Your Best Buys Are Always at Fry's

A Silicon Valley institution has shut down. Fry's electronics says on their website:

After nearly 36 years in business as the one-stop-shop and online resource for high-tech professionals across nine states and 31 stores, Fry’s Electronics, Inc. (“Fry’s” or “Company”), has made the difficult decision to shut down its operations and close its business permanently as a result of changes in the retail industry and the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Company will implement the shutdown through an orderly wind-down process that it believes will be in the best interests of the Company, its creditors, and other stakeholders.

The Company ceased regular operations and began the wind-down process on February 24, 2021. It is hoped that undertaking the wind-down through this orderly process will reduce costs, avoid additional liabilities, minimize the impact on our customers, vendors, landlords and associates, and maximize the value of the Company’s assets for its creditors and other stakeholders.

I think of it as a Silicon Valley institution, which is where it started, but in fact, they had 31 stores in nine states.

I took this sad picture outside Fry's Brokaw Road store on the last day of February when I was out around the valley making a video.

When I came to the US in the early 1980s, Fry's was a supermarket chain. I mean a normal supermarket chain selling food. I rented a house near the intersection of 680 and Capitol Avenue. The nearest supermarket was on the corner of Capitol and Hostetter and it was...yup...Fry's. So not only have I bought things like HDMI cables and disk drives in Fry's, I've bought potatoes and chicken. Of course, you'd have had a hard time buying a chicken any time in the last few decades. And now you can't even buy an HDMI cable.

Even back in the '80s, before Fry's Electronics existed in anything like its recent form, there was a single electronics supermarket. It was off Oakmead Parkway in Sunnyvale. If you wanted to buy a DRAM chip, or a single transistor, or a weird cable then that was the best place to go. It was a sort of electronic supermarket. In fact, apparently one of the children in the Fry's family had no interest in food retailing and took a food supermarket that they had closed and turned it into an electronics supermarket. It was an amazing place to wander around, even if you never bought anything. It didn't sell refrigerators. Obviously, it didn't sell big flat-screen TVs since they hadn't been invented — it was still the CRT era. I don't recall if they sold anything like HiFi or loudspeakers. I remember rows of full-on geeky hardware.

I was at an internal EDA conference that HP organized for its partners in about 1986, and the HP keynoter had slides with several Fry's ads from back pages of the San Jose Mercury technology section. That page was always a full-page Fry's ad. He was pointing out how every week the price of a 4K DRAM went down a little...but the six-pack of Coke remained the same. He pointed out that although selling cola is reputed to be a ruthless business, it's nothing compared to electronics. But probably everyone in the room, the Silicon Valley ones anyway, knew who Fry's was and had visited at some point, even if just to be a tourist. Yes, it really was somewhere geeks went just to see it. I wouldn't be surprised if it was the only electronics supermarket in the world. It was already an institution, a prop for keynote presentations, and a sort of tourist spot.

From that humble beginning, Fry's Electronics was created. In 1985, the family sold the food supermarkets (the one near where I lived became a SaveMart although I don't know if they bought all of them). They kept the electronic supermarket, of course, and the Fry's name. They went all-in with electronics. The initial goal was to provide a "one-stop-shopping environment for the Hi-Tech Professional" and for decades that is pretty much what they did.

A colleague who did the pre-publication edit of this post told me her Fry's story:

Reminds me of when a friend moved here for a tech job from the East Coast in the early 00’s and I was showing her around, including to Fry’s. I was trying to tell her that their stores were enormous and the company was such a big deal locally that their logo was in the ice at the Shark Tank (she’s a hockey fan) and still she was like, yeah, whatever. And then we walked in the door and her face did this: 

Fry's stores were big, and over the years got bigger as it broadened the line of merchandise it carried to include more consumer goods. I don't know if every store was unique, I only ever went to four stores (Cambell, Palo Alto, Fremont, and San Jose) but each had a theme. One was Egyptian, one was Wild West, and so on. I think it was to make the stores look more interesting than they would if they just had aisle after aisle of boxes.

When the internet came along, I'm sure it was initially a boost to business. All those modems. All those wireless routers once that became a thing. Cables. ISP subscriptions. PCs. But it was also the beginning of the end. If you needed an HDMI cable (until last week), you would just order it from Amazon. Only if you really, really needed it, like, right now, would you go and buy it in a store. But that store would be Fry's, because you knew it would have it. For some reason I needed a weird size of Torx screwdriver a year or so ago, so I went to Home Depot. Nope, it didn't have it. But Fry's did.

When they got bigger, they advertised on TV. I don't think that it ever changed its tagline: "Your best buys are always"...weird beeps..."at Fry's".

Fry's was dying before COVID-19 became the final straw. The internet happened. It is hard to remember that in, say, 1990 if you wanted a webcam or a USB cable, then Fry's was the place you went to. Actually, it is so hard to remember that it doesn't shriek anachronism that I put USB in that sentence. But USB only came along in 1996. But I'm certain you could buy one in Fry's.  The last time I was in there, over a year ago, it was already somewhat of a ghost town.

Like other electronics retailers before, such as Circuit City and the Good Guys, and electronics retailers probably to come like Best Buy, it is now gone. But it was always in a class of its own, selling not just the big box merchandise like TVs and HiFi, but motherboards, microprocessors, DIMMs, and obscure cables.

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