[conspire] (forw) The "Fry's Experience" is gone

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> As for "human transportation", unless you were buying a washing
> machine, most of what Fry's sold could fit in a backpack and then
> you hop on your bicycle.  Fry's was once a privately-owned
> grocery-store chain.  The next generation decided that selling
> computers might be better than selling bread.

Some other nostalgia buffs' discussion of the matter (elsewhere) has
filled in some of the history for me.  It turns out that the Fry's Food
and Drugs chain got sold in 1985 to some buyers who soon sold it to
Krogers.  This left the Fry's family with a large pile of change, so a
couple of members of the younger generation started Fry's Electronics
with some of that dosh -- the ur-location, opened that same year (1985)
having been an essentially unchanged Fry's Food and Drugs mid-sized
market on Oakmead near the corner of Lakeview, just east of Lawrence
Expressway, Sunnyvale (kind of across Oakmead from Faultline Brewing
Company, if you can picture that).

That repurposed grocery store is long gone, bulldozed, and redeveloped,
but it's the one I encountered by surprise in 1985 and was _very_
bemused -- because I certainly knew Fry's grocery stores, and this 
very visibly was one, e.g., all of the sign fonts and checkout stands
were totally unchanged and it still said 'Fry's', but (to repeat my
now-ancient gag) instead of offering chips and dips, it offered chips
and DIPs.  If memory served, I still lived on Concord at the time, and
habitually bought groceries at a Fry's Food and Drugs market out
there, so suddenly stumbling across the just-opened Fry's Electronics 
was... trippy.

The new operation expanded _primarily_ by buying out a flash-in-the-pan
retail effort by Tandy Corporation (the Radio Shack company in Texas)
called Incredible Universe, whose big idea was warehouse-sized
electronics stores, each with a whimsical theme and with many elements
and business practices taken from theme parks.  See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incredible_Universe  
This buyout got Fry's its Sacramento, San Diego, Phoenix, Dallas,
Arlington (TX) and Portland (OR) megastores and gave them the idea 
for the rest of its themed megastores during subsequent buildout.

Meanwhle all of the other Fry's Food & Drugs locations continued in
operation, ignoring their mutant kin, but no longer owned by the Fry's
family.  Most are still around, but it's completely Krogers d/b/a/
Fry's, not an indy chain.


> Total speculation: Maybe the "computer generation" of Fry's ownership
> has decided they want to retire.  Selling the stores to developers
> will let them buy a ranch in Montana or an island in the tropics.

Clearly whether they're just out of operating funds or not, this is
a tactical Chapter 7 winding-up and dissolution to extract everything
possible for the owners.  As is almost always the case, these days, the
poor-sod employees were given the mushroom treatment, were absolutely
the last to know when the plug got pulled, and are getting basically
nothing.  It was 'Thank you for your years of service, now fsck off.'

Meanwhile, there are lots of disturbing stories about just how horrible
a place it's been for the staff, _and_ how ubiquitous the stores'
practice of re-shrinkwrapping returned defective goods and just putting
it back on the shelves as new merchandise has been.  Check out the
comments at ArsTechnica to see some:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/02/frys-electronics-is-no-more-and-all-30-stores-will-soon-close/