| rev:text
| - Holy cow, what has happened to this place?
Once upon a time, this store was a great haunt for the techies, you could find about everything you need and the selection was great. Lots of brands represented and a nice place to side-by-side between options, things like keyboards, monitors, cases/towers and all kinds of other items, which was a huge advantage over online retailers.
Unfortunately, at least at this point in time, I find that their selection is extremely lacking. Trying to find a ball bearing case fan in 80mm, the absolute most common size? Good luck. There are fifty different colors, with all the lame LED lights and silly gimmicks, but not a single decent, plain-Jane 80mm dual ball bearing fan. Seriously???
Another example, try going there to look for a USB to PATA/SAT adapter, so you can pull files off an old drive. Check their website ahead of time, see that it's available in store and head over there. Nobody has a clue where these things are in the store (what a shocker) and so you end up doing a grid-search until you find them in an isle that, of course, had no labeling on the end. It gets better though, because when you search the isle, you find ONE and only one brand represented and no, it is not the brand on the website. It isn't the one that the site told told you they had in stock in this particular Phoenix location either. Furthermore, they don't even have pegs on the shelf for that brand, they don't sell it and never did sell it at the store! What kind of a joke is this? I spent 30 minutes driving over and half an hour searching the store for nothing. In fact, there were several models on their site and NONE of those brands were on the shelf at all!
Tried going to another isle to find a new mouse pad, no dice there either. 80% of what belongs on the shelf is out of stock, it's either you buy the one with puppies on it or you're pretty much screwed. Wonderful!
Don't even get me started on the ever growing section of "junk" they have in the middle of the store, things like kids toys and pop-culture nonsense, such as a life-sized Mjolnir from the Thor movie, or the singing Elmo toys. Are you serious? When did I step out of the grown-ups Fry's Electronics and walk into the toy section at K-mart???
It seems to me based on their inventory and the brands they rep., that they seem to have created a niche by stocking cheap-o, low quality brands that you don't tend to find at the competition (and/or online), so they don't get out-priced. The great irony is that they have this sign on the outside of the store promoting how they "match Internet prices" but nobody else sells most of this junk to begin with, so where's the value?
The worst part about the whole thing is the God-awful people that end up there, which seem to be growing in number. Today alone we saw at least two homeless people wandering around in there, the kind you can smell long after they've left the isle that you're in. Really not doing much for your struggling reputation when your isles wreak of B.O. from some transient.
All in all, the allure of this place has worn off in the last five or six years since I started going there. The products aren't as good, the selection isn't as good, the people who work there are clueless and the customer base looks more and more like Walmart rejects every time I set foot in there. Today was a huge disappointment, coupled with freakish people, smelly transients and empty promises from their own website, which is really too much for one visit.
I am going to avoid this place in the future at all costs, unless I absolutely need something the same day. For anything else, I can no longer see a reason to set foot in this cesspool of an electronics store. They have completely sold out and are nothing but another trashy outlet store, trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)