81 points by jnord 5 days ago | 97 comments on HN
| Neutral Editorial · v3.7· 2026-02-26 03:15:57· from archive
Summary Information Access & Privacy Neutral
This article about Fry's Electronics closure is a straightforward consumer/business narrative with minimal explicit human rights engagement. Structurally, the domain demonstrates positive accessibility and open access practices supporting equitable information access, but these are offset by third-party tracking that undermines privacy rights. The content itself shows mild positive signals for freedom of expression through publication and reader commentary, but lacks substantive engagement with UDHR principles.
I know it's a damn shame. Back in the day when we actually went out shopping in stores that was always one of favorite places to go, even if just to walk around and check out all the cool shit they had.
I would drive hours to get to the nearest Fry's to me, to pick up some new gear. Being able to browse everything and look around was great. For me, online ordering of parts probably hurt Fry's, but the real reason was after a while, you were never sure if the video card you were buying was new, or actually a return item, and after a couple times having to drive all the way back for something that was missing parts, the whole thing just seemed way too risky. Amazon and Newegg nailed that door shut.
> So when they finally closed, there were some people who were sad, but there were also people who were happy to see it go.
Good lord. The nearest Radio Shack (17 miles away) closed, so to get a resistor or cap, it's "order online". That's about as environmentally sound as nuclear testing above ground (perhaps a slight hyperbole there).
But not all that far-fetched. One time, I visited my daughter's place and found a broken wire in the thermostat, so I drove to the Shack, got a cheap iron and solder and fixed it. (When there WAS a Radio Shack)
I replaced my old Nikon F2 with a refurbished FM that cost less than the repairs. Go to buy some color slide or black and white film. Same store (and lucky to have one within 50 miles). "We don't carry those"
I found a flip phone in the fry’s parking lot, my dad turned it in to security, who accepted it with a smirk. I had gone through it and wrote down the phone number belonging to the phone. We called the number a week later and the guy said not only did they not have it in their lost and found, so he had to buy a new phone, but he spent hours with Verizon to make some kind of charges that hit after losing it go away. Maybe 2002 - 2003.
Fry's had an interesting warranty program that I really enjoyed and their employees would build a PC for you with the parts you purchased for free or help you put it together. This made it really nice for someone who was about to drop $2,000 on some parts and didn't trust their hands to break some pins etc.
Their warranty was transferable and they let you know about it. They would print the warranty paperwork out twice and give you a sticker you could put on the inside of the case for whoever ended up having the PC later it was still valid as it was the parts under warranty.
This meant that if you had a part that later on went out, like a motherboard, you could tell them the warranty information or show up at the store with the PC and they would figure it out. I thought this would be garbage like how Apple or Best Buy just wants you to buy a new one and try to scam you out of warranty replacement, but they actually would replace the part as needed and if that part no longer existed they would replace it with a similar one. I took a PC back there that had a motherboard under warranty that stopped working and that motherboard no longer existed, so they dutifully went and found a motherboard that had those same minimum features and substituted it without a cost.
The surge in laptops contributed, too. The opportunity or need for expansion cards, additional memory or storage upgrades, and peripherals disappeared or shrank.
I used to think of the sales staff as the United Nations of Fry's. It was always thrilling to see someone starting their American dream, even if the service was haphazard.
The Egyptian Fry's in Campbell was my local store. Fry's was amazing - you just had to know that the salespeople were on commission and avoid them. I never had one come up to me in line and try to get a commission, but that honestly doesn't surprise me. As a nerd, I would even sometimes go and just help random people there - the salespeople sure didn't help anyone there!
Fry’s would frequently accept returned items, and instead of returning them to the vendor to refurbish them, they would simply re-shrink wrap them and put them back on the shelf with a different colored price sticker. The item could be fine, or it could be damaged, have parts missing, etc.
A term was coined for this: “re-Fryed.” As in, “don't buy that video card! It’s been re-Fryed!”
I loved Fry's in their prime, probably the early 2000s. I think what made them special was largely a product of the time. Personal Computing was booming and new products you'd never seen before were coming out every day, and this one mega store had everything. It was fun just to walk around and survey what was going on in that moment in time.
From my perspective the main things that killed it were online shopping, as the article mentions, and computing just becoming more boring, at least from a hardware perspective. Once the iPhone came out, that became many people's primary computing device or computing peripheral. Everything you needed was just an app or software which you could download online. The great mass of consumers just need a laptop and a few commodity peripherals, and they can get all that at Walmart. Then Newegg came along and really ate the PC hobbyist market.
