Silicon Valley finally has a big electronics retailer again: Micro Center opens | Hacker News Reader

Silicon Valley finally has a big electronics retailer again: Micro Center opens

microcenter.com

301 pointsmodeless168 comments

The Micro Center in Cambridge, MA, has improved a lot over the years.

When they have the thing that I want, I'd prefer to go there, rather than order online.

Also, I've never seen opened returns re-shinkwrapped and sold again as new at Micro Center, unlike in stories about Fry's. There are some wire shelves where opened returns are sold at a small discount, clearly labeled.

Incidentally, would be nice to also have a good surplus and e-cycling store browsing adventure in town. But I guess the economics are difficult, when real estate is so expensive, and most of the few customers for unusual stuff are online. (That local hobbyists could save a lot of money on shipping cost of decommissioned corporate and lab gear, or make impulse purchases they wouldn't online, probably isn't enough, I'd guess.)

>When they have the thing that I want, I'd prefer to go there, rather than order online.

Worth mentioning that they price match Amazon

I bought a CPU cooler there a few months back - the guy at checkout told me to pull up the Amazon listing on my phone so he could knock some cash off

https://community.microcenter.com/kb/articles/6-do-you-price...

How is that possible? Amazon has to have lower overheads than a brick and mortar.

They hope you'll buy a soda and a magazine or whatever. They always try to upsell protection plans.

I don't recall ever asking for a price match at a brick&mortar, even though I'm aware it's available at some stores. I'd guess most people don't.

The store gets some mileage out of being known for price-matching competitors (even online competitors, where that'd be a bit much).

(Well, occasionally I have questioned in-store, when a major chain shows one price on the Web, available at a specific brick&mortar location, but when you get to that location, there's a much higher price on the shelf. Now I tend to order for pickup at those stores, which is more work for them, just to lock in the Web-advertised price, rather than the switcheroo price.)

In Canada Staples will also price match Amazon.

I will make stores price match anything and everything. I also look at every item on my grocery check out to make sure the price is exactly what the shelf said. I concede no ground to fine print sales expiration dates. However, I am a freak when it comes to remembering these things after a decade of business purchasing and I did my fair share of taking advantage of the consumer.

I frankly enjoy fighting stores on pricing and get dopamine from a good deal and it pains me to pay more than necessary even if I can afford it just fine. I understand not everyone is like this.

There was a period a year or two ago where if you leaked cookies and ad tracking to Amazon and deliberately clicked through to competing sites their algorithm would aggressively slash pricing far below MSRP. I admit I would use this technique in microcenter to get Amazon to give me ludicrously cheap pricing then turn around and make them price match for instant gratification.

Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.

>Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.

Then why don’t their 10-Ks and 10-Qs show it? There is a reason it has a reputation of being a cutthroat business. Out of all the big retail businesses, only Home Depot/Lowes has 8%+ profit margins, and Apple obviously.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-pr...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BBY/best-buy/net-p...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/net-pr...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KR/kroger/net-prof...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ACI/albertsons/net...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TGT/target/net-pro...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/JWN/nordstrom/net-...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/M/macys/net-profit...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WBA/walgreens/net-...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CVS/cvs-health/net...

Because net profit margin is different from gross margin. The products are still marked up way higher than that bottom line number. PMn is the margin after you add in all the over head costs and those really have little to do with whether they are loosing money by selling a product under their target mark up.

Best Buy making a gross $250 on a $1000 priced TV or $50 when discounted to $800 still isn’t loosing any money unless they are at their credit ceiling and cannot replace the good sold. They make zero if A customer standing in their store deciding not to even give them $50 and giving it a to a competitor on their cellphone. Tho is absolutely profit opportunity lost, even if it is small.

Consider the case of a business operating at excessive margins with huge room to discount but doesn’t. Their fixed costs must then be spread over few transactions and lower their net margins to almost nothing. Instead a business operating at a much more socially optimum price point sells a huge amount of goods at a lower mark up and gets to spread those fixed costs over a lot more transactions. Their Gross markup may be less than the high priced store but their net margin can be higher.

I set a lot of prices during the pandemic. Any average business found that they were granted some degree of monopoly power and could generate higher net margins with less competitive prices. Many of us found the simplest solution was to just pass on all costs to the consumer because they had no choice but to take our price or not get their good.

Times are different and there is competition but many businesses have still forgotten how to increase gross margin by having a sale.

Not to get into politics but tariffs are the same way. The elasticity of demand for a good determines the monopoly power of the supplier/retailer and how much of the tariff gets passed on to the consumer. Highly interchangeable products will not see the full tariff passed on to the consumer because that would mean forgoing all sales. The importer will determine how much gross margin they can give up without loosing money…but the producer in the foreign country also does the same math. Do they completely give up the American market to save inventory for other markets or do they eat some top line profit and still make some sales.

Many goods will indeed be pulled from the market, but if the producer fails to find replacement customers in other markets they will look back at 300M Americans and reconsider whether they can give their importer a better price while still making something. If the good expires, like say a case of white wine, or becomes obsolete in the case of say a lightning charging cable there is additional pressure to make the decision before the surplus simply becomes unseeable.

