Online shopping and finally Covid = double whammy. I recall visiting Fry's in San Diego and LA many times - nothing like it in Canada, but a few were similar. These Canadian ones were swept away by the internet. I had noticed that Fry's was getting more and more tatty in recent years - there would be huge rows of the same stuff = many suppliers fading away.
The world will miss them, Thank you Fry's for the era you dominated. Predecessors, like ACP, Advance Computer Products - Tom Freeman, as a prime example, had a monthly flea-market/swap meet in his parking lot - always a hit. They faded in the 90's as surface mount and LSI made stuff hard to build and repair... and Space Age Metal products - a huge scrap yard that turned into ClassIC components - who successfully transitioned to be a major active components supplier.
I loved FRYs too, but shopping there was always a pain. I remember once I was buying a laptop, and at the very last moment they realized they put the wrong laptop in the wrong box, and just couldn't sell it to me without the price jumping by $500 or something. So I just walked out. I never found this experience in Best buy, for whatever reason Best buy has been able to adapt much better than either circuit City or Fry's did.
Well, I never had any sort of price switch played on me. I don't blame you - was it a scam or a true error - we will never know.
The trouble with Fry's seems to be a lack of high level state of the art knowledge, and they fell behind. The ownership aspects allowed them to hang on longer.