[conspire] (forw) What's going on with Fry's Electronics?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Josef Grosch (jgrosch at gmail.com):

> I think some of the more successful stores, Sunnyvale and San Jose,
> will be around for a while. Palo Alto is looking a bit rode hard and
> put up wet.

I see what you did, there.  ;->

(For those who don't know, the Palo Alto Fry's Electronics location has
an 1800s Old West theme.)

The writing's been on the wall (Book of Daniel, chapter 5) about the
Palo Alto location for about a year, because that neighbourhood has 
been slated for redevelopment -- and that's basically the reason the 
lease isn't going to be eligible for renewal when it expires in January.

I was delighted to read that, before it was a Fry's Electronics, that
building was a _cannery_.  Huh!


Can't remember exactly the year -- probably 1985 -- but I distinctly
remember the totally weird experience of visiting the newly opened
_original_ Fry's Electronics location in Sunnyvale.  It was on a
side-street off Lawrence Expressway, east of there, about a block or
two.  At the time, I was living in Concord, California, where the 
major grocery store two blocks away was a Fry's Supermarket.  

What made the original location surreal was that three members of the
Fry's family (John, Randy, and Dave) with someone named Kathy Kolder
had _literally_ just slightly repurposed a Fry's Supermarket to sell
electronics rather than groceries -- exact same styling, same checkout
counters, everything.

As I joked at the time, they had merely switched from chips and dips to 
chips and DIPs.

The ur-location was shut down a few years later, moving to the first of
their two successive larger warehouse-style locations on the other side
of Lawrence.