goin to CA soon, to be a CC tychoon

On Sun, 8 Jun 2003, Fred N. van Kempen wrote: Some background for people who don't live on the U.S. west coast or in Arizona, apart from Fry's being a cheap electronics reseller of notorious repute, many (all?) or their stores have "themes." My favorite (and I use that term loosely) Fry's has to be the one in Burbank, California on Hollywood Way near the airport. It's store theme is that of 1950-60s sci-fi movies. Visible from the parking lot, there's a flying saucer crashed into the side of the building. Inside there are a variety of aliens, giant ants, a monster octopus, and some GIs in an old army jeep that's been sliced in half by an alien's ray gun blast. The other ones I've visited are the ancient Roman themed one down around Fountain Valley in Orange County and the Tiki/island themed one near LAX. I visited the San Diego one years ago now, but I wasn't paying attention to anything apart from the electronic gear. I've only had one defective purchase experience there. I bought three external drive enclosures from them. Two of the three enclosures had defective (and very cheaply made) power supplies, so I ended up taking them all back and getting a refund. I've avoided the place for at least three or four years now; basically since the late 1990s when the DIY PC upgrades side of things became mainstream. Aside from the sometimes interesting decor, I find being stuck in a Fry's to be a nauseating experience. You've got sales clerks incessantly chasing you around, asking if they can help you. At least I think they're asking to help me; half the time it's hard to know what is being said. Then you've got various senior clerks at POS terminals over near the hard drive, motherboard, and memory aisles. They tend to struggle with basic data entry. Good luck trying to have them check to see if a particular motherboard or drive is in stock. And god help you if you're a clueless customer who accepts "technical advice" from one of them. If you make it a rule to avoid the store sales staff at all costs, you'll have better luck with your purchase. Then, at least in more recent years, there are the masses of rude and technologically inept customers, pushing their way about the store. Sometimes a cluster of them will pause for a moment, and the "guru" in the bunch will loudly yammer away in misinformed techno-babble to the other members in the shopping party. Their heads bob in acknowledgement and awe of their computer genius friend. Come to think of it, the experience of shopping at Fry's (or CompUSA, Best Buy, Radio Shack, or Circuit City), as a modern /cultural/ experience is probably one of the single greatest reasons that I've turned to classic computing as a hobby. The mainstream PC and Windows mindset is one of general incompetence; those who subscribe to it effectively accept that their hardware and software fails all the time because "that's how computers are." Bleh. -brian.