Demolishing the Fry's Electronics in Burbank | Hacker News Reader

Demolishing the Fry's Electronics in Burbank

latimes.com

139 pointswalterbell113 comments

Where else could you simultaneously purchase through-hole transistors, a gaming motherboard, a 19" rack, a leafblower, a loudspeaker disguised as a plastic rock, pornography, a taser, a sandwich and a decent cup of coffee while surrounded by fiberglass cowboys and aliens... sad to see

Don't forgot the knock-off cologne!

Sandwiches, too. Ate at the cafe a fair bit. When my buddy was living on Victory and Hollywood we hit Burbank on a regular basis.

Of the Burbank, Fountain Valley, San Marcos, San Diego, Anaheim Hills, Roseville, Sacramento, Fremont, Las Vegas and Sunnyvale locations, I think I liked the San Diego one most for selection (it was a former Incredible Universe), but the Roseville and Las Vegas ones had the wildest themes, even more than the Burbank UFO. But the Fremont location when I ended up there in 2019 was deader than a doornail, and it was like waiting for the next hit to kill them. The next hit came sooner than I thought.

I used to stop by the Fremont location for a sandwich when traffic on the Sunol grade was bad.

if you looked hard, you might even find the offices of the American Institute of Math at a fry's location... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Institute_of_Mathemat...

Fry's American Institute of Mathematics built and operated a 192-acre golf course in Morgan Hill.[1] There was some suspicion that was the real purpose of the Institute. They'd been trying to build a large clubhouse (er, "headquarters") on the site, built to look like the Alahambra castle and equipped with guest rooms, a wine cellar, and "a gourmet-industrial kitchen with master chefs from a San Francisco seafood restaurant and a Napa Valley resort." That was not, apparently, built. Here's what it was supposed to look like.[2]

[1] https://www.greenfoothills.org/pga-tour-eyes-frys-course

[2] https://archive.is/1sukx

And each one of those items would somehow have a dead pixel.

I loved Fry's and shopped there often in the 90s and 00s but it did seem like half of the things I bought there had to be returned for one reason or another.

Once I was returning something at the Palo Alto Fry's and the couple ahead of me had a laptop where someone had removed the battery and replaced it with a sandwich. Only at Fry's.

I once returned a product that was not working to the Burbank Fry's location. I walked around the store for a bit, then passed by the section where that product was sold - and saw the product I had returned back on the shelf. Could tell by the way I had torn it open - they had just wrapped it back up and put a small discount on it.

>for one reason or another.

Exactly that. It was never that it straight-up didn't work. It was just that there was some issue.

I first encountered it with a TV that literally had a dead pixel. From there, the next 3-4 purchases featured something wrong. Monitor's built-in settings menu didn't display, cordless phone speaker issue, etc.

Dead pixels.

No way it was random. Funniest part was they'd get snippy with their return policy, like you were the problem.

Whenever I was out in the Valley I'd visit one or more Fry's. Then there was Weird Stuff Warehouse and Computer Literacy Bookstore. There probably wasn't any area the size of Silicon Valley that had stores that even remotely compared. Always spent more than I budgeted but never felt bad about it.

When I first moved out to the Bay Area in 1995 and discovered Fry's it was wire-wrapping tools, sockets, enclosures, electronic components, porn magazines, junk food, soft drinks, Computer Shopper magazines....

Computer shopper!

https://archive.org/details/computer_shopper

Delicious, they even scanned the cardstock ad inserts

You could literally purchase a bag of chips (SIMMs) on one aisle, and a bag of chips (Fritos) in another!

I must admit that “Big Boob Babes” was my favorite CD-ROM purchase in 1994. No, it was not a DVD

This morning, I was just watching the video of “The Distance” by Cake, and I vividly recall when that was released and played on my car radio, and the metaphor of corporate slavery was not lost on 24-year-old me.

My favorite store was the one with the Mesoamerican temples and stuff.

Also, remember Weird Stuff Warehouse?

I have an extension cable that still has the bright orange Weird Stuff Warehouse sticker on it. I will never remove it.

The Computer Shopper magazine. How it was 3/4” thick full of content every edition just amazed me.

5/8” of that was ads. But, before the consumer internet, those ads were as interesting and valuable to readers as the articles.

The articles in Computer Shopper were pretty much fairly low effort filler. Not that there weren’t tons of ads in things like PC Magazine but the articles/columns/reviews were of pretty good quality for the most part.

While the point of the articles was to keep it legally qualified as a "magazine" rather than a "catalog" (as postal rates then favored the former over the latter), there were some good things there. Don Lancaster wrote some amazing articles about Postscript and how you can write Postscript code to make figures rather than using a drawing program. And Stan Veit, who was editor of Computer Shopper for a time, wrote some good history articles about the early personal computer scene in the 1970s (Veit had opened in 1976 the first computer store in NYC, and one of the first in the USA as a whole)

Fair. I had forgotten about Don Lancaster, probably because that was never an area of particular interest. Mostly only bought Computer Shopper if I were building a PC or something like that.