If a good has no viable alternatives and is relatively shelf stable expect all tariffs to be passed along because the products price is already disconnected from its cost and the business producing it is closer to a monopoly than not.

>Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.

This statement encompasses the whole business, for which the profit margin is the relevant metric, not gross margin. And it is clear that the standard retail business is not one in which you can earn a lot of money. Just because a specific item sells to a customer for more than what it costs to buy just that specific item from the supplier, does not mean the business's margins are high. There are myriad costs that have to be accounted for, such as spoilage, theft, inventory, transportation, labor, returns, etc.

Some things sell for higher margin, some things sell for lower margins, but at the end of the day, the stores clearly operate at very low margins. Hence why so many go out of business all the time, and all the brick and mortar we have left are the biggest ones with the largest volumes.

That is not what we were talking about though. We were talking about how much discount you can force out of a retailer via price matching which is a function of its Gross Margin. a 25% discount at the register doesn't mean a bottom line 25% subtraction from Net Margin. Those numbers are distantly connected and most operating costs (minus COGS) are fixed.

That might work for a few customers, for a few products sold at high margins. But mathematically, if the business started giving everyone 25% discounts, and they already only have a 2% profit margin, then it doesn’t pencil out that it could survive.

Bottom line is if a business, and an entire industry in this case, has 2% to 5% profit margins, across 10+ publicly listed businesses, across decades of operation, it means they are selling goods at about as low of a price as possible (averaged over all goods). Some will be high margin, some low margin, some negative margin, but at the end it’s only resulting in a couple percent of profit.

Best Buy will price match competitor websites and printed ads, via online chat, for online delivery or in-store pickup.

Amazon prices what they can get away with, not what their costs are. Jeff Bezos’s rocketry hobby is a testament to Amazon’s ability to extract surplus.

Almost everyone prices that way - that is how supply and demand works.

Bezos's wealth is ~100% due to stock appreciation, which in turn is tied much more closely to AWS than to the consumer store.

I think the point is Amazon cuts costs and reduces price first, prices out the competition through economics of scale, then once competition is eliminated is able to raise prices.

If every person price matched every item, they'd be screwed, but: most people don't, many items just can't be, and if eg you're price matching a $20 cpu cooler, you may also be buying a $500 cpu or a bunch of other components that they'll actually make money on.

This is also why different stores have different skus for items - that $20 coolermaster 40mm with red LEDs is cm40rl-w at Walmart and cm40rl-a at Amazon.

Retailers will absolutely budge on this technicality, this is to disarm those that aren’t aggressive. Everyone’s retail margins are wayyyyyy higher than they want the consumer to believe and their holding costs are non-negligible.

I thought the purpose of that was to let them avoid price matching on certain items despite having price matching policies. I have never heard of one budging on this. Have any?

It's also so you can't buy the "same" item a year or more later after yours is out of warranty.

Which some people were known to do, and then return their old unit in the new box for a refund.

So model numbers are sometimes changed far more freqently than device characteristics or features are changed.

It is so the manager has a policy to fall back on to say no. It is just the second round of negotiation.

I am not saying everyone will play ball, but managers whose pay is a function of sales likely will. Have you ever negotiated buying a car before? Indicating you will let corporate know they lost a sale by not budging on price will almost always win the negotiation with managers who think they can just be lazy without consequence.

In the standard retail environment, I have definitely had businesses price match products with the same specs but very slight SKU differences, you just have to be open about a willingness to forego the instant gratification because that is the only service in person retail provides today. That might mean actually completing the sale online and then asking again. They know when there is actually a material difference to the products.

Businesses that are legit monopolies will not budge.

That is good to know. Thanks.

Stores often refuse to stock products unless they are given a comfortable enough margin on them that can be as high as 25%. That is how they can afford to do deals on CPUs to draw people into the store. Amazon also has overhead in shipping costs to customers that the brick and mortar store does not, since they receive goods in bulk that amortizes costs. They both also want as much money as they can get out of the customer, so they have little reason to lower pricing upfront unless they think that it will help them get even more money (like how microcenter cuts prices on CPUs since they expect to make it up on everything else you need to build a PC).

Microcenter is a surviving personal computer retailer from the DOS days.

Seemed like they were intentionally flexible enough at the beginning so they would be able to go forward with any and all manufacturers that might turn out to prevail, back when nobody knew for sure.

Whether the future would more strongly include Apple, IBM compatibles, or any other alternatives which have come & went.

It was a "superstore" by design, decades before Walmart got there through its unavoidable momentum.

The vast majority of items do need to fly off the shelf, but it's best not to purge too much of everything else. The smartest operators can actually stock a larger number of slower-moving items too.

