Thus falls another giant. The sunset of the in-person, parts-picking excursion is upon us. No longer can your dad drive you to a temple of computing treasures to pick your PC, piece by piece, from the hallowed halls of a big square space that feels larger than life.
Retail giants like Circuit City, Radio Shack (mostly), and now Fry’s may be gone, but the spirit of lawless fixing and making they could invoke lives on. Weep not that these evil days are ours; these are not the last days of our house. For the parts-picking experience lives on—online, and in our hearts. So say the bereaved (who happen to work here):
Miles Robinson—Developer Project Manager
Among my friends in the early 00s, it was a rite of passage to build a gaming rig from scratch. We would make a pizza party out of it whenever anyone would build one, and there would be 5 people hanging around giving conflicting advice on how to best handle wire management and air flow. The big event that kicked it off was when everyone piled into the car and we all went to Fry’s to get the parts. Fry’s was where real PC users went. For some reason, a lot of my memories of Fry’s are associated with failed overclocking experiments, wisps of blue smoke and the smell of ozone.
Eric Essen—Chief Tool Officer
It was 1998. I had shrunk and entered Wonderland. There was a 12-foot-tall rabbit standing in front of me and giant playing cards raining down from the sky. I’d been to Disneyland and Las Vegas, but I’d never seen anything like this before. $10 stacks of CDR’s, a complete PC for $99.99, (including a 56k modem). This was the full-color, Sunday funny papers of geekdom.
A decade later I was packing loose tools into a plastic bag with an inkjet-printed header card—one of the first Pro Tech Toolkit prototypes—and sending it to a Fry’s buyer in San Jose. I had made the contact by blindly navigating a phone tree; a week later they were inviting us to an open buyer day. After a whole day of butterflies, the meeting went great. We got the green light to test some products, and we built a great ongoing relationship.
We not only sold tools to Fry’s, but collaborated to expand their service departments, and provide training on new devices. An iFixit tool display eventually wound up in the same spot where I first stood in awe before the rabbit in Wonderland, all those years ago.
Andrew Goldheart—Product Engineer
I shopped at Fry’s for my first self-built PC in 2002, and while that computer has been Ship-of-Theseus’d several times over, the motherboard still powers my occasionally-booted Windows XP machine.
Jeff Snyder—E-commerce Director
Thanksgiving at Grandmama’s always meant a weekend trip to Fry’s. The one near Grandmama had a player piano that was either never on or was always broken. (I was 10-ish when we started going, and always thought it was roped off because they were waiting for someone to come play it). I saved my pennies and bought a refurbished Palm IIIe on sale in 1999 or 2000. It was the first, but not last, time I was disappointed by technology.
Megan Costello—Parts Testing Assistant Lead
I got my first laptop (a Sony Vaio, circa 2006) from the one in Fountain Valley — insisted on using my own money so that it was all mine and I didn’t have to share. Plus, ours had some pretty cool features that were fun to play around when Dad was in there for other stuff. Come to think of it, that Vaio lasted well into 2015 with some upgrades.
Kadan Sharpe—iFixit Pro Support
Bought my first “1337 g4m3r” graphics card from Fry’s when I was like 17. It was kind of surreal, seeing so many parts all in one place.
Sterling Hirsh—Developer
It would have been about 2008 and some friends and I were the very first group in line for Black Friday. I joined up with them a bit before midnight and the line was already long. By the time it opened, the line was all the way around the building. I never did any Black Friday craziness again, but it was fun to do once. Among other things, I got a PC case that I still use today!
Katie Peña—Shipping Associate
Only one I have been to was the one in San José, but when we went to visit family we would go there sometimes. My friend does a blog of weird stuff in California, and has pictures of the other stores.
Scott Stephens—Shipping Supervisor
My father was an avid fan of Fry’s, and one of lil’ Scott’s earliest memories involves playing in the replica NASA Space Shuttle in one of their L.A. stores and pretending to be an astronaut. I grew up loving retail electronic stores (R.I.P. Circuit City), but thinking about Fry’s will always give me those warm childhood feels.
Will PC modding survive in this new world barren of local parts stores? Almost certainly. Will we miss the convenience of driving-distance options, and grieve the in-store experience? Most assuredly. But the real Fry’s, is the friends we made along the way. And everyone, even Grandmama, can keep that spirit alive if we keep fixing.
34 opmerkingen
Yep. Rip Fry’s. In a world where massive corporations rule, it was only a matter of time before they had the life squeezed out of them; just as it will be with the rest of us, eventually, unless these corps are reeled in.
