I want to thank any of you here who have a Fry's near you for not boasting every chance you get. Today was the first chance I've had to go to a Fry's and I must say it's an insane experience. I don't know if all the stores are like the one in Tempe I just visited, but if they are, I demand they bring one to Northern Virginia immediately!

First of all, it's easily the largest store I've ever been in - I'd estimate it's four times the size of either Costco in my area. Don't get me wrong, I certainly don't like it just because it's big, but I do love that they have nearly every consumer electronic device sold in America. I mean, some stores have an end cap for USB thumb drives. Fry's has an aisle. In fact, one thing I observed is that nearly every type of device had its own aisle. PC Cases, keyboards, cameras, even motherboards! I couldn't believe there was an aisle with every motherboard out of its box and stuck to the wall for you to investigate. Amazing. And when I say "they had an aisle for cameras," sure, you might think that's nothing special. Most stores do. But it's the sheer density of just their point and shoot line that threw me. I'd say it was four rows, 20 feet long, each row with a camera every 5 inches.

The store is like Best Buy, on crack and steroids, with a dose of Office Depot, a side of Micro Center, and then throwing in the stock of Newegg.

Fortunately, I was pleased with the prices, too. It's brick and mortar, so you're not going to get the best prices on everything. They're also going to sell a lot of the overpriced stuff like Monster cables, sadly. But for example, one of the things I needed in there was a simple cable to connect my Zune HD to my rental car's AUX in jack. In Radio Shack or Micro Center, that cable is going to cost anywhere from $7 to $15. And sure, on Monoprice it's probably 60 cents. But for $2.50 at Fry's, that would be low enough to make me drive to the store in a pinch.

Argh, I'm very jealous now. I don't have anything like this near me, and I live in a pretty populated area. I must recommend it to visitors of the west coast. The size is monstrous, but I think the store is exellent.

Every time a friend of mine comes down from Colorado, he demands a trip to Frys at some point. It is quite the nice store for computer enthusiasts, and even non enthusiasts for the amount of stuff they keep on display. Just bought 2 flash drives there this weekend, a Lacie imakey, and an on sale tiny 8gb HP drive for $17.

Yeah, the stores are awesome. I've been to a few out in California as well, and they all are similar, just varied in size a little bit.

Maybe I need to visit Frys in a different city, as my experience with the one in Las Vegas was almost the opposite to yours. It was big, but the selection was woeful compared with my local shops in Edinburgh, and the pricing was terrible.

In fact the only thing I think that cost me less in the US than at home was hire of some machine guns and bullets :-)

Raleigh/Durham/RTP is, I think, widely known as a tech center, in the same vein as NoVA, the Bay Area/Silicon Valley, and the like.

Guess how many computer retail stores there are in the actual Park and closely surrounding areas. Nope, try again. No, still wrong. Give up?

Zero.

That's right; RTP has zero computer stores within, say, a 15-minute drive. The closest thing is a Best Buy that's on the outskirts of Durham, and that only opened five or so years ago. In fact, in the entire metropolitan area, the only thing that comes close is a TigerDirect outlet, and it's nowhere near the Park.

(Now guess how many office supply stores there are. That's right. Still zero.)

I like living here, but there's basically nowhere decent to buy computer stuff. When the TigerDirect outlet is, without doubt, the best place for it, you've got serious problems.

Part of the fun of visiting different Fry's stores is to see all the different themes.
Palo Alto - Old West
Fremont - Electricity History (and Grand Ballroom, to some extent)
San Jose - Aztec

It's not uncommon for traveling geeks to visit Fry's stores as part of their tourist agenda.

I'm so spoiled. I remember going to the very first Fry's Electronics store (the Fry family ran grocery stores before that). There were gigantic models of components built onto the walls and ceiling- it was like being inside a computer.

edit:
Wikipedia has a good quick blurb about Fry's.
Fry's History page also good.
While the stores are impressive, not everyone is happy camper. Witness this testament/rant. (I only read a little ways down, but it seemed to ring true to me)
I'm wary when shopping at Fry's these days. I only buy items I have researched and I always walk right past the bag-checker at the door.

edit2:
I've mis-remembered the original Fry's store- mistaking it for the subsequent replacement nearby.

