
None of that happens IRL; you're so busy working, by the time you have a few hours to kill, all you want to do is space out. Doing tourist stuff gets to be WORK.
After a few months of this, I started to just obsessively spend time at Fry's.
I didn't even really need anything from Fry's. It was just this place I could reliably visit at any tech hub on the west coast. Doesn't matter if you're in Burbank or San Diego or Sacramento or Portland or Seattle: if it's 2010, there's a Fry's you can wander around in for a couple of hours.
I've never been to The Space Needle in Seattle, but I've been to Fry's Electronics numerous times.
taggart 9 hours ago [-]
While attending the University of Arizona in Tucson in the early 90s, I got very confused by posts on Usenet talking about buying computers at Fry’s. You see, the Fry’s grocery store chain still existed in Tucson at the time, so I could not figure out where a grocery store would stock computers!
Needless to say when I moved to the Bay Area after college graduation, I wasted no time visiting the closest Fry’s Electronics. For me, that was the original Fremont location - the one in an office park off Mission Blvd with the space theme inside. I never see that location mentioned any more. It was closed after Fry’s bought the Incredible Universe stores and they moved the Fremont Fry’s to the IU store on Auto Mall Parkway.
topato 9 hours ago [-]
Fry's grocery is still the branding of Kroger in the PHX area
kevinpet 6 hours ago [-]
I was confused when I moved out to Phoenix especially because the logos are pretty similar. Turns out Fry's electronics was started by the sons of the founder of Fry's food.
paradox460 1 hours ago [-]
Phoenix used to have two Fry's electronics too
pimlottc 6 hours ago [-]
I just recently learned from the last Not Just Bikes video [0] that these big box stores tend to be very hard to reuse (even when they don't include a giant spaceship). 99 Percent Invisible has a good article [1] on some of the challenges and a few success stories, but it takes a major effort.
The construction guy in the video said 95% of the building is being recycled. Don't know how accurate that is, but good if true.
ignormies 4 hours ago [-]
The comment you're replying to is referring to the difficulty to repurpose these buildings without complete replacement.
Recycling raw materials is important, but ideally we shouldn't be constructing buildings that are single-tenant, requiring a complete demolition just to make the land have utility again.
user3939382 7 hours ago [-]
My dear dad drove me back and forth between Burbank and Palm Springs 3 times while I figured out motherboard/memory compatibility. Miss dad and miss Fry’s.
dimator 4 hours ago [-]
that's so sweet. :')
reminds me of my mom taking me to radio shack, so many times.
thank you for sharing.
otterpro 9 hours ago [-]
I'm sad to see it end like this. About 20 years ago, I used to go to this Burbank Fry's after work whenever I could and spend hours just browsing. They had this cool 50's sci-fi alien/ufo movie theme inside. Another favorite is the Fry's in Anaheim where I got pc parts to build my first 486 PC in the early 90's. So many memories. I remember buying my first laptop ever, a monochrome thinkpad with personal check (as my credit card limit was too low) and having to call bank to verify my balance; also the day that I bought a Pentium CPU when it first came out, and the time when I got the boxed Windows 95 OS. Those were the days.
dimator 4 hours ago [-]
on top of the selection, the experience of going there is something that doesn't exist anymore: it was just packed with people. i remember more than once deciding to forego a purchase because of the line of people waiting to check out. all those fellow nerds, just wandering the aisles...
those were indeed the days.
mixmastamyk 8 hours ago [-]
Similar... spent hours and hours at the one in Canoga Park during the 90s. (Sometimes DAK too.) Believe it had an "alice in wonderland" theme. Can't even remember what I bought but even perused the magazine section while there.
Oh wait, I do remember buying a 20? foot long (several meter) orange crossover ethernet cable! Then I punched a hole thru the drywall in my apartment and connected my two PCs. One of which had dialup internet, so I could access it and my .mp3s from the other. Pre-wifi by about 5-10 years. :-D
jedberg 4 hours ago [-]
Canoga Park was indeed Alice in Wonderland themed. That was my Fry's too. When the closed down they actioned off all of the Alice themed items inside.
