The Fry’s Electronics of Renton looked very dismal to say the very least. From my take on it, it seems like the business as a whole is about to go out of business. From walking through most of the store interior, it seemed like that they had little to no new merchandise and this was evident in other stores from what i have viewed on the internet.
Even shelves that were supposed to house core PC components were empty or nearly empty. The video card aisle had only one unit and that happened to be low-end. The motherboard section was completely empty.
Moreover, there was bunch of random stuff such as packs of drinks, furnaces, garden hoses, and much more used to fill up shelf space to make the store seem less empty.
The most ridiculous thing I saw there was a refurbished Dell Precision T3500 (8-9 year old workstation PC) being sold for $799 as a gaming PC.
This decline can be partly attributed to Amazon and the online retail industry for having cut throat prices, but I highly attribute Fry’s Electronics’s upper management at fault. They failed to invest adequately in their internal IT as evident as many of the machines for employee use still ran on Windows XP which had technically reached end-of-life five years ago.Their website design seemed under-invested in terms of search capability, visual appeal, and other UI elements in comparison to the competition. For a store that was supposed to cater to PC enthusiasts, they seem to never have bundle deals such as CPU/motherboards, RAM/SSD, CPU/RAM, etc.
Furthermore, it feels a bit sad that Best Buy will probably be the last electronics retailer in my area.
