RIP Fry's Electronics

[Bobby Henderson]

The customers go into the local store to check out an item and then go home and order it for less on line. The brick and mortar stores have only become the show rooms for internet suppliers.

This syndrome in consumer behavior is common enough that a term was coined for it years ago: showrooming.

Showrooming cuts both ways though. It's always more enticing to see a desirable product such a new big-screen TV or computer in person within a brick and mortar retail store. A web page at Amazon just doesn't compare. I think it's a lot easier for consumers to sit on the fence about a big ticket product purchase if they can only see the product online. If enough brick and mortar retailers disappear it's liable to cut into a lot of product sales overall.

[Lyle Romer]

Don't know wether that actually holds true, but it's interesting that some one actually mentions it in a business statement:

'Flickinger said the company also failed to install rooftop solar systems at its stores, which could have offset the rising price of products and employee wages.

“Amazon went 100% solar, and that has allowed them to reduce costs and increase wages,” he said. “Target and Walmart are well on their way to doing the same.”

What?!? In the best case, rooftop solar breaks even after 7 or 8 years. It sure isn't going to offset the rising price of products and employee wages in the short term. When flying I very rarely see rooftop solar on big box stores. or large scale rooftop solar installations anywhere (caveat, I haven't flown anywhere in CA in several years so things may be different there). If it provided any significant savings, Walmart, Target, Home Depot, etc. would be installing it everywhere that gets significant sun exposure.

[Lyle Romer]

The trend has been toward making all things common so that the only difference is price. Some of our musical instrument customers said that since all of the makers of this type of instrument did a very good job at making them, the only one factor to use in deciding to purchase one over the other. PRICE!

This seems to have worked its way into almost everything you can buy. The customers go into the local store to check out an item and then go home and order it for less on line.
The brick and mortar stores have only become the show rooms for internet suppliers.

Sad but true.

I remember the previous CEO of Best Buy (pretty sure it wasn't the current one) saying that his primary initiative when he took over was to make sure that the prices were the same as Amazon so that people wouldn't have a reason to browse in the store and order on Amazon.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Still, Best Buy is also struggling... It's hard to still make a margin, if you have to pay for an actual store front and a bunch of employees, compared to mega-sized warehouses running on automation and minimum-paid wage slaves...

What?!? In the best case, rooftop solar breaks even after 7 or 8 years. It sure isn't going to offset the rising price of products and employee wages in the short term. When flying I very rarely see rooftop solar on big box stores. or large scale rooftop solar installations anywhere (caveat, I haven't flown anywhere in CA in several years so things may be different there). If it provided any significant savings, Walmart, Target, Home Depot, etc. would be installing it everywhere that gets significant sun exposure.

It depends on the price you're paying for electricity. There are quite a few big-name companies around here, installing solar panels. Even if it takes a year or 5 to 8 for them to break-even, if you're a big boy with sufficient cash reserves, it totally makes sense.

[Leo Enticknap]

Added to which, the price of the panels is coming down and their service life and output capacity are going up. It's gradual, but it's happening. When we installed rooftop solar in 2016, I did the math carefully and concluded that it would pay for itself in 5-6 years, based on the cost of the system, the amount of electricity we were consuming at the time, and the cost of electricity delivered down the wire. Since then, the price of a kWH has increased significantly beyond CPI inflation, so much so that I reckon we're at almost at the break even point now, if not actually there.

That having been said, Southern California is about the best case scenario for rooftop solar: bright sunshine pretty much guaranteed, for between 8 and 12 hours each day, likely on around 90% of the days in the year. In, say, Minnesota or Northern Europe, 6-8 years would likely be more realistic, assuming that all the other relevant variables (the main ones being the cost of installing the system and the cost of retail electricity) are similar.

[Martin McCaffery]

It depends on the price you're paying for electricity.

It also depends on if the power company lets sell back to the grid. Here in Alabama you have to pay the power company add your electricity to the grid. Insane, but true.

[Marcel Birgelen]

It also depends on if the power company lets sell back to the grid. Here in Alabama you have to pay the power company add your electricity to the grid. Insane, but true.

