In the fall of 2013, work sent me to Tempe, Arizona for a week of training. After arriving in town, one of my first stops was at the local Fry’s. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Although we didn’t have a Fry’s here in Oklahoma, I had visited a few of their other locations. Fry’s was multiple stores in one — like Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA and Radio Shack all under the same roof. They had a huge selection of movies, music, and A\/V equipment. The computer department contained everything from completely assembled computers to parts like hard drives, memory, motherboards and cases. They had an entire aisle of electronic bits, like capacitors, wires, and adapters. They sold electronic toys. They sold appliances. They sold home security systems. They sold drones. They had a coffee shop in the middle of the story that sold lattes. <\/p>\n

Because I was going to be in town for a full week, I ended up buying two things: a PS3 (the one that came packaged with Grand Theft Auto V) and a Raspberry Pi. I’ve never been to another brick and mortar store that sold Raspberry Pis. I arranged all the furniture in the room into a gaming lounge and invited my coworkers up to my room to play GTA5 and a bunch of old games I was able to get working on the Pi. It was a fun week.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Along with that Fry’s in Arizona, I also visited one in Vegas, one in Dallas, and another one in southern Texas — Austin, maybe. If there was any problem with the store it was that there was no such thing as a quick trip to Fry’s. The stores were so huge and I rarely went to one with a single item in mind, which led to me wandering up and down the aisles checking out everything. This also made trips to Fry’s rather expensive. I bought my Blue Yeti microphone from Fry’s on a whim.<\/p>\n

Last year, rumors spread online that Fry’s had quit purchasing new product to sell. Pictures circulated of empty shelves. I was hoping to visit one more time, but I didn’t make it to Fry’s in 2020. I didn’t make it anywhere in 2020.<\/p>\n

Earlier this week without any warning, Fry’s permanently closed and locked their doors. The company updated their website<\/a> to state that they had “made the difficult decision to shut down its operations and close its business permanently as a result of changes in the retail industry and the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic.” <\/p>\n

Sometimes I worry what will be left once we get COVID under control.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the fall of 2013, work sent me to Tempe, Arizona for a week of training. After arriving in town, one of my first stops was at the local Fry’s. Although we didn’t have a Fry’s here in Oklahoma, I had visited a few of their other locations. Fry’s was multiple stores in one — like Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA and Radio Shack all under the same roof. They had a huge selection of movies, music, and A\/V equipment. The computer department contained everything from completely assembled computers to parts like hard drives, memory, motherboards and cases. They had… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13019,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13018"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13026,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13018\/revisions\/13026"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}