Thread by @lemay

With respect to all my fellow Silicon Valley nerds of a certain age, my nostalgia for Fry’s is … extremely mixed, and I’m not mourning their passing. (thread)

https://twitter.com/kron4news/status/1364445597344800768

Sure, in the old days they were huge and you could get nearly any computer or electronics part there, but there were also many aisles containing a substantial variety of used to be euphemistically called girlie magazines. We used to joke about it. "For all your (boy) nerd needs.”

Good luck if you needed help finding something, *especially* if you were female. In the old days a lot of the time I had sales people look me straight in the eye and then turn around and run away. Luckily I got to know the stores so I could find stuff on my own.

Fry’s was notorious for repackaging returns and putting them back on the shelves, and it got to where at least a third of the things you bought there just didn’t work.

So you had to make a second trip, and the return lines were (intentionally?) incredibly poorly staffed, so you could be there for an hour in line returning the thing and then rebuying the same thing, which then often would not work. FFS.

Later on their labor practices became so bad that yes, you could find a sales person if you needed help, but they worked mostly (entirely) on commissions, so they would steer you to the most expensive thing on the shelf.

They would especially do this if they thought because you were female they could lie to you about it. (I remember a $50 VGA cable once, I laughed and picked up the $5 one and the sales person got super mad at me.)

Once I needed a big, expensive thing at Fry's, and I found it myself, and I loaded it on my cart myself, and on my way out a random sales person decided he wanted that big expensive thing commission, so he chased me down the aisle and grabbed my arm so hard he left a bruise.

I’ve never had to scream at a sales person to leave me the fuck alone before, or since, but I had to at a Fry’s.

My experience at Fry’s was just so consistently hostile over and over again that the moment…the very SECOND there were viable alternatives (Central Computing in Santa Clara comes to mind, and then better stocked office supply stores, and then of course online), ...

... I VERY HAPPILY stopped going there at all unless it was a computing emergency. And even then it was a struggle. I re-evaluated my computing emergencies specifically because I did not want to go to Fry's. I haven’t been there in ten years or more.

Now, yes, the themed stores were totally fun, and they totally did stock a lot of really deep-nerd unusual stuff that was otherwise hard to find, especially early on. I am thankful they had a huge computer book section back in the day given that I was writing computer books.

But they 100% killed themselves with their terrible, terrible business practices and I am not sorry to see them go. (end)