Drooling over PC part reviews in magazines that I could never afford, checking the weekly printed Fry's ad in the local paper to find deals, convincing my parents to drop me at the electronics-nerd-utopia for a lazing weekend afternoon - "Won't you get bored?" . . . "No Mom!"

Iconic building, nostalgic time.

> convincing my parents to drop me at the electronics-nerd-utopia for a lazing weekend afternoon - "Won't you get bored?" . . . "No Mom!"

I had a traveling job for a while, I was away from home every single week.

When you first start doing a job like that, you imagine that you'll be doing all kinds of sightseeing. I thought I'd be traipsing through Central Park and eating Cubanos in Miami.

None of that happens IRL; you're so busy working, by the time you have a few hours to kill, all you want to do is space out. Doing tourist stuff gets to be WORK.

After a few months of this, I started to just obsessively spend time at Fry's.

I didn't even really need anything from Fry's. It was just this place I could reliably visit at any tech hub on the west coast. Doesn't matter if you're in Burbank or San Diego or Sacramento or Portland or Seattle: if it's 2010, there's a Fry's you can wander around in for a couple of hours.

I've never been to The Space Needle in Seattle, but I've been to Fry's Electronics numerous times.

I remember when Fry's opened in the Portland, OR area (actually ~15 miles south). It occupied the former Incredible Universe site. We considered it a notable upgrade.

Fry's was like a museum of common and obscure electronic parts, devices and strangely miscellaneous stuff (mundane office supplies, home appliance accessories, etc.). It was definitely the go to place for computer building blocks and related supplies.

It was amazing what could be found there. One really great thing was relay racks and all kinds of shelves and attachments for them. Too good to pass up I bought one. It was used in my office (for webserver and LAN) and still houses my home server.

Like everywhere else Fry's closed unceremoniously. I guess the chain couldn't withstand the growing online competition and waning interest in desktop machines. Too bad they had to go, now and then it would be so convenient if neighborhood purveyors of "exotic" electronics were still around.

> it would be so convenient if neighborhood purveyors of "exotic" electronics were still around

Speed up electronics prototyping in support of future manufacturing.

I had gone there a few times probably several months before they closed. It was quite sad how empty it was. Product hangers were lined up in a single row with one item on each hanger. The only shelf that looked full was the one aisle filled with just the same two pack of canned air, nothing else.

For those in the bay area, Micro Center is opening a branch in Santa Clara.

https://www.microcenter.com/site/stores/santa-clara.aspx

Well, maybe. It's delayed months at this point.

That link you posted there says 2025! Wow that makes me excited. Big fan of microcenter.

Loyal customer of the Detroit area Micro Center. Thought I was the furthest customer that day when I bought my last laptop there coming ninety miles. Salesman said he's sold two machines that day to customers from Grand Rapids and one to someone from Muskegon! That Muskegon customer had travelled nearly 400 miles roundtrip to buy a laptop. I'm fairly technical and yet I haven't ever found a question my salesman couldn't answer.

Thought why would they open one so close to another, until I just found out the 3255 Mission College Blvd one was closed.

Yep. Glad they're coming back.

One of the things I loved most about Fry's was that clearly an engineer designed their checkout line. It's the only retail checkout line I've ever seen that fully embraced queueing theory.

They had one long line that everyone got into, and a load balancer up front that would direct you to an open check stand, and at least at the store I went to, in their hayday they had 30 registers open at once!

This sort of queuing system is also widely used in Post Office and bank branches in the UK since at least the 1980s.

Many airline counter lines work this way here in the US and the line at my local post office does as well. The post office line hardly move though.

Aldi in Market Street, Manchester, UK had that for many years. It worked really well. I think it might have put some people off when they saw the length of the queue, but it moved so fast, and you never felt like you'd chosen the wrong checkout as there was only one queue.

Unfortunately, they redesigned the shop a few years ago and got rid of that.

Which gave the checkers a 20-30 second break as the customer next-in-line briskly walked from the queue, past register 30, 29, 28, past more impulse items, ... down to register 4.

My dear dad drove me back and forth between Burbank and Palm Springs 3 times while I figured out motherboard/memory compatibility. Miss dad and miss Fry’s.

that's so sweet. :')

reminds me of my mom taking me to radio shack, so many times.

thank you for sharing.

I just recently learned from the last Not Just Bikes video [0] that these big box stores tend to be very hard to reuse (even when they don't include a giant spaceship). 99 Percent Invisible has a good article [1] on some of the challenges and a few success stories, but it takes a major effort.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7-e_yhEzIw

1: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/ghost-boxes-reusing-a...

The building which used to house Fry's Electronics in Concord, CA is now an indoor gym/adventure type enterprise.

https://pioneerpublishers.com/old-frys-building-to-see-new-l...

I used to visit that store once a week, just because.

What always bugged me about Fry's at the end was how disrespectful people eventually got to the sample goods on the floor. I swear, every motherboard had their pins smooshed in. Maybe this is `old man remembers` but it wasn't that trashy in its heyday, when admittedly, I was a kid so maybe I didn't notice. Maybe it's because they had to pivot hard to cheap trinkets towards the end and that brought in a different crowd, I'm not sure.

