Re: [PLUG] Fry's going out of business

I have learned to live with second day from Amazon rather than dealing with the drive to Microcenter. I miss the instant gratification sometimes, but generally it's not an issue, and I buy way fewer impulse items in the slaughter-chute at the registers.

On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 2:11 PM Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:

On Wed, Feb 24, 2021 at 12:48 PM Casey Bralla via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> I remember visiting a Fry's in Silicon Valley about 10 years ago. They
> had an entire aisle of motherboards. Now this was nirvana for me, but
> I wondered how they could make money.

Microcenter has a whole aisle of motherboards, and while it is nice to
be able to just buy a motherboard if you're in a hurry, the
presentation is almost useless if you care whatsoever about which
board you get.

Motherboards have a variety of features like number of slots, how many
lanes are even wired on those slots, number of SATA/USB3/etc ports,
and so on. Microcenter just sticks them all on a shelf, maybe with
the intel ones on one side and the AMD on the other. Maybe they're
grouped by chipset - maybe. No shelf tags or anything like that.

Their memory is a real mess - just tons of DIMMs and it isn't really
obvious how they're organized and they aren't super-well labeled.
Again, that is one of those things you tend to shop by filtering, or
with reference to vendor support lists or other tools. When I bought
my last set of RAM I had to use lists on random websites to figure out
which DIMMs contained Samsung B-die chips. Good luck figuring that
out browsing the aisle at Microcenter.

It just strikes me as not being very useful for window shopping - it
would be just as easy to just ask for a particular model and have
somebody go in the back and grab one. If Amazon could offer same-day
delivery it would be just as good.

Now, there are plenty of other things that make more sense to just
shop off the shelf. This just doesn't translate as well to a lot of
the more enthusiast-oriented stuff. It is still fun to browse, but I
couldn't see buying a motherboard as an "impulse buy."

--
Rich
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