Which one did you go to? If you went to the one on Baseline in Tempe you should try to hit the one on Thunderbird in Phoenix. It's worlds better.

Are Fry's actually bigger than Costco in floor space? I can't even begin to imagine how that would all fit together. Unless the Costos mentioned are much smaller than the ones I'm used to. The ones around here are at least 140000 sq.ft. I'm trying to find a more accurate size but haven't come up with anything solid in a quick search.

I first visited the original Fry's in 1990 or so, back when it was just a computer parts store that happened to carry snack food. (That space was later occupied by Computer Literacy, a great bookshop, now obsoleted and gone.) What was genius about the original Fry's was the clientele. I distinctly recall staring at the video cards and the fellow next to me offering advice based on which ones he'd worked on.

The modern, huge Fry's is another world. It's awesome that I can go there, confident that I'll go home with whatever obscure part I need. However, there are limits to that awesomeness. The salespeople are just absolutely clueless for any question beyond "do you stock X and where I do I find it?" To ask a question of that form, I once had to wait while a salesman was explaining to a customer why he needed to buy a more expensive HDMI cable. (Total B.S., but I didn't interject.)

Fry's has a weird policy of what they do and don't stock. Take stereo amplifiers. They have a great selection of Yamaha, Denon, Onkyo, Sony, and Harmon-Kardon, but Pioneer is nowhere to be found. Their camera selection is even more hit-or-miss. But for my weekend project, where I needed a PATA laptop drive and a USB/PATA adapter, they had two choices for the hard drive and four choices for the adapter.

In terms of Silicon Valley nerd tourism, on a recent trip I made a point of going to Weird Stuff Warehouse. Didn't actually buy anything, but it's just a grand visit through all sorts of obscure crap, often for very reasonable prices.

Looks like no.

Fry's in Tempe
Costco in Fairfax, VA
Costco in Springfield, VA
Costco in Raleigh, NC
Costco in Toronto (Etobicoke)

Really? That Fry's wasn't bigger than my local Costco? That seems impossible. Perhaps it's because half of a Costco's store has ceiling-height shelving units that make it seem a little more crowded.

Okay, well if it's not bigger in square footage, there's no denying that they at least carry many multiples more products than Costco.


I believe I went to the Baseline one. I might go to the other one today, as I think it's actually closer. I can't tell you how irritated I am that there are two of these stores within 10 miles of each other, and the closest one to my home in Virginia I think is in New York.


Yeah, when I went there to visit my wife's family, it certainly seemed like they were still busy building that area up. I wouldn't be surprised if you had some kind of computer store in the future, though. Still, it's annoying.

I do think that brick and mortar stores have a place, even in the computer industry. They just have to be the size of Fry's to do it. I order almost all my electronics from Newegg or Amazon, but I still frequent my local Micro Center all the time. There's a ton I dislike about that store, though. It just seems more...disheveled than Fry's.

When I go to Fry's today, one of the things I want to check out is their price on RAM. That was one of the things that made me stop going to CompUSA, which was that they charged obscene amounts for RAM. They'd charge for generic twice what you could pay online for name brand. It didn't give me much faith in the rest of the store.

So yeah, Bitt, lets start letter writing campaigns to get Fry's stores in our areas. I think we both live in places that could benefit from a store like this.


They still do, don't they? My wife and I went to the Suns game last night (they wiped the floor with Portland - Woot!), and they constantly had ads for Fry's Food Stores with the same logo. I thought it was such a funny secondary business, but I didn't know it was the other way around!

I learned from the Wikipedia article that the Fry family sold the stores very early on and the sons went into electronics. I had heard a different story- where the boys were putting electronics displays in the grocery stores and it took off from there. Guess all legends can't be true.

Fry's food stores are run by Kroger's nowadays, although the two Fry's companies still share a similar logo.

Uh, RTP has been in existence since 1959. IBM has been here since '65. Cisco since '98 or '99. Nortel (not such a big deal now, admittedly) since the '80s or maybe even '70s. Red Hat and Red Storm were founded here.

There is zero excuse for there not to be at least a Micro-Center-like store. We did have a CompUSA until they shut down, but that was 12 miles away.

Sounds like one heck of a business opportunity...