Yeah, but this is where the big boys also have an advantage. Often times, in order to be able to sell power back to the grid, you need to do some paperwork, like starting your own little power production company. All this overhead is a big burden for small businesses and private citizens, but those big corporations do have the resources to pull it off...

[Leo Enticknap]

California used to have a regime whereby not only could the power company not charge you a significant amount for hooking your rooftop solar installation to the grid (IIRC, it was a one-time fee of around $100), but they had to buy any excess power you produced, whenever you delivered it to the grid. This was done by allowing you to "bank" power you feed in when you're not using it, and "withdraw" the same number of kWHs at no charge when you are burning more than you generate (at night, in other words). You only had to pay an electricity bill if the total number of kWHs you consume exceeded those you generated over the course of a year.

However, the power companies soon found themselves subsidizing their customers' solar installations via this system. Their lobbyists in Sacramento went to work, and the system was changed. Now, you can still sell your excess power to the grid, but all you get is around 2c a kWH. If you need to suck power from the grid, you have to pay the going rate for it (around 18c in these parts). We managed to get our system installed just before the regime changed, and can stay on the old system for 20 years from the installation date. But for those who went solar afterwards, a battery backup system to go with the photovoltaic panels is now essential for it to make economic sense.

[Marcel Birgelen]

California used to have a regime whereby not only could the power company not charge you a significant amount for hooking your rooftop solar installation to the grid (IIRC, it was a one-time fee of around $100), but they had to buy any excess power you produced, whenever you delivered it to the grid. This was done by allowing you to "bank" power you feed in when you're not using it, and "withdraw" the same number of kWHs at no charge when you are burning more than you generate (at night, in other words). You only had to pay an electricity bill if the total number of kWHs you consume exceeded those you generated over the course of a year.

However, the power companies soon found themselves subsidizing their customers' solar installations via this system. Their lobbyists in Sacramento went to work, and the system was changed. Now, you can still sell your excess power to the grid, but all you get is around 2c a kWH. If you need to suck power from the grid, you have to pay the going rate for it (around 18c in these parts). We managed to get our system installed just before the regime changed, and can stay on the old system for 20 years from the installation date. But for those who went solar afterwards, a battery backup system to go with the photovoltaic panels is now essential for it to make economic sense.

I guess this is an ongoing concern in many countries. Over here in Europe, most old electricity meters will run backwards if you produce more energy than you consume. But ever since they introduced "smart meters", that are connected to the power distribution company, there are troubles. Some of them don't register the energy you produce, so you essentially loose all of your over-production, unless you're going to invest in batteries. Others do register the amount you produce and many power companies are now arguing that they don't need to pay you as much for that generated electricity as you pay when buying from them...

In Belgium, there recently was a court case, because the electricity distribution companies were very eager to install the kind of new "smart meter", that didn't register over-production at all. But the government granted everybody a 10-year period, where they could be certain that their over-production would be "bought back".

One of the major problems is that most power grids are pretty old. Most of them were never designed with so much "unreliable producers" in mind. It was designed to have a few big production sites from which it then would be distributed to the end-user. With the lack of any large-scale power storage facilities, other than those few countries that can repurpose some of their hydro-power for this, this imbalance of production versus consumption will only grow. That's why we shouldn't laugh too hard at the likes of Texas...

[Bobby Henderson]

We don't have a lot of roof top solar on buildings here in Oklahoma. Sunlight is plentiful, especially during our occasionally brutal summers. There problem here is hail stones and other elements of severe weather. It's a gamble to invest in a rooftop solar system here. Some of the newest kinds of solar panels are built to withstand some considerable hail, but they're typically rated to withstand one inch hail falling at 50mph. Golf ball size hail is bigger than that and it's not exactly rare in Oklahoma. We've had instances of baseball and softball size hail hit in the Lawton area a couple times within the last 10 years.

Some people in rural areas are allowing power companies to install large wind turbines on their property. They literally go from having to pay for electricity to getting a paycheck from the power company. Some people have even installed their own (smaller) windmills to generate power. A few even combine that with geo-thermal and at least some solar to get even farther ahead.

When flying I very rarely see rooftop solar on big box stores. or large scale rooftop solar installations anywhere (caveat, I haven't flown anywhere in CA in several years so things may be different there).

