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
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.
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]
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
There was Halted and this other one I liked better Alltronics? run by an old amateur radio guy. Originally it was in Los Gatos. But then moved north new Zanker Rd.
Just being able to look at all the various components was a good education.