Robert - Antwoord
I made countless trips to Fry's in Houston working on a complex project that eventually won an international R&D 100 Award in October of 2020. This loss is incalculable.
Greg George - Antwoord
Frys failed because they failed to innovate and market effectively. Best Buy and MicroCenter are still here even tho Giant's like Amazon and Alibaba are breathing down their backs. To get people to part with their hard earned scratch you must do more than simply exist.
Jerome Williams - Antwoord
I traveled and visited many Fry's over the years. Any visit would result in a purchase of something until a couple years ago. The shelves started to get emptier and emptier until there was little left on the shelves. I used to ask the associates when was the store closing, always received an excuse involving the lack of inventory. Their final closure was years in the making and obvious to anyone that visited many of the stores over the last several years. They'll be missed but Microcenter while not as large or diverse will fill a large majority of the gap left by Fry's failure. Sad to see them gone but it's be obvious for a while they were struggling.
Jim Conrad - Antwoord
Agreed. Really too bad. I always enjoyed going to the west houston and bay area blvd stores but they quit stocking things I was interested in and service badly deteriorated. Their electronic components were straight out of a museum. The last time I went there I tried to buy a chrome bit and it took 15 minutes to get someone to help me as there was only an empty box on the shelf. After waiting around 30 minutes while she “looked in the warehouse” was informed that she went to lunch and left the building.
Bob Fisher -
I regularly visited the Manhattan Beach Fry’s location throughout high school and early college and even had an entire PC built with parts from the store. While the call customer service wasn’t great, every employee in the store made sure I got what I needed, even more so making sure I get replacement parts or even orders for stuff I needed at times. I purchased a good 5 computers from Frys because they knew what they were talking about, I’d end up picking up a GPU after having a 30 minute conversation with an employee, it was a more comfortable feeling compared to Best Buy. I hear people constantly saying at least MicroCenter is still around when I can barely find one in my area. Guess I’ll have to haggle at Best Buy for overpriced PC parts that are 6 years old. Store may have had an outdated feel to it, but geez it was a tech wonderland for me.
natclay96 - Antwoord
This whole thing is simply sad. %#*@ the Corona Virus for killing off the best and funnest, most necessary things of my life. Please return someday, FRYS. Like an aftershock from an earthquake. We will be waiting, with wads of cash in hand, for your triumphant return!
snowfreeze - Antwoord
I remember when “Incredible Universe” in Sacramento became Frys. There has been a shift in Culture and selling PCs with actual salespeople in person is no longer what people desire. I will miss the great selection of Pro class tools and components and the overall Vibe of the place.
Eric Holmes - Antwoord
Welp, it appears any rights to using our brains and creativity is being harnessed by hostile take overs and farmed to desperate shot callers to control any aspects of the human via ego to find the next big nothing from their own imaginations. Bully is afraid of competition. Fear of growing old and less useful to a world they assume they created.
Angela Dear - Antwoord
Well, at least some of us still have MicroCenter.
Steve Gemignani - Antwoord
I remember visiting the first Fry’s when I was doing some training at SGI in Mountain View. They had stacks of Fairchild chip manuals and tons of other stuff probably donated (or pulled out of the trash bins) by Silicon Valley companies. I used to joke that it was the only store that had potato chips on one side of the isle and computer chips on the other. When the Fry’s opened near my work in Burbank every Friday became Fry’s Day. We would load up the car, have some junk food lunch and spend an hour wandering Fry’s. Good memories.
Don Sears - Antwoord
As someone who built his first home computer in 1982 out of parts scrounged at a San José swap meet (http://bit.ly/2MXAspK), the death of Fry’s is like the death of a beloved niece or nephew: not of my generation, but still part of the family and to be mourned.
Rik Myslewski - Antwoord
I probably spent enough time at my local Fry's (City of Industry, CA) that some of the seasonal employees surely thought I was a long time employee or was connected to the company in some way. The first year or so after it opened asking sales associates in the PC parts area so many questions about MBs, optical drives, RAM ( in MBs not GBs), video and sound cards, and everything else about upgrading or putting together my own PC that, well heck, that was my electronics University. Never purchased much until I realized I didn't need to know how how to solder to build a PC and then the flood gates opened and I built three PCs in less than a year and sold everyone to friends to get more money to build a better one. I will sorely miss Fry's as there is nothing quite like buying what you need or don't need right on the spot, waiting for UPS, FEDEX or the USPS is just not the same and most of the time what you ordered is not what you receive or is DOA. Returning something you purchase online nowadays just terrible.