Eventually Fry's succumbed to the GameStop effect - their primary market is completely eaten out by online competition, so they fill their retail space with cheap garbage to make ends meet. The last few times I visited my local Fry's it was more empty shelves and cheap bargain bins than anything I was interested in buying.
It was a sad end, but not surprising. I just don't think you can justify having large specialty stores anymore when online shopping is so convenient and the options are so much more plentiful.
I’ve been missing the local Fry’s and recently learned that MicroCenter has opened a store in Santa Clara. It felt like heaven! It was pure fun to meet all fellow enthusiasts who would swarm the demo DGX Spark to figure out if a couple of those would be better than a Blackwell. That’s my happy place now and I didn’t even spend a dime on the first visit.
Coming from the Midwest I visited Fry's for the first time in early 2020 weeks before COVID. I had always heard amazing things about the store, for years. It was on my short list of places to visit on the west coast. That place was not a healthy operation. Close to half the shelves were empty, the place was generally a mess and needed a deep clean, and worst of all the employees seemed entirely disinterested in helping me.
When news came that they had shut down I was entirely unsurprised.
COVID might have sped things up a little but that location at least was on its last legs.
There were just horrible in their last years. easily one of the worst places I've shopped at. Multiple locations too.
Microcenter is around now, they're not as bad but they suck. They force their cashiers to ask and demand for your personal information (phone number,address,etc..). At least online retailers won't give you dirty looks when you give them dummy info.
People are nostalgic about these places, but if they can't realize their disadvantage and at least provide decent customer experience in person, it's probably best if they went away. I wish there was a costco-like decent brick-and-mortar electronics store (costco is famous for treating it's employees well, and then having them treat customers well, as well as their wide range of high-quality items). I can order just about any piece of electronics, including things like resistors and get it within a day or two most of the times. it sure beats fighting traffic, and vying for salesperson's attention for help about an item, standing around a locked cabinet hoping someone would have the time to come and unlock it for you, so you can give them your money, standing in lines and the aforementioned cashier experience. These problems are not inherent. They are direct effects of mismanagement (except the traffic part).
Sacramento Fry’s off Northgate was my go-to store circa ’98. Whenever a friend wanted to build a PC, that’s where we went. The employees were great; the salespeople, not so much.
I still made the trip every holiday season until around 2017 but it had been going progressively downhill since about 2007. The expanded café, the drastic reduction in books and magazines, PC parts getting strip-mined and never restocked, audio/video media slowly disappearing; you could feel the shift.
I miss the SacBee flyer and the last-minute Christmas gift runs. Egghead Software, CompUSA, RadioShack, Borders (one of the only reliable places to find 2600), Tower Records...it was a different time.
I recently went to Micro Center. It reminded me of Fry's in the good ways. Large store, all kinds of parts and tools. They had a case of Raspberry PIs and accesories. They had a whole section 3D printers. They must have had 100 kinds of cases. A big section of storage, GPUs, RAM, etc.... It was great! I wish it was closer.
Note: I went to the one in Tustin, CA. No idea what the SV one is like or the originals in Ohio.
One thing I noticed at the Fry's in the Dallas-Forth Worth area, back when I lived there in the 2010's, is that it a lot of employees seemed like they were in the US on H-1B visas. Which often, not always but too often, means their employer is treating them poorly, perhaps underpaying them compared to what they would offer people with permanent residence or citizenship — because H-1B visa terms give you just one week to find a new job or leave the country if your current employer lets you go. (Or they used to in the early 2010's, at least; I haven't kept up to know if there have been changes since then. I took a job overseas in the mid-2010's, so I get a lot less first-person knowledge of what's happening in America now that I'm only there for short visits, usually at Christmastime.)
That, combined with a good friend of mine passing on rumors of the company treating their employees poorly (my friend said that he would choose to shop elsewhere rather than Fry's if he had any choice, and since the Fry's was near his house while the Microcenter was a 30-minute drive away, that meant he was giving up convenience for principle)... well, I started shopping at Microcenter too until I took this overseas job. So I wasn't too surprised to learn of Fry's demise: the writing had apparently been on the wall for years.
They replaced all the workers at our local Fry’s with people who knew nothing about the products, weren’t friendly, and often spoke little English. It was odd. I don’t know that it happened at all Fry’s our just ours.
