fried out

Many of the deaths that cause great mournings to pass out from my community - Gary Gygax, Stan Lee - don't mean very much to me personally. I can't say that for Fry's Electronics. That was a store that was once essential for my everyday life.

Although by the time it shut its doors a couple days ago, I and many others had been wondering what had been keeping it alive, because for several years it had been worse than useless, it was a waste of time to go there. Its vast shelves were virtually empty, and of course the employees had been clueless ever since it turned into a glossy retail establishment from its initial incarnation as a computer nerd warehouse.

I first encountered Fry's in the mid-80s, when my hardware guru sent me there to buy the parts for what he then turned into my first computer. Fry's was at its first location then, tucked into a corner of one of the tiny industrial parks that made up Silicon Valley, a big warehouse mostly of unlabeled computer parts in bins. I went up to the counter, one of those glass counters with more parts on display inside, handed them the slip on which H. had written my requisites, and bought the results.

Soon Fry's moved into a bigger facility across Lawrence Expressway, and introduced their first clever store packaging: giant "Enter" and "Escape" keys pasted on to the front doors, and a giant diode mockup in front. There were still bins and shelves with miscellaneous unpackaged parts, and most of the packaged ones were in plain boxes with identifying labels pasted on. There was very little designed packaging in computer parts in those days.

Literally anything you could possibly want in electronic or electrical parts or equipment was for sale at Fry's. And that was reinforced by their choice of what else to sell, the life-sustaining material for computer engineers: food/drink, mostly bags of chips and refrigerated cans of soda, and magazines, of two types, computer tech and men's erotica. It was kind of a parody of what they thought engineers wanted.

Around that time, as I've told before, a computer tech friend of mine (but we'd bonded mostly over English folk music) from the midwest came to town with a colleague for a conference. When I picked them up for dinner, they asked me to take them to Radio Shack so that they could pick up some supplies - I think they wanted to hack their hotel room phone or something. I said no, I've got a better place, and I took them to Fry's - then still the single store and unknown outside of the Valley. They were delighted, and spent considerable time exploring its wonders.

Gradually over the years Fry's altered, but not entirely for the worse. More stores opened: besides the original in Sunnyvale, there was the Western-themed one in Palo Alto and the Mayan temple in Campbell and others. The sales force became less knowledgeable. Huge counters with dozens of stations appeared for purchasing. Security persons to compare your sales slip with your purchase showed up at the exit door. On the shelves there were more packaged products. In the days when packaged software flourished, Fry's had lots of that. In the days that VHS and DVD and CDs flourished, Fry's had lots of that too.

Eventually the Sunnyvale store moved to a new facility with a Disneyland-sized parking lot. The store inside was cavernous and now filled with household machinery like washing machines. The electronics were all still there, but tucked into the back. It wasn't quite the same, but I kept shopping there, until the point where I could no longer find obvious items that Fry's ought to carry. That was about five years ago, and I gave up trying.

I don't see Fry's as having been killed off by online suppliers. I turned to online suppliers because I could no longer get what I needed at Fry's.