Reports are Fry's is officially dead as of the end of the day

[Roswell]

1 hour ago, Jumballi said:

I DID HAVE ACCESS TO THE INFORMATION, I worked there and I could access the stores financial records, then at closing the manager would say we were number two in the chain at $20K for the day

Yes, getting daily POS totals isn’t rocket science for a retail worker.
 

The thing you don’t grasp here is that a single store’s revenue for a day means absolutely nothing when you don’t know the entire chain’s costs or trends. Rent, wages, debts, profit margins, shipping costs and a plethora of other information is missing from the picture.

 

To assume you can extrapolate how well a national chain is doing based off of a daily register total in one store is absurd.

 

1 hour ago, Middcore said:

 

I still don't know why it's so important to you to argue this point. Some sort of vendetta against MC maybe? Much as I'd love the chance to someday hear the story there, I guess I'll just have to miss out because I'm putting you on my ignore list instead. 

Read my above reply. I don’t have a vendetta, I have common sense. Rando customers and floor employees have zero access to Micro Center’s financial situation since they’re a private company. This isn’t a difficult concept to understand.

[PianoPlayer88Key]

I hope......


(That picture was actually taken probably at least a year ago or so.)

heh I just noticed part of the "F" is still visible behind my phone

Guess we got an "F" for respects (or whatever, i've never played COD or whatever that came from)

Also one time when I was in that same Fry's last January (2020) ... a song came on over the PA, which I thought then (and now even more so) was quite appropriate.

"Highway to Hell" - AC/DC

(I also remember thinking then that if MC took over Fry's locations, they could start playing "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin?  )

[Middcore]

I've seen people say most of the Fry's locations are gigantic in terms of square footage compared to Micro Center. Maybe because they were devoting aisles to DVD's and CD's in their heyday, which I don't think MC ever did? That said, and considering how expensive the leases in a lot of Fry's west coast locations probably were, I kind of doubt we see MC swoop in for them.

[Guest]

13 minutes ago, Middcore said:

I've seen people say most of the Fry's locations are gigantic in terms of square footage compared to Micro Center. Maybe because they were devoting aisles to DVD's and CD's in their heyday, which I don't think MC ever did? That said, and considering how expensive the leases in a lot of Fry's west coast locations probably were, I kind of doubt we see MC swoop in for them.

Fry's is definitely a pretty large store. I miss the old VHS tape and library card catalog days. It was like a scavenger hunt lol. 

 

[RoseLuck462]

I've never been to one but I've heard of plenty of deals that occurred there. 

 

RIP

[SpikeSpiegel]

I heard Fry's had inventory issues.  So it makes sense that they went out of business.  No inventory equals no profit.

[HerrKaLeu]

5 hours ago, Jumballi said:

Not anecdotal for me, I worked at fry's, my friend at microcenter. For every single sale I had on a good day, he'd outpace me by 5-10 times. Fry's financials were garbage, there were days where the entire store pulled in less than $10K in gross proffit, and this was 2 years ago. IDK how bad it was during 2020, but my coworker who stayed said they got no stock for weeks at a time, meaning they were probably hemorrhaging money.

Do you mean revenue, or profit? Because those are vastly different...

 

If one single store creates $10K PROFIT in a single day, that would be fabulous. 

If you mean revenue, that is meaningless because expenses could have been $11K, so it would be a loss. 

[Euchre]

OK, so interesting discussion here, especially mentioning Radio Shack, and how Fry's are so big. The two are very much connected.

 

Radio Shack (then known by the corporate parent name, Tandy) started a 'big box' venture to compete with the likes of Best Buy and Circuit City, among others. It was called Incredible Universe. It was quite elaborate and impressive, and a clever kind of idea, but honestly a bit too late. They were only around 5 years, '92-'97. This was the heyday of 'computer shows' that largely consisted of wholesale approach to end consumer sales of computer components and technology. Anyway, it failed. The store locations that were anything like profitable were bought by another computer biased consumer electronics retailer - named Fry's. It represented a major expansion for Fry's.

 

As for Radio Shack's fall, a number of factors contributed to it, most especially an 'addiction' to cellular sales, even after it became too competitive and less lucrative than when it got into the business. Regardless, in 2015 they filed their first bankruptcy, and in 2017 their second, which effectively imploded and closed the corporate owned Radio Shack stores. What you see today are just the old franchise locations (listed as 'authorized dealers') and special partnerships with other retailers. No true, corporate stand alone Radio Shack stores really exist.

 

Let's say I have some direct knowledge about this.