I came this close to buying a 15ft tall Queen of Hearts.
LeoPanthera 9 hours ago [-]
For those in the bay area, Micro Center is opening a branch in Santa Clara.
Fascinating, I drove by it and thought "Oh look, they forgot to take down the sign when the store closed." It will be interesting to see how they do. For computer stuff, Central Computers has been the 'go to' store for a while. Central also has a store on Steven's Creek (a bit further down toward San Jose).
rmason 8 hours ago [-]
Loyal customer of the Detroit area Micro Center. Thought I was the furthest customer that day when I bought my last laptop there coming ninety miles. Salesman said he's sold two machines that day to customers from Grand Rapids and one to someone from Muskegon! That Muskegon customer had travelled nearly 400 miles roundtrip to buy a laptop. I'm fairly technical and yet I haven't ever found a question my salesman couldn't answer.
fuzzythinker 6 hours ago [-]
Thought why would they open one so close to another, until I just found out the 3255 Mission College Blvd one was closed.
bsder 7 hours ago [-]
When the hell are we going to get an Austin or San Antonio Microcenter?
draculero 6 hours ago [-]
According this Reddit thread, it's going to be in the same place as Frys:
That link you posted there says 2025! Wow that makes me excited. Big fan of microcenter.
stergios 8 hours ago [-]
Nice, and in that same plaza is Harbor Freight.
yellowapple 4 hours ago [-]
That sounds like a pretty dangerous combination for my wallet.
9 hours ago [-]
vmladenov 8 hours ago [-]
I read a rumor that they’re aiming for May now
parshimers 9 hours ago [-]
it's sad to see this location go. it was such an amazing store on the inside. the theme had some great homages to Mars Attacks!, as well as a great many other sci-fi films. this album has some good pictures of some of the more notable sculptures in there, but the theme went even farther than just sculptures: https://www.flickr.com/photos/selfishcauses/albums/721577140...
What always bugged me about Fry's at the end was how disrespectful people eventually got to the sample goods on the floor. I swear, every motherboard had their pins smooshed in. Maybe this is `old man remembers` but it wasn't that trashy in its heyday, when admittedly, I was a kid so maybe I didn't notice. Maybe it's because they had to pivot hard to cheap trinkets towards the end and that brought in a different crowd, I'm not sure.
ack_complete 7 hours ago [-]
Given the kinds of returns that Fry's would accept, I wouldn't be surprised if those were returns they had accepted that way. The one near me would attempt to resell laptop power bricks that had been returned with no AC power cord, and one time I got "new" RAM sticks that turned out to be actually used and so busted that a quarter of the data bus lines were inoperative.
jallmann 6 hours ago [-]
I remember buying a Radeon at Fry's (Fountain Valley, Roman Empire), going home, opening it up and... it was something else, a cheap VGA card. They gave me a hard time about taking it back too, 16-year old me didn't know how to cut through the BS so my dad had to go back with me on a 3rd trip and get it sorted out. What a place.
coobird 6 hours ago [-]
That was my local Fry's and I wouldn't touch any returned item with a 10-foot pole given the stories I heard about them, despite them being on discount. This was back in the late 90s before social media, so it must of been word of mouth through my high school friends.
I had the impression that their return process was very lax so you'd have "customers" returning broken items or worse... And they'd end up on the shelves with the white "returned item" sticker with the discounted price.
theturtle32 5 hours ago [-]
And the discount was never even big enough for me to even consider taking that risk for a moment! $395 new, but then returned and restocked with that sticker and only marked down to $390? Nah. I always wondered who was actually dumb enough to fall for that.
Only time I ever considered it was when the returned one was the only one left.
coobird 5 hours ago [-]
I probably still have some LEDs and transistors in my parts bin that (my dad) bought for me from that Fry's.
