Sometimes those fancy new products were perilously enticing. Those of us with time to kill could catch a glimpse into parallel worlds of technology we'd yet to discover.
Fry's was like a theme park-not only because each store was decorated to resemble some faraway place like a Mayan temple or an ancient Roman bath house, but also because it offered all genres of nerds quality versions of their toys. I don’t remember befriending other shoppers directly, just that their mere existence boosted my excitement. Apart from the sea of dads obsessed with touchscreen remotes, you’d discover a fellow nerd-child powering through the latest DDR demo, a doppelgänger in a Star Wars T-shirt also shopping for cheap LAN gear, and someone else obsessing over the newest Nvidia card. Our family outpost in Wilsonville, Oregon, was the home of excuse-based electronics purchasing for the entire Portland region. After all, most normal people really had no reason to go to Fry’s. Those cluttered aisles fostered a surprising sense of community. And yet, I now feel sad for the next generation who won't have a place like Fry’s-with its aisles of cables, computer parts, and inessential gadgets-to spark hands-on inspiration. I’m somewhat surprised it lasted this long.
For a company whose sales motto seemed to be “If it plugs in, we sell it,” it was perhaps inevitable that it would slowly bleed dry in the Amazon era. Folks in the Midwest can't say that about Micro Center, their own regional electronics retailer.įry's has been sliding downhill for a long time. I bet if you polled 100 Fry's shoppers, at least 90 of them were walking out of the store with something they hadn't come for.
You could find bone-handled pocket knives there alongside bins of DVDs you’d never-ever-want to watch.
Fry's also, quite famously, sold more than just electronics. How could anyone not care? Fry’s was the magical electronics emporium where so many of us bought our first CD burners, flatscreen monitors, cordless vacuums, wireless printers, or ATI Radeon 9800 graphics cards.
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