 

I loved the few times I was able to shop at Fry's. I kind of despise commoditized PCs, which dominate the market now. The day when you could as cheaply, or more cheaply go to a computer show or Fry's or local electronics retailer, and build a system, are sorely missed.

[Euchre]

6 minutes ago, HerrKaLeu said:

Do you mean revenue, or profit? Because those are vastly different...

 

If one single store creates $10K PROFIT in a single day, that would be fabulous. 

If you mean revenue, that is meaningless because expenses could have been $11K, so it would be a loss. 

Gross profit is effectively revenue, and you're posing the question of net profit.

[Jumballi]

13 minutes ago, HerrKaLeu said:

Do you mean revenue, or profit? Because those are vastly different...

 

If one single store creates $10K PROFIT in a single day, that would be fabulous. 

If you mean revenue, that is meaningless because expenses could have been $11K, so it would be a loss. 

6 minutes ago, Euchre said:

Gross profit is effectively revenue, and you're posing the question of net profit.

I gave an approximate revenue, as for gross profit, usually we'd be at a small positive margin to up to 10% negative loss on all sales because of the sales and price matching policy.

I often told my managers that we needed to remove one or both of the policies as the store literally lost money on every customer who walked in.

[Guest]

The last time I went to the Fry's in Roseville (before the pandemic) it was mostly empty shelves. They said that Fry's was switching to the consignment model, but it didn't bode well. A couple Fry's stores had already shut down in the Bay Area (which lost its only Micro Center a few years prior). Some of the parts in my current build were purchased at Fry's. I'll miss it even though it wasn't great at the end there. 

[Mling]

14 hours ago, SGT-AMD said:

Source? News Article?...No?

 

source for what exactly?

[aisle9]

The timing of this isn't a huge shock to me. I had been shopping much more at the local Fry's than either of the two Micro Centers over the last few months. Mostly because all I needed was goofy little drive bay replacements, cheap coolers, things like that that Fry's had cheap and in droves and Micro Center usually didn't. The Fry's here was also so much cheaper to get in and out of. The nail in the coffin for them was the switch to consignment inventory, and that happened because Fry's couldn't/wasn't paying their inventory vendors, so the stock quit coming. The last time I was in there (this past Sunday), their GPU stock consisted of a single 710. The walls of half the store plus a large aisle in the center were lined with Zalman and Cougar mid-towers, the prebuilt section was more cases on display than actual PCs...the most substantial PC component aisle was the aforementioned fans, cheap coolers, goofy drive bays (I knew I should have bought that goddamned HDD air conditioner on Sunday) and add-in cards. Oh, and the overpriced garbage-tier PSUs. It was like all the major OEMs just refused to send anything to them--which was actually kind of the case.

 

For all the shit Fry's took lately, it will always have a place in my heart. Back in 2009, I bought my old HP HPe-170F from their San Diego store. i7-920, GTX 260, 9GB of RAM, crazy stats back then, and at a great price too. When I got back into PC building in 2015, it was with parts from their Arlington, TX store. And then the aforementioned preference for Fry's over either MC lately. It's a little like Radio Shack's death, but I didn't have the same attachment to them as I do Fry's. I know a lot of people had the immediate reaction of, "Finally! Micro Center will take over the building!". I wouldn't be so sure. MC has repeatedly said several times on Twitter that they're open to expansion, but not just for the sake of expanding. Taking over a failed Fry's location that's 2-3x the size of any MC I've ever seen might not make the most business sense.

 

And why wasn't the timing a shock? Because when I was in my local Fry's on Saturday, their POS system went down. Just cash or hand-written card numbers. I wasn't about to hand my credit card number over (although in retrospect my shit might have been free if I had). My last purchase there was a dinky little cooler that I was going to return--guess that's not happening--a goofy drive bay adapter with asterisk-shaped cutouts in it that are great for airflow in a case that has none otherwise, and a $9 M.2 NVMe PCIe adapter that I love and was going to buy a second of this weekend--guess that's not happening either. I might also be picking up a Fry's shirt from teepublic.com.

 

I miss it already, and I regret not buying a few more things there on Sunday when I had the chance. I'd like to hope that I'll stumble across a pile of those goofy drive bay adapters at Big Lots, but I'm not holding out too much hope. They'll probably be on Newegg by the end of next week, no doubt at prices way above what Fry's was asking.

[OwayBaway]

On 2/23/2021 at 7:49 PM, Middcore said:

Not posting in Tech News because there is no "official" source yet but lots of reports from employees on Reddit and social media that today was the last day of business for Fry's Electronics, and the company's website will go dark as of 12am. Already getting 503 errors sometimes trying to access it. Employees apparently got no advance notice, although the writing has basically been on the wall for Fry's for a while. 

