Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 27 Apr 2005 18:22:27 GMT
It looks like the Seattle Fry’s store will be selling Tiger for $99 this weekend. I suspect that other Fry’s locations will have similar prices, but it’s not at all uncommon for Fry’s to run different promotions in different regions. Take a look at frys-electronics-ads.com; they’ll probably have details within a day or two.
Posted by Scott Laird Mon, 14 Mar 2005 19:46:16 GMT
No matter how much you like Fry’s, 4 visits in a single week is just too much.
I think I’ve ODed on Fry’s. At this point, all I see when I walk in the door is a Walmart with their core demographic switched from rednecks to rabid gamer wannabes. When looking for a cheap, non-tacky PC case on Saturday, I asked a wandering sales guy about cases without plexiglas windows in the side and he replied “we don’t have a lot of demand for those. Pretty much everyone wants to show off their mods.”
Hmm. Looks like both modfree.com and modfree.org are free. I see a merchandizing opportunity here. If anyone wants to pick them up and run with them, let me know–I’ll be first in line to order the “my PC is beige” t-shirt.
Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 16 Nov 2004 01:38:33 GMT
A friend just sent me a link to this week’s ads for Fry’s Electronics in Seattle. This has been a long-running irritation for both of us–unless we go out and buy a paper, we don’t know what Fry’s is selling this week. It seems ridiculous that they don’t post their sales online themselves; instead, this link above comes from one of the two major Seattle papers; they’re both hosted in nwsource.com.
While it’s nice to see their ads show up online, it’d be even nicer if they were actually usable–as it is, you get an unreadably small image of the ad; you can click to zoom, but the zoomed image only shows a single segment of the ad, usually one or two items. So, to read the whole ad, you’d have to load at least 100 distinct images. Nice work, guys.
Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 03 Sep 2003 00:16:19 GMT
Well, Fry’s Electronics finally opened a store in the Seattle area. Bizarrely enough, I had a easier time finding unusual computer stuff in Bellingham then I’ve had in Seattle. A lot of that is me not knowing where to look, but Seattle seems to suffer from too many CompUSAs and assorted office supply stores, and not enough actual techie-oriented computer stores. Example: I wanted to find a PCI Ethernet card that was supported by a specific kernel build that we were shipping as part of our product at work, and I ended up having to raid my closet at home, because no place in town seems to sell anything other then $20 tulip clones. I don’t know, Intel and 3com have stopped making real Ethernet cards or something, but it’s kind of irritating when you’re only a few miles down the road from The Evil Empire, and you have to mail-order Ethernet cards.
Anyway, Fry’s is here. It’s in Renton, which isn’t my ideal location for an electronics store, but it’s better then Portland, which was the closest Fry’s.
Cyn and I drove down on Saturday. That may have been a mistake, because it looked like everyone else in the entire state was there as well. They had 66 registers open, and the backup from the checkout lines was screwing up foot traffic in about half of the store when we got there.
All in all, it’s not exactly God’s Gift to Geeks, but they did have a lot of stuff in stock, including around 20 different motherboards (including 2 ITX boards), spools of Cat 5 (didn’t look for 5e or 6), multimode fiber with at least a few different connectors (but no singlemode), CPUs (including a couple speed grades of Opteron, although I didn’t see any motherboards), and so forth. Their drive prices weren’t great, but I was able to get a DVD/CD-RW combo drive for $49, which is about $50 cheaper then CompUSA. Not like that’s hard or anything–last time I was there, they wanted $30 for IDE cables ($2.99 from Fry’s, probably $0.17 in lots of 1,000 online).
In the end, I suckered in and spent too much money. My wife has been wanting a new computer for a while, and talked me into getting her a small-form-factor IWill XP-4. With a 2.4GHz Celeron, 512MB of RAM, 80GB drive, wireless keyboard and mouse, plus a 15” LCD, it came to just over $600, which doesn’t seem too shabby. I added a DVD reader and a wireless card that I had sitting around, and we now have a computer in the kitchen, running Linux. I’ll get to that rant later.