But online shopping became so convenient, more and more of my purchases started going through Newegg and Amazon.
I feel they failed to adapt to digital. If you look at Best Buy or Microcenter (the survivors), you can purchase in store or digitally or have it shipped and they make it quick.
It made no sense why they couldn’t provide a hybrid channel and expand their sales as opposed to forcing you to go in the store and failing to honor the online prices in-store or the in-store prices online.
Also, it’s incredible that they had embezzlement, because they seemed to have very tight internal controls when you shopped there.
I really miss it. It was a great place to shop and I drove to the entire otherside of the city to shop there. Although I’m told by people from the southwest that their northern expansion stores were much more beautiful and didn’t have a warehouse feel.
Well, at least I got the answer to one longstanding question...the relationship between Fry's the electronics store and Fry's the Kroger-owned grocery store. They even have (or had) the same logo!
The various "components, available" of Radio Shack was quite interesting; we still had (have?) one in town long after they mostly went away, and they still had a dusty old collection of various components.
> Good lord. The nearest Radio Shack (17 miles away) closed, so to get a resistor or cap, it's "order online". That's about as environmentally sound as nuclear testing above ground (perhaps a slight hyperbole there).
I wonder if this is true?
Let’s say you were to buy the item from a store. Suppose the store is five miles away. You drive to the store, buy the item, and drive home. You used 10 miles worth of gas, plus the wear and tear on the car (meaning it has to be replaced 10 miles earlier than it would have otherwise).
Now, suppose you order it from Amazon. A worker picks it off a shelf in the warehouse, puts it in an envelope, and puts it on a truck. The truck drives to your house to deliver it.
Even if they JUST delivered your package, it should be basically a wash in terms of energy, right? You had to drive from your house to the store, they had to drive from the distribution center to your house. There would be a bit extra packaging, but I am not sure how many gallons of burned fuel an envelope is equivalent to.
However, if you had say, an Amazon delivery, then that delivery truck is not just driving to your house. It is driving to dozens of houses along a route to deliver your goods.
If you imagine the alternative, where each of those deliveries instead has to have the owner drive to a store, that could be hundreds of miles of saved trips because of the delivery drivers only taking one trip.
>The surge in laptops contributed, too. The opportunity or need for expansion cards, additional memory or storage upgrades, and peripherals disappeared or shrank.
We were once able to upgrade CPUs, RAM, video cards, HDD, network cards and replace batteries in laptops, too.
About the iPhone making computing boring: PC video game market got much stronger in the late 2000s and 2010s. Maybe the share of people using phones as computers went up, but also the number of people heavily using computers in general did. (Not saying that playing video games makes someone a PC enthusiast or that it's even a real hobby, but it means they buy the parts.)
I think it was just online shopping that killed Fry's, like you also said. Especially all those expensive parts that far outweigh the shipping costs.
Also idk how Gamestop was a thing once even all the console games went onto non-physical media.
The thing is computing has become fun again. Weird and wild cases, crazy water cooled setups, insane keyboards with new types of sensors being developed all the time (not only are analog keyboards a thing now, there are multiple types of analog keyboards!)
There was a lull in the market for a bit but IMHO the tech scene is interesting again.
Found out they opened a Microcenter recently here in Phoenix, so nice to have a brick and mortar electronics store again now that Fry's is no longer around.
You could watch people return items, them tossing them into a bin, and then some employee later taking that bins straight back out to floor to restock. No shrink wrapping needed. Learning how to detect refried parts was crucial to shopping there. In SoCal, Frys was just a place to get a part quick. Reliable or quality parts required going to a place like MWave or wait for newegg to ship.
Yeah, Micro Center is awesome. They have become my first stop when I'm buying PC hardware. They aren't always the cheapest, but they are never so much more that it's a big deal, and I value having a local shop so it's well worth paying slightly more. Heck, the staff is even reasonably knowledgeable and has been able to help me out on occasion when I don't know something. I never had the opportunity to go to Fry's, but Micro Center is what I imagine they must've been like.
I just left a similar comment about my local Fry’s in California. They replaced all the employees, who had been knowledgeable and helpful, with people who knew absolutely nothing about the products. I thought maybe it was just at our store, shame to hear it happened all over.
I would have a hard time living far away from a Micro Center. Your first impressions are pretty much correct in that, yes, it is great.