Also I have seen some affordable stock pulled from the shelves and online like smaller capacity SATA SSDs, after higher-capacity or more modern units naturally replace them as technology progresses. Looks like they mark down the less-modern units, or they won't move at all, and those can then end up at the point where further markdown would be below cost. All remaining stock disappears to a liquidator, which are more common than ever these days. Just when you thought it was really going to get good. It used to be easier to browse for "stragglers" that were too expensive when first released, if you waited a year or two those prices could be really slashed when more modern versions took over the mainstream, if you could find any stock remaining.

I drive right by the one in Houston almost every week where you can see the store conveniently a block away from the freeway, only sometimes for that same reason the traffic can get so bad that it's a 20 minute ordeal getting back out of the parking lot, down that block, and back on the freeway :\

So sometimes I'll wait a few weeks before just dropping in, but it's also always been good to have when you need something right away.

Except recently when I knew exactly what I wanted, a 2TB SATA laptop HDD, not an SSD for this particular PC. I still had a 1TB NIB in my storage unit from a few years ago when I picked up a couple but only used one at the time.

Well, these days they had nothing. Except a few items of one SKU that was your typical modern garbagey SMR HDD, which modern SMR is miserably sluggish (you know, like a snail without a shell) by comparison to regular HDDs from previous decades (which were all conventional CMR until some SMR bozo came along). SMR is very frustrating even for long-term storage, and completely useless in a laptop. Give me a break.

Had to then go to the storage unit and dig out the 1TB one I already had.

Nobody's fault but mine for shopping and trying to be a consumer when it's not absolutely necessary :\

I don't think 2TB 2.5" CMR drives exist. At least this was the case few years ago and I doubt they invest in development of 2.5" platters anymore.

Amazon pricing isn't always that good and they lie about the discounts and retail prices, at least here in the UK. My US colleagues tell me the same is true in the US. I've actually found that general high street crap seller Argos here tends to have better retail prices than Amazon. I can just amble on down the road and get what I needed same day pick up in person rather than wait for a delivery to turn up.

It's not too uncommon for retail stores to match Amazon, as long as it's specifically both "sold by Amazon" and "shipped by Amazon". Best Buy does too, for example.

Not anymore. That massive logistics network and in house courier ain’t cheap.

Delivery costs can be significant, especially for big things.

Not quite the same as storefront surplus, but: https://w1mx.mit.edu/flea-at-mit/

I was literally just there an hour ago, buying $800 worth of gear for a Wi-Fi mesh buildout.

Could I have gotten it cheaper online? Probably. But when you have 36 hours notice that you need to build out Wi-Fi, you can't beat Micro Center.

A company I worked for provisioned all its software dev machines from Micro Center. That's how I'd heard of it.

That store is dangerous. The last few times I went "just to browse" but I came home with an ultra wide monitor and a new PC build.

I've started buying parts retail instead of online just because of how much I enjoy Microcenter. The interior does need a bit of a renovation though, it looks almost identical to how it did in the 90s.

90s anachronism is a perfectly valid aesthetic. I dislike the tendency to think that things must constantly be changed for purely aesthetic reasons. This tendency was intentionally created in order to sell more things -- look up the history of Ford and Alfred Sloan for details.

While maintaining the 90s vibe is commendable, the keyword is maintain. Cambridge and Cincinnati complement their 90s aesthetic with grime and stains also from the 90s.

> identical to how it did in the 90s

Are 1990s customers and their children in Microcenter target market?

Should the next Microcenter aesthetic be 2000s, 2010s, 2020s or 2090s?

3090s.

> The last few times I went "just to browse" but I came home with an ultra wide monitor and a new PC build.

Wow, that sounds like a great day!

> The interior does need a bit of a renovation though, it looks almost identical to how it did in the 90s.

I think it would really bring me joy if I walked in and they were playing early 90s Beck, Soundgarden, Letters To Cleo...

If it is not broken, do not fix it. Renovations would cost money, which would mean higher prices. It is better to stick with what works than see prices rise to cover pointless renovations that would harm their competitiveness. The money is better spent on expansion that would pay for itself.

Dude don’t update it. Do you really want it to look like Best Buy? Because that’s the ad company they will hire to remake their brand. But it will be even more of that.

Considering New Hampshire’s lack of sales tax, I’m patiently waiting for Micro Center to establish a new presence in Nashua or Salem. The Cambridge location, while personally cherished, isn’t that accessible by car because of Boston’s stress-induced car traffic congestion. Even on foot, getting to the store is still a bit of a journey. Also, let’s not forget Massachusetts’ 6.25% sales tax.

In New Hampshire, I am positive Micro Center would attract customers from all over New England and make an absolute killing from sales, potentially overshadowing their Cambridge profits. I would never shop online or in Cambridge for hardware again. But, I’m sure they wish not to jeopardize the Cambridge store or their MIT and Boston tech hobbyist clientele. Otherwise, I am surprised they have not yet acted upon this idea.

But, a man can dream!

Comments like this remind me I might be the only person in Massachusetts honestly calculating my use tax for my tax return every year.

Probably one of the only people in the country.

I have a friend in RI that does it.