Gennipher - Antwoord
I will miss them and their location in Palo Alto. You could smell the VC money in the air strolling the parts aisles mid 90s through the first dot com bust. You could spend hours in their dvd section alone.
Dick Powell - Antwoord
I lived and worked in the SF Bay from ‘94 to ‘97 when I return home to Scotland getting a company internal transfer.
That meant regular trips back to the Bay for company meetings and conferences.
I’d arrive, tired and jet lagged after a 10 hour flight at SFO, pick up a car and drive directly to Sunnyvale’s Fry Electronics just to get my “fix” in my technology temple of worship, Then I’d go check into a hotel and get some sleep.
I frequented Palo Alto’s “wild west” themed Fry’s as well as the much larger Sunnyvale one almost every weekend I live in the Bay (I lived in Mountain View).
It was the first place I ever saw a computer track pad (Palo Alto Fry’s) and a 3D virtual reality headset (also PA) - and that would have been around 1995!
George Taylor - Antwoord
I spent many Silicon. Valley lunches haunting the aisles of Frys, first on Oakmead, then Lawrence, then Arquez. For smaller parts I always went to Halted, but for larger stuff, always Frys. It was an important part of my development as an engineer. First we lose Weird Stuff and now Frys. I hope something appears in its place. For now, its a very pleasant memory.
joe - Antwoord
Good riddance.
Years ago my wife’s parent’s got sucked in by them with an ad for an HP computer for $150.00. By the time they got out of there they had convinced them they needed to spend close to $600.00. They did not know any better and got took big time.
John - Antwoord
Y’all make me feel very old. I built my first laptop back in the mid-1990s. By the time Fry’s came to be big, I had already passed onto shopping for most things online.
Kathleen - Antwoord
RIP Fry’s, Will Micro-Center be next?
adicks - Antwoord
Fry;s started my families foray into tech building and repair. My youngest now 21, loved to accompany my on a Fry run! The last run we made was to Fry’s Atlanta the store was so unbearably empty. Picked up batteries and could not find anything else to buy. They will be missed, but if you don’t adapt, you just go extinct
Jim Halsey - Antwoord
I always made it a checklist item when on vacation to try and find a Fry’s. We would sometimes travel over an hour from where we were staying, to make the pilgrimage to a Fry’s if there was one close enough that my wife wouldn’t get too upset over the drive. I loved being able to go in and peruse items that I couldn’t find while at home, or could only get online. Gone are the days of being able to see and choose something from a shelf, and being able to talk to someone in person that knew something about the hardware before you buy it. Now having to listen to uninformed sales people at box stores that don’t have the same passion for the process and discovery of building anything from the ground up is, at best, a mentally painful and disappointing experience.
Sean Reid - Antwoord
I would buy the Friday newspaper just for the Fry's ad on the back page of the sports section. Roaming around the store hoping to find the deals in the ad and usually buying loads of extras!
Ron Christoffel - Antwoord
I loved the “Mars Attacks” theme of the Fry’s store in Burbank! The “crashed” flying saucer above the main entrance, and the full-sized US Army Jeep cut in half with a “plasma ray” along with a couple of soldiers (manikins dressed in Army uniforms) was always a highlight of my visit.
Over the years, I built more than a couple PCs (and upgraded many more) from parts sourced from Fry’s. There’s no substitute for holding the box in your hands, reading the specs, while determining if this RAM will fit in this motherboard in this case with these drives. The sales staff were always very knowledgeable and helpful when you had a question. You just can’t get that from Amazon. They will be missed.
SLSanchez79 - Antwoord
I was at the opening of the first Fry’s store in Sunnyvale, CA in May 1985. The original concept was to provide a retail outlet for electronic components for engineers/designers in Silicon Valley. There were no computers or other finished electronic gadgets for sale. This was only a few months after the IBM PC with its open architecture was introduced. Almost all semiconductor manufactures has shelf space although most of us were not sure the concept would work. Manufacturer’s component catalogs and application data was available. These data books were always hard to come by for most engineers. There was an equal amount of snack foods and grocery items stocked so that customers could have something to nosh on throughout the night as they worked against deadline to finish their projects.
That first store of about 20,00 sq.ft. was in an office park nest to the Social Security office. Within a few weeks, especially at lunch time, you could not find parking within 2 -3 blocks.
mkturner - Antwoord
Yes, I find it amazing that in the beginning you could buy parts and tools from broken glass display cases, then 30 years and many big stores later, they were again using broken fixtures to sell……off brand toys like a flea market.