Fry's really made me feel like a kid in a candy store -- all the PC software and hardware along with electronics parts too. I was less interested in the household appliances, but I think the small Sony Trinitron TV that was in my bedroom was from Fry's.
Oh yes, they also had candy as well, strategically placed in the isle where we'd wait before reaching the cashier. Must have picked up dozens of Reese's peanut butter cups and Skittles over the years.
BrandoElFollito 50 minutes ago [-]
What a nostalgia trip. And I am not even American and never been in a Fry's :)
DataJunkie 6 hours ago [-]
My dad and I spent so many days in that place. The Burbank one wasn’t my favorite. My favorite was the Alice in Wonderland theme in Woodland Hills. Also liked the tropical theme in Manhattan Beach. Our local Fry’s, one of the last ones to open, was sad. Some kind of California nostalgia theme. Palo Alto, cowboy/Wild West… that one was so cramped. I remember the Santa Clara one had a lot of hardware that others didn’t have like large plotters etc.
Definitely miss it. Even the low quality of the items and the rude or useless sales staff lol.
jimt1234 6 hours ago [-]
My favorite thing about Fry's was the weekly sale ads in the newspaper with all the rebate offers. At one time I had at least a dozen cheap-ass "web cams". LOL
In the early days, Fry's would take returns on opened software. I remember returning Borland C compiler after copying many floppies when I was a teen.
brundolf 4 hours ago [-]
My dad and I used to make a habit of going to the Plano, TX location together and just walking around. I'd want to look at the software and the games, he'd want to look at the big TVs. It was one of the few activities we could do together. Lots of nice memories doing that
Personally, visiting friends in California and them taking me to Fry's fir the first time was an experience I'll not forget. We had CompUSA back home. But, Fry's was a whole other level.
Going from being a computer geek in 90s rural midwest to being a computer geek in a Fry's in Silicon Valley in the Tech Bubble was like stepping into a magically wonderful mirror world.
> The Fry's Foods grocery chain began at this location in 1954 when Donald Fry acquired Ray's Market, owned by Ray Dickenson. Joined by his brother, Charles, in 1955, they grew that initial store into a 41-store chain which they sold in 1972. Charles gifted a portion of the proceeds to his three sons, enabling them to launch the first store of what would one day become the highly successful Fry's Electronics retail chain.
shoelessone 9 hours ago [-]
A bit similar for me, I grew up in the Midwest and spent a lot of time wandering around CompUSA and Circuit City / Best Buy when I was a kid. When I was old enough and had some reason to go out West, Fry's was one of the top things on my list of things to go see, it felt like a pilgrimage of sorts.
supportengineer 4 hours ago [-]
I don’t know what kind of world we are leaving for the next generation. It’s completely devoid of any character or authenticity.
sema4hacker 8 hours ago [-]
The first Windows machine I ever bought was a cheap advertised 386 deal at the San Jose Fry's in the 90's. The sales guy took me around to load up a shopping cart with chassis, mother board, memory, hard disk, floppy, etc., with each item stocked in separate store departments. Probably around $200 total. Took it all home, put it together, and it worked reliably for years.
SOLAR_FIELDS 8 hours ago [-]
As a kid my dad always was building computers and I’ll never forget the first time he took me to a Fry’s and I could just pick all the parts to build my PC right then and there. What an experience that was.
wileydragonfly 9 hours ago [-]
I miss both Incredible Universe and Fry’s a great deal. Incredible Universe was the only store I ever saw that let me play a NeoGeo and CDi.
johnvanommen 8 hours ago [-]
I think the best Fry's of all was the former Incredible Universe location, just south of Portland. I believe it was the only Fry's that didn't charge sales tax.
The Fry's by I8 in San Diego was an Incredible Universe too. (Not the Fry's in north county, the one further south.)
mrpippy 5 hours ago [-]
That Mission Valley San Diego Fry’s seemingly bought all of Incredible Universe’s old delivery trucks too, and never repainted them. Well into the 2000s, it was hilarious to still see Incredible Universe trucks driving around delivering appliances.