Google maps says Salem is 40min+ from Cambridge, and Nashua is 50min+ from Cambridge, and add another 10min to 20min from other parts of Boston.

Each minute of driving costs at least $0.67 (from IRS), excluding increased morbidity and mortality risks (injury from car collisions is the top health risk for most Americans).

So even using $0.50 per minute of driving, if you are only going to NH to evade sales tax, that is 80min*$0.50cents = $40. $40/0.0625 =$640.

So the first $640 of the purchase doesn't even save you any money (even more for most Bostonians further than Cambridge), and it costs you 1 to 2 hours of your life driving back and forth. If you value your leisure time at at least $100 per hour, then you're looking at spending at least $2,200 for the tax evasion to start paying off.

I'm just positing why Microcenter will not open a NH location anytime soon, because most of its customers (who are in Boston metro) won't find that it pays off to travel to NH.

Tax free weekends exist in MA as well, yet a lot of people still travel across the state line to buy tax free items like booze.

It's not always logical, but sometimes you find yourself outside of the city or heading north to be wilderness and the value prop changes if you're already heading that way.

I agree that MC won't open one here, as we can't even get an IKEA closer than Stoughton.

My favorite store like this is the Apple Store in the pheasant Lane mall - the parking lot is in Massachusetts, stores are in NH.

Oh God. I wish the sales clerks would leave me alone. They’re always trying to put their sticker on purchases and proffer useless advice. Still, it’s the best in the area, and the Trader Joe’s is a draw. I bought my first computer, an Apple //gs at Micro Center at their original, single location.

They're not there for you, they're there for your grandma. They also get paid terribly, let them put their little stickers on. You never know when they might return the favor.

Oh yes. I'm strongly in favor of having a sticker on everything and want these salespeople to get credit for every purchase even when I know exactly what I want.

Regardless if they gave me any help during that particular visit or not.

Why not? Wtf do you care? It has no effect on you other than making them happy.

Because making people happy costs you nothing, in this case and many many others, so why wouldn't you?

Just ask for their sticker and promise you will put it on your purchase. If another approaches just show them the sticker, they get it.

St. Louis? Or do other locations also pop up near Trader Joe's?

One in Cambridge also happens to be next to the Trader Joe's. I'm starting to see a pattern here..

It's been more than four years since Fry's closed. I can't believe it took this long to get something better than Best Buy and bigger than Central Computers, in the middle of Silicon Valley of all places!

We had a Microcenter that closed in 2012, took them that long to return.

Who in Silicon Valley uses actual computers and not something in the cloud? Do any start ups use actual hardware that you'd get at some place like MicroCenter? Don't they just get handed shiny new Apple hardware (something from HP/Dell if they're on a budget) to interface with the cloud?

I think many of the employees have gaming rigs at home and would buy parts there.

You'd be surprised by how many "tech" people have no clue on about how to build a rig, nor have any willingness to learn.

Youre not wrong.

I have a pc with 24GB 3090 card capable of running LLMs locally, but our electricity costs make API calls much more reasonable.

Even gaming -- streaming geforce now is cheaper than ammortizing cost of power + hardware over time

For my personal use, I'll take the hit in cost for the additional control that owning the hardware gives me. Even less restrictive things like blocking sideloading are unacceptable to me.

Cost break down please

The store has lots of other tech enthusiast stuff, like a huge selection of 3D printers.

And a full aisle of electronics / hobbyist gear, including decent soldering stations, fluke gear, tons of components, and a good smattering of SparkFun and Adafruit's catalog.

They have great small business machines and more importantly, everything you need without waiting for amazon. Their in-house prebuilt brand PowerSpec have great prices for the hardware and work nicely whether you go for a gaming version or office build.

silicon valley-ite here: we have normal gaming machines and linux boxen too …

I get the feeling the real Fry's died long before that. It seemed like it was going downhill when I left the area about 18 years ago. Less parts, less tools, less test equipment, more packaged gadgets.

Yeah Fry's was pretty awful.

Fry's had an interesting vibe and felt you time traveled to the 90s, but my gosh they were so weird. They searched your bag on the way out. Microcenter is a godsend although it'll be hard to beat B&H with Payboo card.

I only use B&H site for checking general prices or reviews, as they won't stop discriminating people.

A discrimination lawsuit almost every year since 2009.

https://www.thephoblographer.com/2024/07/09/bh-photo-lawsuit...

Not really familiar with their internal affairs but as a retailer they have been nothing but great in my experience as the customer. In the end, any large company will at some point be accused of certain things, rightly or wrongly, and I am willing to bet larger retailers simply have an easier time paying off the complaints before we hear about them. I mean, the primary alternative for me would be Amazon, which won’t win any prizes from me in employee affairs dimension, I can tell you that.

I think a lot of that was following what sold. If nobody is buying these things at Fry's, it doesn't make sense for them to stock them.

IMHO, there was a drop in good deals around the time they got rid of the purchaser who was doing the embezzleing (2008), and also new stores started opening with 'boring corporate store' theme ('new' sunnyvale store, vegas). If I'm gonna be at a boring corporate store and not getting good deals, why bother?