That's a crime the Valley Relics Museum couldn't get the Spaceship. It has done a really great job saving what can be saved of Los Angeles San Fernando Valley history. If you're ever near the Van Nuys airport check it out. Fry's was a happy place for me. Memories of their old Terminal based stockkeeping system (AS400? AIX? I heard rumors the owner wrote it themselves). The Burbank Scifi theme, the Manhattan Beach polynesian theme, the Woodland Hills Alice in Wonderland Theme. Even the old sacramento unthemed version and the newer train themed one. The memories of building my own computers for several iterations and almost always getting my parts there, shopping first with my Dad then later a relaxing walk on my own. The haunted look of female partners dragged there. The ecclectic selection. It was a okay substitute for an old style electronics store like Electronic City, but had so much other interesting things. So many interesting things lost in LA. DAK2000, TRI-ESS Sciences, OPAMP Books. ALL Electronics surplus.

My favorite thing about Fry's was the weekly sale ads in the newspaper with all the rebate offers. At one time I had at least a dozen cheap-ass "web cams". LOL

Damn. I grew up in Glendale and used to visit this store all the time. I’d take the bus if my parents couldn’t take me. Which was actually 3 buses and probably 4 hours of travel to get there and back. My dad worked at Lockheed Martin and the credit union was right across the street so that was always an excuse to drop-in after a bank visit.

Got my first WRT54G there, my first managed switch, power supplies, misc parts for RC building (heat shrink, soldering accessories). Was always fun to visit “the pit” with all the motherboards and processors unboxed and on full display. Felt like the NYSE with people lined up to look at the board and grab a processor. It was always so active like a bee hive. Visiting more recently it was just a shell of its former self.

It’s still my favorite store with the alien attack vibes and all the army jeeps.

Here's a decent 21 min mini-doc on the birth and death of Fry's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pu2uAKc37jI

Personally, visiting friends in California and them taking me to Fry's fir the first time was an experience I'll not forget. We had CompUSA back home. But, Fry's was a whole other level.

Going from being a computer geek in 90s rural midwest to being a computer geek in a Fry's in Silicon Valley in the Tech Bubble was like stepping into a magically wonderful mirror world.

A bit similar for me, I grew up in the Midwest and spent a lot of time wandering around CompUSA and Circuit City / Best Buy when I was a kid. When I was old enough and had some reason to go out West, Fry's was one of the top things on my list of things to go see, it felt like a pilgrimage of sorts.

El Sobrante, https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=94274

> The Fry's Foods grocery chain began at this location in 1954 when Donald Fry acquired Ray's Market, owned by Ray Dickenson. Joined by his brother, Charles, in 1955, they grew that initial store into a 41-store chain which they sold in 1972. Charles gifted a portion of the proceeds to his three sons, enabling them to launch the first store of what would one day become the highly successful Fry's Electronics retail chain.

Gone are the times when I could spend some time perusing around Fry’s…looking at all the discrete components and computers. It was sad seeing it die too; all the empty shelves filled with the same item spread out…

A classic bit of satire and HTML form humor that reflected Fry's focus on products and ambiance but not necessarily employee helpfulness: https://web.archive.org/web/20200130175501/http://homepage.s...

Always had good memories of hanging out at Fry's in Burbank. Maybe you guys could check out my work-in-progress ROBLOX level that captures that unique experience: https://www.roblox.com/games/18551707487/Frys-Electronics-Bu...

I don’t know what kind of world we are leaving for the next generation. It’s completely devoid of any character or authenticity.

I'm generally very positive about technological and economic progress and just defended Fry's being replaced by online stores to my wife. That said, we are losing physical third spaces and I think that's a real problem. Towards the end going to Fry's was more entertainment for me then of practical value. PCPartPicker and online stores are much more convenient than walking around Fry's but if I had a kid who wanted to build their first PC I'd do much rather drive to Fry's together, walk around and check out the parts together etc. Even if it meant we had to go back there more than once because we got the wrong part or something didn't work. The shared effort and other like-minded people around just is a value in itself. My Fry's also was in a mall with a fabulous taqueria. The taqueria by itself isn't worth the drive but made for a great stop right after and turned it into a fun little outing.

We need more things like this but I don't know how to make it work economically. Maybe shopping never was the best focal point for this?

Great video on the history of Fry's and how its stores became abandoned at Bright Sun Films...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cjUqV-jvsSA&pp=ygUVYnJpZ2h0IHN...

Great channel in general.

I miss the Fry’s of the late 1980s. I need a 7400 chip and a bag of chips. Then pick up a he-ne laser at weird stuff.

What a nostalgia trip. And I am not even American and never been in a Fry's :)

Anyone remember the one in Sunnyvale in the early 90s. It had a circuit board floor?

I visited that a lot! I never caught on to that. Darn!

I wonder what they did with the Fry’s 747.

lol

https://www.747sp.com/747sp-production-list/21992-447/

United purchased it for $1 in 1986

later asking price was $8.0 million in 2004

And Mr William Fry purchased it for $10 in 2005

trail gets murky though around 2009?

I bought it for three fiddy

They had a 727-200Adv at one point too. I assume it's been turned into Coke cans by now.

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