I remember a story I heard about Microcenter. It was started in my hometown (Columbus, OH) by a Radio Shack store manager. When PCs were coming out, the store manager kept putting those PCs up at the front of the store. The district manager would come back and make him put it in the back. This went on for a bit until the store manager quit, took his best sales guy, and opened up Microcenter at the mall next door, selling PCs. They eventually took over the entire mall, before moving to another part of town, and then expanding to other towns. By the time Radio Shack figured out where things were going, things were too late.
I didn't know this years later, watching Young Sheldon ... that Incredible Universe was Tandy's attempt to get into the consumer electronics when Radio Shack's profit started falling, and that Tandy has a whole (very profitable) leather company. My SCA friends tend to know a lot more about Tandy Leather than they do about Radio Shack.
Fry's Electronics closed here in the west part of Phoenix, several years ago. Their shelves were starting to get bare and were selling things from consignment. It took a while for them to die, and I finally found out why: they were having trouble getting credit to buy inventory.
> Fry's Electronics closed here in the west part of Phoenix, several years ago. Their shelves were starting to get bare and were selling things from consignment. It took a while for them to die, and I finally found out why: they were having trouble getting credit to buy inventory.
I was going to do some of my 2019 Christmas shopping at the one and only Fry's in the Chicago area, but I walked inside and it looked like a bomb had gone off. Nothing was organized, lots of empty shelves, the cafe was closed, and I got a serious case of the heebie-jeebies and hightailed it out of there.
Google Street View shows it as it was in August 2019. As far as I know, the building is empty now.
And then there was TigerDirect, but that's a separate rant. I used to have three major computer shops within driving distance, but it's down to one now with MicroCenter.
> the store manager kept putting those PCs up at the front of the store. The district manager would come back and make him put it in the back
It's interesting and sad that RadioShack somehow managed to succeed and fail at least twice in computing, first in the 8-bit microcomputer era and second in the Tandy PC era. It seems like they failed in the build-your-own-cheap-PC era as well.
> Fry's Electronics closed here in the west part of Phoenix, several years ago. Their shelves were starting to get bare and were selling things from consignment. It took a while for them to die, and I finally found out why: they were having trouble getting credit to buy inventory.
In 2019, I was in San Jose for a business trip, and I was excited that there was a Fry's Electronics within walking distance of my hotel, so after work one day I walked over to it.
It was one of the most surreal experiences of my life. I went in there, and it was almost completely empty. Very few workers, most of the shelves had absolutely nothing on them, there were barely any workers. The walls that usually had a bunch of TVs were completely bare, they managed to still have a full shelf of PlayStation Classics, and like one little basket of USB cables.
I genuinely thought they might have forgotten to lock the front door after closing, and that I was accidentally trespassing, but nope: there was a person behind the register and I was able to buy a flash drive.
For what I can only assume are obscure financial reasons, Fry's kept their stores open for like a year after they'd effectively gone out of business.
Yeah that's what I figured, but it was really really weird when I was there. It is so odd to go to a giant decorated store in a nearly empty state. I don't think Backrooms was really a meme at that point, but that's the sort of vibe it gave me.