Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?
I usually purchase my computer components from Newegg.  However, whenever I was impatient or pressed for time, I used to go to Fry’s.  I remember one time in 2011 driving from Santa Cruz to Campbell to pick up a hard drive to replace one that suddenly failed; having to wait days for shipping would have been more inconvenient.  Fry’s is a great convenience in these cases.<p>It’s unfortunate to see Fry’s in the zombified state that it’s in.  Back in the 2000s it was a really nice store, but recently it has fallen on hard times.  I went to the Sunnyvale store a few months ago to try to find a TV antenna, and the selection was a bunch of beat-up boxes, some of them with discount stickers indicating that they were returned items, which left me not confident about the whole lot.<p>Meanwhile, I’m a little envious of the electronics stores of Tokyo, particularly Yodobashi Camera and Yamada Denki.  I travel to Japan regularly, and every now and then I check out these stores.  Their Akihabara flagships are a nice mix of Fry’s selection and Best Buy’s presentation.  Sometimes I wonder why we don’t have that in Silicon Valley, but then I remember that Tokyo’s density and transit-oriented planning makes such retail operations more viable than Silicon Valley’s largely car-dependent, US suburbia-style planning, which favors online shopping.  Still, these flagship Akihabara stores are wonderful places to shop.