Jeff Dillon

I shop at Fry's all the time here in the Si Valley. They stink. #1, they don't sell Sun equipment. #2, they employ the dregs of society. If they simply hired 1/2 the # of people who were competent, then the possibility of at least one employee being worth talking to would start to exist. #3, they sell only cheap to make made in China high markup items like cables, USB hubs, and other assorted worthless trash for unreasonable prices. #4, as a system administrator who does work in and about the Si Valley and in Valley data centers, they are almost worthless in an emergency for finding any equipment. One day I needed 500 crossover cables, and all three Fry's were out. They don't carry single mode fiber. The multimode fiber selection is terrible and priced about 5 times what is fair. They don't carry any acceptable quality gigabit cards, only trash like D-Link. #5, they lie about rebates. Its simple, they will jerk you around about rebates. #6 I built a computer system once in an emergency there and found the memory overpriced, the boards overpriced, well, everything but the second-stock hard drives with "rebates" to be outrageously overpriced (i returned a "new" Hitachi after getting this "new" drive with the case of the clik klacks). #7 They "allow" returns, but give flak about returns and mysteriously just about everything on the shelves has been returned. Really Fry's is a rental agency. #8 The worst book selection ever created, ever. Best Buy and Circuit City aren't really stores, but droid retail outlets where people go to get the Made in China trash they think they need. The word "conservative" and Chicago do not belong in the same sentence; see Illinois and Chicagoland all lawful purposes gun ownership laws and regulations for an insight on that. If you spend any time at all at Fry's outside of a dire emergency, you are a vulnerable consumer. Come to my new store, Coprolite's, we sell fossilized feces made in China. (Brooklyn Bridge may require some assembly.) They used to be cool, and had a real selection of stuff that an EE would love, and real Fluke meters and oscilloscopes. Now they specialize in selling ABBA and Britney Smears crud, Anime crap, China made crap, last generation appliances. The only useful thing there are the zip ties, they have a great zip tie collection, but even that's gone downhill - they don't carry Panduit stuff anymore. So off to Graybar for that stuff too.

Posted by Mike Smith on July 15, 2004 at 03:00 PM PDT #