[upbeatlinux]

Sacramento Fry’s off Northgate was my go-to store circa ’98. Whenever a friend wanted to build a PC, that’s where we went. The employees were great; the salespeople, not so much.

I still made the trip every holiday season until around 2017 but it had been going progressively downhill since about 2007. The expanded café, the drastic reduction in books and magazines, PC parts getting strip-mined and never restocked, audio/video media slowly disappearing; you could feel the shift.

I miss the SacBee flyer and the last-minute Christmas gift runs. Egghead Software, CompUSA, RadioShack, Borders (one of the only reliable places to find 2600), Tower Records...it was a different time.

[linguae]

I’m also from Sacramento and I also have fond memory of that same Fry’s location in the 2000s. It was an excellent place to buy new computer hardware and other electronics. I still have the Brother laser printer I bought there in December 2005 during winter break of my freshman year at Cal Poly SLO; not only does my printer still work, but I’m still using the original 20-year toner cartridge!

I live in the Bay Area now, and it was sad to witness Fry’s decline in the 2010s. I’ll never forget going to the Fry’s in Sunnyvale in late 2018 and seeing the near-empty parking lot, the spartan selection of merchandise, and already-opened boxes being resold. I ended up switching to Central Computers whenever I needed hardware that couldn’t wait for a Newegg shipment. I’m also glad that there is now a Micro Center in Santa Clara! Micro Center is the closest thing to peak Fry’s.

[egberts1]

Good times.