‘It was a geek paradise’: Fry’s closes its 31 electronics stores
The long suspected and finally confirmed permanent closure of Fry’s Electronics on Wednesday loosed a torrent of nostalgia from tech types who recalled frequenting the quirky themed stores during their heyday, before the onetwo punch of the internet and the pandemic knocked the business off the pedestal of retail geekdom.
Bay Area residents fondly — and not so fondly — recalled time spent at the locally founded chain that never quite adapted to a Silicon Valley where hardware increasingly took a backseat to software while ecommerce drove down prices and siphoned sales. The coronavirus pandemic accelerated the company’s demise, as it has for hundreds of other inperson shops during the past year.
Fry’s was founded in Sunnyvale as a family venture by brothers Randy, John and David Fry in 1985, with Kathryn Kolder as a business partner. Fry’s announced the shuttering of its 31 stores in nine states on its website.
“It was a geek paradise,” said
Abbi Vakil, a hardware engineer who started frequenting the Palo Alto location when he was studying electrical engineering at Stanford in the 1980s.
Vakil said there were periods when he would stop by the Portage Avenue store every day before it closed in late 2019. He knew most of the employees’ names and spent so much time there that he hired two of them away from the store to work for a company of his own.
“They were always underpaying people,” Vakil said, describing the chain as “more like your grumpy old uncle,” instead of featuring the hyperfriendly customer service pervading other bigbox stores. “They acted like they were doing us a favor by being there.”
Still, the chain was fostered by and symbolic of a bygone Silicon Valley era. While grocery shoppers in Los Angeles might be piqued by a celebrity sighting while buying food, a Fry’s location in the valley always offered the promise of a reasonably priced piece of silicon and a chance to cross paths with an emerging tech titan taking the latest hardware or video game for a spin.
Even the store designs catered to a unique, geeky clientele. The San Jose location was built to resemble a stepped Mayan pyramid flanked with palm trees that also dotted the interior. The Palo Alto location adopted a Wild West theme, complete with a lifesize cowboy rearing up on horseback. The Campbell store also featured a pyramid, this one of the Egyptian variety, while still another shop featured a flying saucer sticking out from the storefront, as if crashlanded from deep space.
Around the time of the dotcom bust in the early 2000s, the chain began to expand its offerings, never quite regaining the identity that made it a destination in the late 1980s and early ’90s.
“Fry’s became a bigbox store,” Vakil said. “The place everybody loved was gone 20 years ago.”
The drubbing taken by retail during the pandemic appeared to be only part of the reason for the chain having slung its last keyboard.
The company had denied rumors of its impending doom in recent years, countering reports of empty shelves that portended the end by claiming it had switched to a consignment model — paying suppliers only once an item had been sold.
“Electronics and appliance stores went down substantially in 2020, and they were no doubt a casualty,” Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at market research firm Forrester Research, said in an email.
“There were rumors of challenges for years, which suggests that it may have had a cash crunch for a while,” Kodali said. “Any company going into the pandemic with a cash crunch was only going to do worse when cash was even more crucial. It’s unfortunate because it was, for many, an institution, but it appears to be another casualty of the pandemic and a further push of sales to eCommerce.”
In their heyday, Fry’s stores doubled as hangouts for teens and tech types to grab gear and swap notes on doityourself projects, even if the staff was less than helpful.
DengKai Chen, who works at Twitter in the Bay Area, grew up hanging around a spacethemed Fry’s near Anaheim in Orange County.
“Fry’s was more than just a store . ... It was an experience, you’d meet people with similar interests,” he said.
While he was in high school, browsing the aisles for hours became an activity of its own, sometimes sparking runins with likeminded builders.
“Oftentimes the staff wouldn’t be helpful, but the other person in the aisle with you looking at similar stuff was,” Chen said.
The store even indirectly helped him get his first job out of college — at Google in Mountain View. Asked during the job interview to discuss something he was proud of building, he described a GPS device he’d attached to a camera to track the location of his snapshots.
“I was able to go to Fry’s and buy parts and create this thing myself,” he said.
With the supremacy of Amazon and other online retailers only compounded by the pandemic, those serendipitous creations and interactions are dwindling.
“You can order what you want online,” Chen said. “But that inperson collaboration and sense of community isn’t there.”