They aren’t the best place to buy many categories of items, but for other categories, they are pretty amazing.
Their in-house brand Inland used to really suck 10+ years ago, but now they make some great product categories, like their SSDs and flash storage (sometimes branded Micro Center instead of Inland).
The 3D printing section is pretty legit, it’s come in handy when I’ve needed parts in a pinch, and they cost the same as online (actually, less, since Bambu charges shipping).
There are times when their PC parts are cheaper than elsewhere like if you buy motherboard and processor via a bundle.
They’re the best place to snag a GPU. When supply is low. You beat scalpers by going to Micro Center. They’ll only sell them in store and they check ID to make sure you don’t buy them more than once every 30 days.
They are, to my knowledge, the exclusive retailer of Bawls energy drinks.
Last I checked, they do price match with online retailers.
The salespeople are commissioned but usually aren’t annoying about it, and generally it makes them helpful more than not, and they tend to know exactly where everything is.
I wouldn’t really go to Micro Center for things like cables and other accessories where you get better selection online.
I wouldn’t expect a major difference with the original Ohio locations. I’ve been to locations in numerous states and they’re all generally the same, although I think there’s a location somewhere with a mechanized moving filament wall as something of a party trick.
I remember when the place started to go. It had been Mecca for all the components and switches and tools, and fun to visit. Then shelves were no longer full and as time went on, sported increasingly wide gaps. Toward the end, far more shelf than product. And the packages, as you said - there were always a few that were obviously previously opened, retaped sloppily, sometimes having a returned-item sticker. I don't recall if the returns were a lower price. It was depressing and I stopped going. I think I went to a closing sale but there was nothing I wanted.
Not I. The same sales people I had talked to the day prior would pretend to not speak English the next day. Their employees would put all the returned items back on the shelf and to comply with the law they would put temporary stickers that said "returned item" but the stickers would very intentionally fall on the floor within an hour. Friends made videos in the stores regarding this behavior and the stores called the police on them every time. The police would always side with the store likely due to the delicious sales tax funding them. Employees would improperly handle RAM and repackage it as new. A couple of them interviewing at a company I worked for even admitted as much. In my opinion a swap-meet would probably have been a safer place to buy gear. This was in Fremont, California.
>their primary market is completely eaten out by online competition, so they fill their retail space with cheap garbage to make ends meet
Two years ago I entered a Best Buy (bigbox US electronics retailer) shocked to see the main entry display was (presumably unshippable due to size) BBQ pits. My guess is that it was for reasons similar to your statement (although I wouldn't call it the GameStop effect, as they have a profitable secondhand market).
I’m also from Sacramento and I also have fond memory of that same Fry’s location in the 2000s. It was an excellent place to buy new computer hardware and other electronics. I still have the Brother laser printer I bought there in December 2005 during winter break of my freshman year at Cal Poly SLO; not only does my printer still work, but I’m still using the original 20-year toner cartridge!
I live in the Bay Area now, and it was sad to witness Fry’s decline in the 2010s. I’ll never forget going to the Fry’s in Sunnyvale in late 2018 and seeing the near-empty parking lot, the spartan selection of merchandise, and already-opened boxes being resold. I ended up switching to Central Computers whenever I needed hardware that couldn’t wait for a Newegg shipment. I’m also glad that there is now a Micro Center in Santa Clara! Micro Center is the closest thing to peak Fry’s.
Article about Fry's Electronics closure presents factual information about a commercial event; demonstrates basic freedom of expression by publishing commentary on business matters without apparent censorship.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Page publishes detailed article about business closure publicly.
Domain implements public comment functionality, enabling reader expression.
Third-party ad network and tracking code present, indicating commercial constraints on editorial autonomy.
Inferences
Publication of consumer-relevant business information demonstrates support for information freedom.
Ad network integration suggests editorial decisions may be influenced by commercial interests rather than purely independent judgment.
Reader comment capability supports reciprocal freedom of expression, though moderation policies are not visible.
Open access model (no paywall) supports information dissemination; however, third-party tracking undermines editorial independence and privacy dimensions of free expression.
Domain-level presence of third-party ad network (AdThrive) and Jetpack Like functionality indicates collection and transmission of user data without explicit privacy safeguards visible on page.
Domain-level accessibility features support equitable access for users with disabilities; open access model supports information access as component of adequate standard of living. Combined modifiers from accessibility and access_model create positive structural signal.
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