This Retailer Was Something Special

Palo Alto Fry's, 2003: when you couldn't find parking

My first visit to Fry's Supermarkets was in Fremont in 1976, when we bought our first home in the then-sleepy East Bay town at the BART terminus. Fry's had an aisle devoted to electronics parts, an unusual feature in an era when grocery stores only offered food and household items.

Over the next few years Fry's found its niche in the tech-happy Bay Area and switched out of the cutthroat supermarket business.

Fry's Electronics became a fixture in Silicon Valley. There are hundreds of stories about engineers running down to the local store to pick up a crucial part for research that couldn't wait.

Fry’s Electronics was a mainstay for electronics experimenters from the 1980s through at least 2018 and one of the “must see” locations during visits to the Bay Area of California. They supplied many of the electronic parts, computers, tools, test equipment and accessories needed by Silicon Valley startups and other geeks living in the area.

Even your humble blogger, no tech whiz, kept his old equipment alive by going to Fry's for an old part; sometimes I would find something on a nearby shelf that might work better. I kept my 2009 MacBook alive by swapping out the hard drive in 2012 and again in 2014.

But Fry's, like many retailers, couldn't survive the trend towards online sales. Today the company announced the closure of all its stores.

After nearly 36 years in business as the one-stop-shop and online resource for high-tech professionals across nine states and 31 stores, Fry’s Electronics, Inc. (“Fry’s” or “Company”), has made the difficult decision to shut down its operations and close its business permanently as a result of changes in the retail industry and the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Company will implement the shut down through an orderly wind down process that it believes will be in the best interests of the Company, its creditors, and other stakeholders.

The Company ceased regular operations and began the wind-down process on February 24, 2021.

Fry's fell victim not only to Amazon but also to the shrinking of its customer base. There are fewer people who have the knowledge, motivation, and courage to work on hardware---either as fixers or inventors--with only speciailzed tools, a soldering iron, and an oscilloscope. A bygone store for a bygone era.