It's easy enough to see solar panels on a lot of commercial and even residential buildings in Google Earth or the satellite view in Google Maps (or Apple Maps, Bing Maps, etc). I think some cities and towns even do a bit of arm twisting via zoning or other incentives to make developers install solar.

[Jesse Skeen]

It was obvious Fry's was dying 2 years ago- their shelves were getting empty and they couldn't get any new product in because their suppliers had cut them off. I'm amazed that they lasted as long as they did after that happened. Must have really sucked for the employees going into a store where they didn't have anything to sell. They were my favorite store before all this happened, so it was really sad to watch all of this. They were my last hope for anyplace having a decent selection of Blu-Rays after Tower went under. They had a great selection with tons of obscure titles, even porn and "Faces of Death".

I vastly prefer in-person shopping to ordering online- I mainly hate waiting for things to arrive. One of the first online orders I had to make when we lost our last real media store ended up having the wrong title shipped, so I had to go through the whole send it back and wait for the replacement to come routine. Being obsessive I'd rather not have covers damaged in transit either, but I'll just have to learn to live with that.

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

As far as I know, Fry's was never in NJ, but I do miss Radio Shack, although I did not appreciate them at the time. After years of paying high prices for batteries, their discontinuing low priced audio/video connectors/cables and only selling overpriced faux gold connectors/cables, and having employees that not only did not know where things were in the store, but knew less about what they sold than I did, the end came for me in the early 2000's when I went in to buy an overpriced connector (because they were close and convenient), and the only store employee that was working would not help me find it until he was done with what was clearly a personal conversation with a friend. I left, and vowed to never come back, and did not come back until their going out of business sales. Fortunately, there is still one local electronics parts store near me, although I doubt it will be there when the owner decides to retire.

In the mid 1990's, Tandy/Radio Shack got the idea to get into the "big box" stores to compete with Circuit City and Best Buy. They opened a prototype store called Incredible Universe near my home. It carried everything electronic from parts to almost every major brand and type of electronic item. The store really was incredible. The prices were not great, but they were competitive with other big box stores. Ultimate, they decided to pull the plug on Incredible Universe in the late 1990's, and the going out of business sales were truly incredible. The point of this paragraph is that I read a news story the other day that the current owner of the Radio Shack name plans to open an online store that will sell everything electronic, kind of like Amazon but only electronic (Audio/Video/Parts). It kind of reminded me of Incredible Universe, but it won't be the same not being able to actually go into the store.

[Jim Cassedy]

In the 1980's I used to shop at "Dick Smith Electronics", a sort of Australian version of Radio Shack that had a store down in either
Mountain View or Sunnyvale, CA (near "Silicon Valley") I bought a pretty decent shortwave radio there as well as a couple of scanner
receivers and other assorted electronic esoterica. But what I really liked, is that Dick Smith had 'bins" of many small parts like toggle
switches and various audio connectors, & terminal blocks, etc, so that if you only needed ONE to build a project or make a repair,
you only had to buy the ONE item you needed, and not a buy a package containing several, like you had to do at Radio Shack, Fry's &
a couple of other places. (and at least for me, if I bought a bag of 5 RCA connectors (for example) and I only needed one, I'd almost
always misplace the package with the 'extra' , unused, connectors, so that the next time I needed one, I had to buy another whole bag
of em'. I think that was actually part of their sales business model. lol (and why 5 RCA connectors, not 6???)

The store is long gone, although D-S still exists online, and perhaps they still have some brick & mortar locations 'down under'.
I miss the local location though!

[Kenneth Wuepper]

In this area of Tri-Cities, (Midland, Bay City, Saginaw) Michigan we had several parts stores. The electronic equivalent of a hardware store.. Shand Electronics, Kinde Distributing, Radio Parts and in Detroit there were a multitude of them. They sold individual parts and stocked an incredible diversity for industrial, repair shops and experimenters. The technicians version of the candy store.

One local store had a shop where they rebuilt B&W picture tubes. They cut off the neck containing the electron gun and replaced it with a new one then resealed it under vacuum. (Didn't work too good for color though!)