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Comment by blindriver | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> 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.

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.

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.

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

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