Then there was the year? or so of circling the drain when there was some sort of credit problem and they tried to switch from owning inventory to a consignment model and most of their vendors weren't interested so they had no inventory.

TBH, I've been hoping they make a Wolf of Wall Street style movie about the store. There was obviously kooky stuff going on business wise, and that means there could be an entertaining story.

Agreed; went into Fry's, off Lawrence?, just before it closed. Visited area on and off again over the years since. Central Computer did seem to have what I needed for that moment, but the area seemed barren, was simply not the same, and especially after experiencing Fry's, Weird Stuff, Halted?, Anchor, Computer Literacy, et al. in the late 1980s and 90s.

Hear hear. I guess we still have Anchor.

PC hardware is a competitive and margin tight business, especially due to online sales. At the same time, the inventory can be very expensive on the books. It makes the calculus for viability of a physical store quite challenging. It's why Microcenter has relatively few stores for the US.

I've been happy with Central Computer. Three machines and two repairs in ten years.

So true. Fry's is still missed every day.

This is a good replacement, though.

I'm lucky to be about 10 mins away from the one in Westchester NY.

They have a dedicated asile to custom water cooling items which shows how serious they are about enthusiasts.

I used to order my new set ups on Newegg but now I just got to Microcenter

Same for me and the Wayne, PA store. Prices are competitive and they're one of the few places I know that carries Bawls energy drinks.

Newegg has deteriorated in my experience and now not materially different from Amazon, with wrong items shipped and multiple dropshippers commingling inventory so provenance of stuff is questionable. Do not recommend.

It is a shame.

I think the tipping point was newegg the store vs newegg the marketplace.

Newegg "the store" was pretty great, newegg "the marketplace" not so much. And unlike amazon at least newegg tells you who the seller is and keeps a big "only show results from the newegg store" filter present. but even despite that the store is not nearly as great as it once was.

I wonder if there is anything left of amazon "the store", perhaps if you buy a book? Or has amazon "the marketplace" consumed everything.

Amazon has surpassed Newegg as my online parts provider of choice.

It's not that things can't go wrong, it's just that they are much better at handling it than Newegg these days.

Totally agree. 20ish years ago Newegg was my one stop for computing purchases online. Now I just use it to gauge pricing as I find their search and filtering to still be the best.

Most of my online computing purchases now come from B&H in New York City. Super fast shipping and I’ve never had a bad order experience.

Newegg was purchased by a Chinese investment firm about 10 years ago. It's like Walmart.com reseller marketplace over there ever since. I definitely visit my local Microcenter when they have it in stock. They also have a "one time use" coupon for $10 3d printer filament.

The store had pre-opening for the past 2 days. I drove by on Wednesday and the parking lot was completely full with folks parking across the street and walking over. I thought I would be able to stroll in and get the free USB drive but ended up not able to visit yet. Talk about pent up demand!

Interesting part is they have actually been open for a week now. They did a quiet opening on the 25th and it was still busy that day

It's good to finally have something "between" Best Buy and Central Computer (et al) back in the SV after Fry's died its slow and painful death as the previous Micro Center in Santa Clara closed.

Unfortunately this new one is in the same shopping center as Harbor Freight and it's close to where I live - this could get expensive... Mean to shop at one, end up shopping at both...

The lines on the "insider" opening day 5/28 were pretty long - I waited about an hour in line just to get into the store and the checkout line was over an hour long.

However, based on my purchases that day, I fear they will be unpleasant to shop at - even when busy, they were annoyingly upselling extended warranties. The sales associate on the floor tried to sell me on a plan for a laptop I bought and then, while there were hundreds of people waiting to checkout, the cashier spent time doing so AGAIN. Both were just following their mandated scripts and were at least nice about it all. They apparently also have some sort of rule that the customer buying something like a laptop also needs to "meet" with the sales associate's manager/supervisor - which was a completely useless awkward perfunctory handshake (and the customer survey asked if this meeting had happened so it appears to be an annoying institutional rule).

> the customer survey asked if this meeting had happened so it appears to be an annoying institutional rule

Whenever I get a survey that asks dumb questions like that, I just answer "yes" so that the employees don't get harassed for not asking those dumb questions to me in person.

"Were you warmly welcomed by a team member?" You bet I was!

"Did one of our team members tell you about our partnership with the Heart and Stroke Foundation?" Sure, why not?

There's a great parody of the whole customer satisfaction thing on a very underrated comedy series called "Corporate". Five out of five!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvHZfAT0F94

Fry's Electronics discussion threads

"Demolishing the Fry's Electronics in Burbank", 100 comments (2025), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43677862

"Fry's Electronics is closing all stores", 300 comments (2021), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26246435

"Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?", 350 comments (2020), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945492

"The Fry's Era", 150 comments (2019), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20853834

Electronics Surplus Stores

"Sundown for Surplus" (2018), https://www.eham.net/article/41444

"End of an Era: Weird Stuff Warehouse closed" (2018), https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/08/sjm-l-weirdstuff-0408...