They ruined themselves by hiring the people they did to run the stores. In the early days the store managers knew business and how to keep customers. That went out the window about the time they decided to expand everywhere.
Deciding to ignore the internet and to have a website from 1993 was also bizarre for such a pioneer in there space.
Joe Smalls -
My local Fry’s was in Wildsonville, OR, and they had an employee I’d always seek out if I had a complicated bit of electronics to buy. A beautiful woman, tough and absurdly smart. I called her the “tech b#&&h” in my head, and she was, but wow! She was phenomenal. I ever asked her a question about a component, a board. or a system, no matter how obscure, where her answer was not encyclopedic, detailed, actionable, and completely correct. I’m sure that other geeks that shopped there know who I mean, and wondered how in h&%l* she could be so amazingly great.
I have to wonder where she is now, probably running NASA or a mid-sized country, or maybe the real power behind Elon Musk.
Bill Babcock - Antwoord
I was in the Campbell Fry's looking at a wireless gaming controller that looked like a star trek phaser. The associate asked me what games I was going to play. I told him I was going to tear it apart to see what chips it had. He was shocked I was going to void the warranty.
I was in one in Los Angeles. Alice in wonderland theme. I complemented a manager on the drug theme. He was shocked. I pointed out the huge pokadoted mushroom with the hula smoking caterpillar.
I was part of a startup in the early 90's. I was able to outfit an electronic lab from fry's. 15 years later, very few parts and tools on the shelves.
bandit - Antwoord
This article, especially the part by Miles Robinson is insulting. We did not have a Fry 's electronics in Central Illinois, and if there was one in Chicago I was not driving 3 hours there to buy parts. That's idiotic. Ask we had and now barely have is small boutiques. And that annoying Best Buy.
Emulator Retro - Antwoord
Who remembers Incredible Universe? As I recall it had a circus and a McDonalds inside the store! Those Tandy/Radio Shack stores along with Fry’s were the best for us electronics geeks. I could never escape that place without buying and they knew it! Online is the future, but it will never be as satisfying. (Except for iFixit and SparkFun of course!)
Benton Bullwnkel - Antwoord
Fry's is gone but Best Buy lives. Fry's I'll always have the memories
Robert Allen - Antwoord
Sometimes the past is better left there.
Speaking of which, if you ever want to actually talk to me (instead of just blocking and muting me everywhere) about that time my payment got screwed up… you know where I am. If not, it's in the past and it will stay there. I don't actually care that much, I just like it when everyone gets along.
But, hey, if you want to walk, walk… I just wonder, with customer ‘service’ like that, who will write an article like this for you, when you go the way of Fry's…?
Christopher Havel - Antwoord
The last 10 years was terrible for fry's and made me not want to go in. I still fondly remember going to the first and only store when it opened up thinking it was the most amazing place in the world. Half of the store was a grocery store and the other half was a wonderland for a 15 year old that was heavily into computers and electronics.
I lived about 3 miles from the store and spent WAY too much time and money there. I saved what seemed like forever to get my first HDD there, a 40 Megabyte drive that could wake the house with the noise it made.
Joe Smalls - Antwoord
Seemed like you were never quite sure how the trip to Fry's would go, for me it would end up one of three ways like the title of one of my favorite spaghetti westerns, Good, Bad or Ugly. But I will definitely, absolutely, positively miss the one and only Fry's Electronics. I'm actually kinda sad how goofy is that..
Tommy Fury - Antwoord
Hey Eric!
I thought it might be fun to tell the story of how iFixit got into Fry’s, from the Fry’s side.
I had heard of iFixit before you approached us, as your teardowns were well-known online. What I liked about your tools was that it wasn’t about price, it was about quality. At the time, the majority of our precision tool category was built to a cost, and that reflected in the quality we were seeing on the shelf. So when that package landed on my desk, I knew that I had to find some way to give it a try. I was a bit skeptical at first, as we hadn’t had a great history with premium tools, but customers really responded to what we put out there, and the momentum built as we expanded the lineup. I was excited when you guys were able to land the partnership with Jeff & the service team, because it was a really good fit, and it’s so rare for those types of deals to come to fruition. I’ve been keeping an eye iFixit after leaving Fry’s, and I’m glad to see your business continues to grow. Hope all is well!
Corry Addison - Antwoord