Frys Goes Belly Up

Fry's in Burbank was where I saw my first flat screen TV - a 46" Philips plasma with a $14,000 price tag. It was barely connected to a source and the picture was mostly snow. In SD.
 
Fry's in Dallas was where I saw my first flat screen using the soap opera effect processor for a movie. I thought, WTF is that?

But they had everything, Fluke Instruments, electronic circuit board parts, soldering supplies.
 
Frys was unique - a vast wonderland of tech where you could get hands-on experience with all the products. There's never been anything quite like it and probably never will be again.
 
The First time I drove to Frys in Burbank and saw this, I knew this store was something special.

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filmguy123 said:
When all the brick and mortar are gone, we may realize just how much we missed wandering these museums of products with a bunch of geeks to point us in the right direction. I'll be telling my kids about it someday and they'll look at me like I used to look at my dad talking about an 8 track tape.
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Yep. I remember doing that with Best Buy, probably 15 years ago. And one of the large computer warehouse stores in the mid-late 90's/early 00's. It's kind of like having an actual magazine instead of reading something on-line. Sometimes it's just a better way to do it. And sometimes you find something you weren't even looking for, but is that thing that's a game changer, and you would have never seen it otherwise.
 
Loved going to Frys back in the day, but not surprised. In my last couple visits to LA I went and the Burbank store was deserted, with half empty shelves, and this was before the pandemic. Shocked they didn't successfully transition to online sales. They had the warehouse space, wouldn't have taken much to compete with other online retailers that put them out of business.
 
My local, pretty big camera shop went out of business before the pandemic.

Competition seems so brutal...just a grind to get by now I imagine versus easily selling a few trucks of $75K betacams back-in-the-day.
 
I spent so much time at Frys, especially the Alien Crash land Burbank store. Even our local up here in Oxnard was a cool store although
it was missing a good theme. I have bought hundreds of thousands of dollars from them over the years, a lot of our appliances, stacks of
hard drives, RAM, presents, Apple Accessories, even an Estes Model Rocket for my son when he was kid.

Going to miss that place, but it is inevitable, brick & mortar is on it's last leg and there is nothing any of us can do about it because more people
value "the cheapest" than value an in-person, hands-on shopping experience. I wonder how much longer the Costcos and Best Buys will be around?
Amazon pretty much is swallowing all retail.
 
It's happening everywhere. I remember, when I was in the UK going to a store called Jessops. Huge place, packed with great gear at all levels. Went bust maybe ten years ago. And then there's Yodobashi Camera in Japan. They had a massive place in Sendai and many other cities. They're still there but now selling mostly consumer gear alongside vacuum cleaners, etc. Sad but inevitable.
 
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soarprod said:
Every time I go there they are very busy. Between the custom gaming rigs and simple live streaming, equipment is flying off the shelves.
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Hopefully their management structure and business finances are good. Selling a lot of merchandise (I used to manage Circuit City stores in thge 80s) is meaningless if your margins suck and the corporate infrastructure are morons.
That's my take on retail. Moving merch is just the very first building block to surviving and just a small part of longevity or success, especially in low margin electronics. Being diversified, agile and proactive are just as important. Retail
is dying rapidly, and competing with Amazon is pointless at this time so how can they survive for the next five years? I hope they do, really hope they do but the prognosis is grim.
 
The historical cycle for electronics store was to start in small/mom and pop boutiques, then go larger, lager and larger. In the 1980's, there were still a bunch of smaller chains around the US. By the mid-1990's, they were mostly driven out of business by the mass market chains, who were subsequently driven out by the megastores. And then by the internet.

My take that it'll soon come back to the boutiques because one ain't getting no service with the online sites. But it's going to have to again start with the high end/high margin products. And it's unlikely to be in consumer audio and video, since that has become a disposable product.
 
filmguy123 said:
Hah! You can tell which generation someone is from based on whether they think the internet is "like a retail store, only digital"; or if they think a retail store is "like the internet, but physical."

But I hear you, Fry's wasn't anything like Bestbuy with a slim smattering of highlighted products, it felt more as if the product existed, you could simply wander the cataloged aisles until you found it.
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That's what I'll miss the most, just cruising the aisles there and coming across some weird, random thing. The first consumer drone I ever saw was for sale at Frys quite a few years ago.
First LED ribbon lights I ever saw were at Frys. It was a cool place in it's day. Where else could you buy Jelly Bellys along with a Wolf Industrial Range to compliment your PC motherboard wiring
retention clips? ;-) Truly a one stop shop for Christmas shopping, I could find something for EVERYONE on my list there, from Luddite to ultra nerd.
 
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