> “Fry's Electronics is closing all stores", 300 comments (2021), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26246435

> "Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?", 350 comments (2020), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945492

This made me chuckle. Betteridge’s law is more of what you’d call a guideline than a rule.

I used to love visiting the Microcenter near our family home back in the early 90s. In those halcyon days, they had a exceptionally LIBERAL return policy - 30 days even on opened software. (the L.L. Bean of electronics).

As a child whose modest income was derived solely from weekly lawn mowing, needless to say I coincidentally became quite accomplished at beating PC games within a month's time.

In defense of my somewhat dubious behavior, I did go back as an older teenager with far more disposable income and purchase a ton of big-box PC games from them. Most of which I still have including one of my all-time favorite RPGs, Betrayal at Krondor.

I got my first computer, an Apple ][+, at the original Micro Center store in Upper Arlington (Columbus), Ohio.

The store was tiny and then grew over time to be huge. I live in NJ now and they have a store about 40 minutes away from me. I'm surprised they are still around given e-commerce and all the other stores that have collapsed. Happy they are--it's always fun to walk through the store like in the good old days and see what you can find.

Yup, I go in the Columbus store semi-frequently -- have since the mid-90's. They've kept up with the times so it's a little less "smells like nerd" (which bums me out), but they are very competent, very good on price, and sometimes it's just NICE to zip up 315 to get something instead of hitting Amazon or Ebay.

In comparison, Best Buy is a disaster lol; I hadn't been since Obama was in office, needed to buy a new tv, and it felt more like "electronics" Value City Furniture crossed with TJ Maxx than anything that came before it (Sun TV, Incredible Universe, etc).

At least at Micro Center you can expect a disheveled-yet-tucked-Oxford salesperson to come bother you until you say "I'm good, just put your sticker on the stuff I'm gonna buy" rather than some burned-out retail drone in a blue polo who tries to hard-sell you on a sound bar you didn't ask for!

It's amazing for the area that claims it's the tech center didn't have a microcenter until now. I like having a microcenter in Chicago.

They had one in Santa Clara in or near the Mercado shopping center until around 2012.

Per this reddit post, at the Santa Clara location there were some 5090 GPU retail boxes filled with crossbody backpacks instead of the GPU. Microcenter did eventually track this to a particular supplier.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Microcenter/comments/1kymzcd/update...

Am I the only one amused that nVidia flagship GPUs are now so large that you can fit 3 backbacks inside their packaging?

I got into electronics around 2016, right around when I was visiting my hometown from living abroad. There's been a Micro Center there for years and I ended up spending hours there looking at all the ESP8266 boards they had there, along with the various supplies of Arduinos and Adafruit boards. Pretty "recent" in terms of electronics tech, but somehow this is already close to 10 years ago :c

Microcenter is what Radio Shack should have become.

It was founded by two Radio Shack employees!

That explains a lot.

And we all watched Radio Shack run face-first into the same wall, over and over and over and over. The market was exploding and it was theirs to lose, and boy did they ever.

I worked at a CompUSA in high school and college. The money was around the PC sale, which was pretty high margin until around 1998/9. I’d come in in the morning before class to do freight… one time we built a pyramid of about 300 PCs.

It was a money machine until it wasn’t.

Radio Shack has to sell everything, couldn’t offer a good variety of devices, and didn’t have the staff to support people with complicated PC purchases. If cell phones blew up earlier radio shack would still be around.

I had a small PC Business. When the Internet Rebates came out with a free PC, we couldn't match that. However, the AOL or MSN monthly fee was $35 or $27 for dial-up. We had Brick.net for $10 a month and $500 to $700 mid-end PCs. We couldn't compete and went out of business.

Yeah that really killed the golden goose. Brick and mortar computer retailer and collapsing prices cant mix - you can’t cross sell high margin services and products with a $400-400 rebate purchase.

When I moved out of retail to professional internships, they were looking to enhance margins by selling candy and DVDs. Best Buy survived that era with appliances and TVs.

For reboot of US mainline electronics manufacturing, we need a video comparing US electronic parts retail with Shenzen electronic parts retail.

I am afraid of asking but what does Sayal classify as? I figured it would take negative time for someone to post Radio Shack in commentary because it’s basically a knee jerk reaction, but I do appreciate a store like Sayal although they’re proper electronics parts seller. These stores are more like finished product distributors. Maybe I’m too picky.

I haven't heard of Sayal, but there is Anchor Electronics in Santa Clara that sells what I would think you're looking for.

In my mind microcenter mostly sells PC parts that you plug in or stick into a card slot, although apparently they do also sell some electronics components a hobbyist might solder to a board.

> Anchor Electronics in Santa Clara

Looks about right! I thought Sayal was scattered across US so my bad :l

A big box product store opening that sells plug and play stuff is to me, personally, not worthy of bearing the title Electronics. It’s not news worthy for hackers. I could say that out of smugness but very often I’m confronted with sales staff that don’t know much about what they’re selling, and I end up (playfully?) educating them about the products, so I suspect this would be much the same.