(Also I remember going to the North County/San Marcos one the weekend it opened, think I bought a 128 MB flash drive for $30. Now it’s a Costco Business Center)
jimt1234 6 hours ago [-]
The Fry's in San Diego (on I15, near I8) has recently been demo'ed. It's an empty dirt lot now. Not sure what's going in there; probably condos.
raincom 7 hours ago [-]
Fry's brothers made a biggest mistake of not taking the company public during the dot com bubble era. Had they taken these stores public, they would have diversified their investments.
TimTheTinker 7 hours ago [-]
I used to shop at this Fry's for supplies when I was an ECE major at Cal Poly Pomona. Sad to see it go.
(I'm sad to see local electronics supply stores in general disappear.)
slicktux 9 hours ago [-]
Gone are the times when I could spend some time perusing around Fry’s…looking at all the discrete components and computers. It was sad seeing it die too; all the empty shelves filled with the same item spread out…
esafak 7 hours ago [-]
If you're near Cincinnati be sure to visit Jungle Jim's, which is like Fry's for food, only way bigger.
arnonejoe 7 hours ago [-]
Anyone remember the one in Sunnyvale in the early 90s. It had a circuit board floor?
2 hours ago [-]
mmmBacon 9 hours ago [-]
I wonder what they did with the Fry’s 747.
bigfatkitten 4 hours ago [-]
They had a 727-200Adv at one point too. I assume it's been turned into Coke cans by now.
Sad, but had a few great memories, such as bringing my kids there 8 or so years ago. We bought some cool stuff amongst the Hollywood props, then we sat in and watched one of the Star Wars films in its small theatre. They were young and had a blast.
b0bb1z3r0 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
black_13 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Rendered at 10:29:03 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Of the Burbank, Fountain Valley, San Marcos, San Diego, Anaheim Hills, Roseville, Sacramento, Fremont, Las Vegas and Sunnyvale locations, I think I liked the San Diego one most for selection (it was a former Incredible Universe), but the Roseville and Las Vegas ones had the wildest themes, even more than the Burbank UFO. But the Fremont location when I ended up there in 2019 was deader than a doornail, and it was like waiting for the next hit to kill them. The next hit came sooner than I thought.
I must admit that “Big Boob Babes” was my favorite CD-ROM purchase in 1994. No, it was not a DVD
This morning, I was just watching the video of “The Distance” by Cake, and I vividly recall when that was released and played on my car radio, and the metaphor of corporate slavery was not lost on 24-year-old me.
My favorite store was the one with the Mesoamerican temples and stuff.
Also, remember Weird Stuff Warehouse?
[1] https://www.greenfoothills.org/pga-tour-eyes-frys-course
[2] https://archive.is/1sukx
Just being able to look at all the various components was a good education.
Fry's was like a museum of common and obscure electronic parts, devices and strangely miscellaneous stuff (mundane office supplies, home appliance accessories, etc.). It was definitely the go to place for computer building blocks and related supplies.
It was amazing what could be found there. One really great thing was relay racks and all kinds of shelves and attachments for them. Too good to pass up I bought one. It was used in my office (for webserver and LAN) and still houses my home server.
Like everywhere else Fry's closed unceremoniously. I guess the chain couldn't withstand the growing online competition and waning interest in desktop machines. Too bad they had to go, now and then it would be so convenient if neighborhood purveyors of "exotic" electronics were still around.
Speed up electronics prototyping in support of future manufacturing.
They had one long line that everyone got into, and a load balancer up front that would direct you to an open check stand, and at least at the store I went to, in their hayday they had 30 registers open at once!
Unfortunately, they redesigned the shop a few years ago and got rid of that.
Iconic building, nostalgic time.
I had a traveling job for a while, I was away from home every single week.
When you first start doing a job like that, you imagine that you'll be doing all kinds of sightseeing. I thought I'd be traipsing through Central Park and eating Cubanos in Miami.