 

The thing is that if they had any actual inventory the pandemic could have potentially saved them. Micro Center has done bonkers business in the past year. But by most reports their stores have been pretty empty going back to 2019 or even earlier, I remember Nerd on a Budget, Bitwit, and maybe others all doing videos showing bares shelves and terrible prices on the few items they did have (over $200 for a 1050 ti - little did we know at the time!). 

I will never be ok again

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Shreyas1]

What's going to happen to all the really cool designed shops? I really don't want them to get torn down, if anything, I hope that the cool store designs aren't replaced by a bland Walmart or something 

[Marinatall_Ironside]

I remember back in 2016, was where I purchased the first set of components for my X99 system that would become my first build. Then in 2017, was when I made the jump from the EVGA GeForce GTX 960 4GB FTW to the Asus GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB ROG Strix OC, which still stands as one of the best upgrades I ever made. All but the EVGA graphics card were purchased at the San Diego location.

 

I also bought storage drives there as well. The 480GB PNY CS1311 SSD, 3TB WD Red (2016), and 8TB Toshiba HDD (~2019) I run were all purchased there.

 

The last few times I went to a Fry's Electronics store personally, I knew that the writing was on the wall, based on the vast empty shelves and lack of visitors at the two stores I visited the most. My parents shopped there as well for their PC needs, and the last time my mother visited one, she decided to call it quits for shopping there too. Too bad they went under. I can only believe they made some really awful business decisions that led to this bankrupcy, and that's not even considering last year, which only made matters worse. What I also believe was that they tried to diversify too much (stocking non-PC or electronics items -- the likes of which you would normally find at a Target), rather than keeping a narrow focus on consumer electronics. Additionally, they weren't really stocking enough high-end PC hardware from brands that were strongly in demand, especially the watercooling hardware (like who wants to buy Thermaltake watercooling hardware when EKWB, Bitspower, and the like were more in-demand and often made better-quality components?). The most expensive motherboard I ever purchased was the Asus ROG Rampage V Edition 10, and Fry's did not have that motherboard at all. That was an online purchase.

 

Like what Linus said about NCIX, I do think Fry's should have scaled their storefronts back, got rid of their general goods selection (I still think this is the worst decision period) as well as their automotive electronics, stopped the internet pricing campaign (online sales really are hurting walk-in retail stores' revenue), started to stock actually good and in-demand PC hardware and other consumer electronics, among other decisions to bring the focus back onto consumer electronics for the home, and come up with a few things that no other retailer could have come up with so that they (business owners) can sell the brand. The themed storefronts were cool for their time, but they ended up becoming too much of a gimmick IMO, and all of the space could have been used for warehousing for a shipping network for smaller-scale storefronts.

[StDragon]

14 hours ago, Jurunce said:

Like what Linus said about NCIX, I do think Fry's should have scaled their storefronts back, got rid of their general goods selection (I still think this is the worst decision period) as well as their automotive electronics, stopped the internet pricing campaign (online sales really are hurting walk-in retail stores' revenue), started to stock actually good and in-demand PC hardware and other consumer electronics, among other decisions to bring the focus back onto consumer electronics for the home, and come up with a few things that no other retailer could have come up with so that they (business owners) can sell the brand. 

IMHO I don't think this is over. Why would they keep the lights on and not move much product? They should have restructured a long time ago. I think the real news will be when the other shoe drops.....

[CommanderAlex]

I was able to visit of the the Fry's Electronic store back in 2017 when my mom and I went on a road trip down to North Carolina and then stopped to visit friends in Georgia. They took us over to the Fry's store to see what it was like and I thought it was cool, but there was hardly anything on the shelves. After that, we went to the Micro Center down the road from there and I was amazed with the product selection. In fact, that was where I got my NZXT Phantom 530 (it was between this and the Corsair Obsidian 750D Airflow...I should have picked the latter).

 

It's sad to see them go but if you don't remain competitive, then you will fall. 

[ravenshrike]

On 2/24/2021 at 3:30 PM, Middcore said:

 

The description of them going out of business "suddenly" makes me laugh because it reminds me of the Hemingway quote about how you go bankrupt: two ways, first gradually, then all at once. 

Except it was about as sudden and surprising as someone who has late stage IV pancreatic cancer kicking the bucket. Bitwit did a vlog on Fry's over a year ago showing the retail desert it had become. Bare shelves throughout the store.