The “Maker” space as it’s called today is amazing but I guess done to death so nobody talks about it?

There are of course no real contenders today that warrant bringing up Radio Shack in any way (but people still do as if it’s relevant). RS put a gorilla’s weight behind teaching people how to fish that when they left, they left a massive cultural void that nobody has since filled and is unlikely to fill. The world has moved on.

Can you link to Sayal?

Because I’m in Toronto, grew up here, have lived in SF/Bay, back when Fry’s was around.

Sayal in Toronto was my go to electronics store. I didn’t realize they were in the US? Unless it’s a different one.

Like it or not, and I'm in the not category, most people conflate electronics with consumer electronics. It is just something we have to deal with.

That said, a big box computer retailer is worth something. For the most part, I've found that sales people know something about computers. Contrast that to general consumer electronics stores where sales people know nothing about everything. If you know what you want, they also tend to be better than smaller computer stores. In that case, you're basically paying someone to do mail order for you.

Anchor Electronics is totally awesome. Very small but very interesting collection of stuff that you definitely won't find at any other store that still exists in the Bay Area.

I wonder if it will include an old bin with unopened copies of dark forces Jedi knight and other old stuff that just never sold all the copies for sale in a discount bin. The Microcenter in Atlanta was a treasure of old software that you had to have at some point in the past.

I sort of hate Micro Center and I sort of love it.

My theory of how you tell you're rich or not is that you walk into a store and you can buy whatever you want without caring what the price tag is.

I'm rich at the grocery store, I'm not rich at Micro Center.

I miss Fry's

I miss WeirdStuff.

How about HalTech?

Yeah, Haltek was great. A friend had a knack for finding valuable stuff — would go into Haltek and come out with a dozen of some obscure digital numerical display from the mid 70's or whatever.

I remember strolling through there and seeing all the weird hardware childhood me drooled over. Adult me did not walk out with a Snappy video capture thingy or a Jaz drive.

I walked through the store on their last day and was amazed at just how much unalloyed junk they had on the shelves - boxes of unidentified circuit boards with bent connectors and components broken off, shelves of empty binders, etc. Lots of neat, weird old stuff, but a lot of things which no one would ever buy.

I miss Incredible Universe.

Was nice seeing that the 5090 exists, but boy, those prices.

I love MicroCenter. Why do they seem to be flourishing as Best Buy seems to be closing stores, reducing staff, and locking items in the back?

While I've built machines using parts from Microcenter, it's been several years, as I eventually went all-in on Macbooks (though you can often get one cheaper there than at the Apple Store). However, as I've gotten into 3d printing and other maker tech in the last year, I'm now there at least once a month, and have spent more than I ever did.

I grew up going to the Microcenter in Vienna, VA. Bought a monitor there just a couple of years ago. Hasn’t changed at all in 25 years!

Same! I think last time I was there was to buy a iMac — back when they first released the different colors. Bought lots of parts back in that era too. Glad to hear it’s still there.

My teenage son just bought a 3D printer there in January.

I used to live a mile or so from the location in Michigan. Previously I lived a few miles from the one in Tustin, CA. Growing up I was a few miles from Fry’s in Burbank and went there all the time. Now I live out in the boonies and it’s certainly made me realize how fortunate I was all these years

Man, I am glad I live near a Microcenter. It's great that they have a big maker section now, too.

I've been shopping at Microcenter in Chicago since I was a kid. I bought my last 3 computers there.

I couldn't believe upon moving to the bay in the aughts that there was nowhere to buy a decent computer. I'm glad they finally have a place to buy a computer out there.

Parking lot is completely full. I parked nearby and walked over. They’re giving away free mugs today with Micro Center Silicon Valley on it.

Huge Ubiquiti display and demo area. I didn’t buy anything today because the checkout line was too long. My daughter liked the Magna Tile selection in the toys area.

Really great to have this much selection nearby.

I love the one here in Orange County California. They always have these combo deals with Motherboard/CPU/RAM that are good deals. My current Ryzen 9 7950x was build from a deal at Microcenter.

When did Microcenter re-gain its popularity? I remember when it was around before it closed down, beside AMC Mercado, and the prices were crazy expensive even back then. Did they somehow lower their prices?

Their shoppers are all on the savvy scale and could easily use their prime membership to buy parts on Amazon, but they don't.

If the customer isn't savvy the knowledgeable customer service adds a lot of value.

I am a "savvy shopper" and have no desire to buy components on Amazon anymore. Their stock co-mingling doesn't work for speciality computer components. I've received items marked as new that were clearly open box returns. I've received completely nonfunctional components. I've received the wrong item a few times. The component I've had the most success with are SSDs, but for anything beyond that I prefer to buy from brick and mortar because of their "curation." To be honest, it's a shame because the Amazon shopping experience is vastly superior but they send you crap, so it's unusable for this vertical. I still buy other junk from Amazon, but nothing that's particularly performance sensitive.

