Fry's Electronics is a chain of electronics stores. Fry's are my favorite stores in the whole world, as I told you already in the Microcenter post. Well, I still haven't been able to visit the Far East, maybe in places like Japan or Taiwan there are better electronics stores, but I haven't checked first-hand. Some day. I believe that when I set foot in Akihabara (Tokio's electronics neighborhood) I will get Stendhal syndrome or something.
But in the meantime, Fry's is the best of the best. It's 34 stores, 17 of them in California, the rest spread out in the West and South of the US. For some reason, Fry's doesn't have stores in the Northeast, not in New York or in any place a thousand miles from it. Precisely because of that, because I can't visit them very often, every time I go to a Fry's is a special event. Today [Sunday Dec 9th] I went to the Concord store, which is at a 15-minute walk from a BART station (the BART is the San Francisco area transportation system), so I could go without a car.
Fry's is simply incredible. I have seen in my life many electronics and computer stores, but none like Fry's. Microcenter is a distant close, but each Fry's is like 5 Microcenters. Fry's is a huge store, humongous, full of all types of electronic devices. All types. Besides the usual computers, TVs, and so on, in Fry's you will find the weirdest adapters, connectors, parts. CDs, DVDs, games, batteries, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, you name it.
From a hard drive to a blender. Fry's is so big that it has a coffee shop inside, because if you can't go through the whole store without a break.
Here are a few examples of things you can find at Fry's, so you can have a small idea:
A fridge for your beer keg, together with the faucet to serve the beer.
An oscilloscope.
A house number with a solar powered light.
A chair with speakers, to play your video console.
In which store do you find one of these things, let alone all of them? Only at Fry's. If I lived in California, either I would go broke, or I would quit doing math to go work at Fry's :-)
If that weren't enough, Fry's founder John Fry, is a math major qho had to quit academics because of family pressure to dedicate to the family business, and a football player who had to quit because of his bad knees. Fry is the main sponsor of an institute for math research, the AIM, which is located in a warehouse next to the original Fry's store in Palo Alto. I visited this institute in 2004, and there I found out about Fry's. John Fry is a math lover, and he supports mathematicians.
And finally, the last blow is that instead of ugly employees, Fry's hires a good amount of young girls with tight tops and short skirts. As if we didn't have enough reasons to go already. Fry's considers that their clients are already electronics geeks, so there's no need to get expert employees, it's better to have pretty girls. It's obvious that geeks are many times lonely people with problems to communicate with the other sex.
This morning I have spent three hours in the Concord Fry's (damages: $160), and probably, since I will be here until next Saturday, I will pay another visit to another Fry's in the area before I leave.