RAM tends to be pretty reasonable, with usually at least one brand on sale every week. When I bought my last Mac Mini, I left the Apple store and drove a mile up the road to Frys to buy more RAM for it. Could have bought the Mini at Frys as well if I had waited a bit, but this one was bought the day of release right before a trip out of town.

Agreed.

Yeah, I understand all that, and no there's no excuse for it. I guess I was thinking more of that Cary area, which admittedly was the only area we covered much of. They took us to Raleigh but we didn't spend much time in the business areas. I got the impression from them that the Durham area was a tad depressed at the moment, though I don't know how true that is.

Regardless, there should be something there. I do like that I have a Micro Center about a mile from me.

Durham has been a tad depressed since forever.

I have only been to one when traveling too (Duluth, GA) but that probably makes it more fun anyway. If you went to Disney Land everyday it would get old.

Very true


Honestly, I didn't believe you until I went to the other Phoenix-area Fry's just now. That's an Aztec one too.

I just can't figure out why

I wasn't sure if the Austin one was even themed. It's pretty subtle, with just some musical notes around. They definitely put more effort into some of the other stores with the themes.

Actually, the Wiki article says I'm wrong- the San Jose store is Mayan and the Phoenix store is Aztec.
Why? Who knows? Geeky stores are fun, I guess.

Fry's the store you love to hate!

Was it the earlier Fremont store that had the camera corral surrounding a Space 1999 moon diorama?

Gave you something to shoot besides the product boxes.

Beware of, too good to be true, clearance prices. Often those items are truly more trouble that they are worth.

Hi,

When I went to San Jose years ago for a development project (early 90's), I would ALWAYS make sure to visit FRY's on Lawrence Expressway. That Fry's motif was Computer Parts. As you walked in the door you were greeted by huge Integrated Circuit models on the walls (10 foot), huge resistors for railings, dipped Tantalum capacitors, PC Board traces, etc. I felt right at home, somehow.<grin> If you needed glue chips to motherboards, they had it.


As mentioned, Weird Stuff is across the street. I never missed going there either.

I once fit a full size computer case (to house all of my SCSI drives at the time), into an airline overhead compartment on my way home that I bought from Weird Stuff. I actually still have a business card from Weird Stuff.

But, I also visited Disk Drive Depot (across the street and down a ways) plus HSC, which was down the street a little further.

There was Surplus Stuff too in Milp1tas, so much stuff, so little time...

Ross

The Tempe store is usually the one I visit, even though there is one just down the street from me. When Fry's bought out Ultimate Electronics, a lot of them popped up almost overnight in the Phoenix area.

The first time I went to a Fry's Electronics was in the mid 90s in LA. The thing I loved most about the place was that even better than the aisles and aisles of computer parts, they had an aisle of oscilloscopes and multimeters. I still think that was amazing

The tempe Fry's was one of my regular spots until I moved in Feb. I still used newegg much of the time, but when you just can't wait for shipping, it's super nice to have.

Too bad you didn't come to the valley a couple months earlier. I would have met you for dinner or something. Oh well, if you ever make it to Belize, give me a shout.

That would have been great! Of course, we were only here for a few days (Sunday to Thursday morning), and much of it was planned to perfection by my wife. We made it to some great spots.

Has anyone here been to Matt's Big Breakfast? I think it's my new favorite place on earth.

I'd been to a few Fry's in CA in the late 90s, but a few years ago we got one here in Seattle (Renton, actually).

I have been there 5-6 times and picked up an assortment of things. One thing really surprised me, though, and was something I didn't remember from the CA Fry's I visited.

So they have a pretty huge DVD section and in the middle of that is a huge Adult DVD section (with little opaque dividers so you can't immediately see the DVD covers). I would think this would get them boycotted by family-oriented customers bu that doesn't seem to be the case -- 10 year-old kids are playing Rock band 20 feet away.

Mostly I wonder how it is worth it for them. In the 3-4 times I have walked by, I have never seen anybody in the Adult aisle flipping through the merchandise. Do all the pr0n hounds wait until 10 minutes before closing and then run in to grab DVDs?

Color me mystified.

Fremont has, or had, that too. Don't remember seeing it recently.

What was most bizarre to me, on my first visit - there I was in an Electronics Store, and here was an isle of personal hygiene products.