A lot of the physical open to the public stores took a beating before South Dakota v Wayfair was decided in June 2018, since it was trivial to spend ~7% less by shopping from a website with a presence outside of your state.

I doubt Microcenter ever expands to the number of locations that BestBuy /circuit city/compusa/etc had, but it might have enough of a market for one or two locations in the top 10 to 20 metros.

I always liked going to well-stocked stores and browsing for stuff. That was Fry's until they shot themselves in the foot.

Micro Center might not be optimal on price, but sometimes you just want to wander a store full of cool stuff and maybe walk out with something you didn't expect, instead of another anonymous box of schmutz from Amazon or wherever

Unfortunately, Microcenter’s selection often leaves me disappointed. In particular, they stock almost no ECC RAM for AM5 machines. They do not stock many graphics cards that have ECC VRAM either. Their best card in stock that has ECC VRAM is this nearly obsolete ampere card:

https://www.microcenter.com/product/652517/pny-nvidia-rtx-a4...

I get it, but as "professional" grade equipment, most customers would acquire that through their employers' vendors.

It also depends on your local market; my location seems to carry more server and HEDT gear than others (they stock more A- and W-series GPUs than 5090s, at least). They've also purchased things I've requested, like ECC DRAM for my Threadripper, which I also purchased from them.

Do you mean that they ordered stuff for you to buy that they did not carry?

I wouldn't be surprised, most retailers can place special orders for things they don't have in stock. I do this at my local record store, book store, and comic store with some frequency.

> When did Microcenter re-gain its popularity?

When online became infested with counterfeits and opened returns with no way to distinguish.

Anyone ordering computer parts from Amazon is just asking to get fleeced nowadays.

I think the explosion of 3D printing has a lot to do with it.

Wish there was one near Los Angeles, especially now that Fry's is gone. There's a MC in in Orange County, but it's a bit too far with Best Buy close and online deliveries.

Micro Center! I used to go to the one in Massachusetts. Really good stuff and a wide selection. I miss Fry's in its heyday, but Micro Center comes close to that ideal.

Micro Center is not trying to be a white-goods (refrigerator, washer / dryer, etc.) store, as Fry's was.

I've had great luck with Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Chicago stores, and there is now one in Indianapolis that is clean and up-to-date.

My mind is blown that this is new.

My small city in Canada has an awesome Memory Express in it. And it's packed with ~16 year old gamers and their dads spending big $ on stuff.

$3719 for a GPU certainly is new.

I'm fucking pumped for brick-and-mortar, though. Bring more bricks.

All I can say is: It's about time.

I'm amazed there aren't more of these stores nationwide.

I live in San Diego, and (luckily) the closest one is an hour drive away in Tustin.

California, 1/8 of the US population, and the world's 4th largest economy, has "after years of waiting" 2 stores 8-/

I can only reminisce about the olden days when there were dozens of "bin stores", with electronic components, test equipment, new and used gear of every variety, and staff that knew about the stock.

Apparently, modern electronic developers feel that ordering from Alibaba is some kind of viable substitute 8-/

This whole disappearance, coupled with the disappearance of the many many small local electronics development firms, is a clear sign of the demise of the American republic.

The elimination of small independent tech companies, and the supply chain that went with them, from our communities and our economy has been a disaster for the american people, and quite frankly, I couldn't care less how many vulture capital fanbois disagree with me...

I see they opened a store again in Santa Clara. I remember the old one next to AMC theater that was a Walmart last I saw.

Reminds me of when I started working at a new Best Buy back when they were the cool new kid on the block

Now if we could only get one near Seattle!

(I've never really understood why a tech hub as large and historical as Seattle doesn't have one. It's weird that it's such a relative desert.)

There's already a bunch of vacant Walgreens / Rite Aid / Bartell Drugs locations, with more to come. Surely one of the bigger ones would be adequate.

Interesting. I've never shopped at one; though my home is near the intersection of two interstates, I'd have to drive about 7 hours to get to one. You're even worse off!

It appears that the pole of inaccessibility for Micro Center for a place in the lower 48 on an interstate is around Spokane to Missoula (Santa Clara vs Denver), but that's only about 3 hours' longer drive than you would have.

Hell yea! Shame we moved from the bay area. Right next to the theatre! Good times.

Surprising - but a good change! I recently picked up an M3 Ultra from there.

One of us.

At first I was impressed with the number of people lined up to go in the store. Then I realized every single person was just an employee.

I live next to the Cincinnati store and have been going there for more than thirty years. There are people waiting at the door every morning when it opens and it is swamped with people from open to close.

The service is unmatched by any retailer.

That’s cool, I’ll just use Amazon and wait 1 extra day though

Other micro centers have a ton of employees so I'm not surprised. They're actually knowledgeable and helpful, the opposite of what Fry's had. And they're everywhere, not in a pushy sense, but just available.

They also earn commission and are motivated to help you. I’ve actually had employees replace items I had chosen to save me cash. You don’t see service like that often.

The third photo isn't employees

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