[wplug] Best Buy's insanity ...

[James O'Kane]

On Tue, 6 Mar 2007, Patrick Wagstrom wrote:

>> Anyone had experience, or heard about problems with Fry's Electronics?
>
> Funny you should mention that, I went to Fry's in Santa Clara today. 
> Surprisingly, they had exactly what I was looking for, and Intel a/b/g 
> MiniPCI card, try to find that at Best Buy.  Fry's is a lot like MicroCenter 
> with a bit better selection, but a lot messier.
>
> I've been to Fry's in a couple of different states now, and the experience is 
> pretty much the same everywhere, not like best buy the same, but very 
> similar. Think of it as a place with more selection, but where you always 
> think that somehow they're trying to scam you.  This is largely because a lot 
> of their "deals" are pretty low quality stuff. However, despite the feeling, 
> I've had good experiences with Fry's. Both in person at their stores (the 
> closest Fry's to Pittsburgh is in Chicago, I think) and online.  If you're 
> going online, they also run outpost.com.
>
> The interface for outpost isn't the best, but usually they have good prices. 
> A lot of times I'll utilize NewEgg.com to look up information about a 
> product, and then purchase it later from Outpost.com or mwave.com.  I'm not 
> sure if I'd every purchase something really expensive from them however.  For 
> larger purchases, I usually pay for the trust of NewEgg.

I tend to be a frequent shopper at the Sunnyvale Fry's, with the 
occational trip to the Palo Alto store. Some things I can think of off the 
top of my head. These are all moot unless they open a Pittsburgh 
area store.
- The offline store won't match online prices. They might as well be run 
by different companies. If you can convince them to match prices, it's only 
if they include overnight shipping costs.
- The Unofficial Fry's Rental Plan. Fry's will take almost anything back, 
mark it down a few dollars and put it back on the shelf. Sometimes they'll 
test it first.
- Some, if not all, sales people in the pc component area work on 
commission. Some expensive, yet small parts like RAM require a sales slip 
from one of these people to get the items at the register. So you end up 
waiting in line to talk to one of them, for something you already know you 
want, and they'll gladly put the rest of your items on the same slip.


It is neat to shop somewhere you can buy resistors, a soldering iron, 
DVDs, harddrives and motherboards.

> --Patrick
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