None of that happens IRL; you're so busy working, by the time you have a few hours to kill, all you want to do is space out. Doing tourist stuff gets to be WORK.
After a few months of this, I started to just obsessively spend time at Fry's.
I didn't even really need anything from Fry's. It was just this place I could reliably visit at any tech hub on the west coast. Doesn't matter if you're in Burbank or San Diego or Sacramento or Portland or Seattle: if it's 2010, there's a Fry's you can wander around in for a couple of hours.
I've never been to The Space Needle in Seattle, but I've been to Fry's Electronics numerous times.
Needless to say when I moved to the Bay Area after college graduation, I wasted no time visiting the closest Fry’s Electronics. For me, that was the original Fremont location - the one in an office park off Mission Blvd with the space theme inside. I never see that location mentioned any more. It was closed after Fry’s bought the Incredible Universe stores and they moved the Fremont Fry’s to the IU store on Auto Mall Parkway.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7-e_yhEzIw
1: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/ghost-boxes-reusing-a...
Recycling raw materials is important, but ideally we shouldn't be constructing buildings that are single-tenant, requiring a complete demolition just to make the land have utility again.
reminds me of my mom taking me to radio shack, so many times.
thank you for sharing.
those were indeed the days.
Oh wait, I do remember buying a 20? foot long (several meter) orange crossover ethernet cable! Then I punched a hole thru the drywall in my apartment and connected my two PCs. One of which had dialup internet, so I could access it and my .mp3s from the other. Pre-wifi by about 5-10 years. :-D
I came this close to buying a 15ft tall Queen of Hearts.
https://www.microcenter.com/site/stores/santa-clara.aspx
Well, maybe. It's delayed months at this point.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/1h5r409/microcenter...
Painting and 3-D scan of Burbank Frys, https://savefrys.com/tributes/ and https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/rip-frys-162eeef6095343ec8b3...
Roman remnants in Phoenix store, https://nickdiak.com/2021/02/an-empire-crumbles-retrospectiv...
Oil-themed store in Houston, https://houstonhistoricretail.com/electronics/frys-electroni...
I had the impression that their return process was very lax so you'd have "customers" returning broken items or worse... And they'd end up on the shelves with the white "returned item" sticker with the discounted price.
Only time I ever considered it was when the returned one was the only one left.
Fry's really made me feel like a kid in a candy store -- all the PC software and hardware along with electronics parts too. I was less interested in the household appliances, but I think the small Sony Trinitron TV that was in my bedroom was from Fry's.
Oh yes, they also had candy as well, strategically placed in the isle where we'd wait before reaching the cashier. Must have picked up dozens of Reese's peanut butter cups and Skittles over the years.
Definitely miss it. Even the low quality of the items and the rude or useless sales staff lol.
Personally, visiting friends in California and them taking me to Fry's fir the first time was an experience I'll not forget. We had CompUSA back home. But, Fry's was a whole other level.
Going from being a computer geek in 90s rural midwest to being a computer geek in a Fry's in Silicon Valley in the Tech Bubble was like stepping into a magically wonderful mirror world.
> The Fry's Foods grocery chain began at this location in 1954 when Donald Fry acquired Ray's Market, owned by Ray Dickenson. Joined by his brother, Charles, in 1955, they grew that initial store into a 41-store chain which they sold in 1972. Charles gifted a portion of the proceeds to his three sons, enabling them to launch the first store of what would one day become the highly successful Fry's Electronics retail chain.
The Fry's by I8 in San Diego was an Incredible Universe too. (Not the Fry's in north county, the one further south.)
(Also I remember going to the North County/San Marcos one the weekend it opened, think I bought a 128 MB flash drive for $30. Now it’s a Costco Business Center)
(I'm sad to see local electronics supply stores in general disappear.)
https://www.747sp.com/747sp-production-list/21992-447/
United purchased it for $1 in 1986
later asking price was $8.0 million in 2004
And Mr William Fry purchased it for $10 in 2005
trail gets murky though around 2009?