I live in Southern California, where we had several Fry's stores. I have visited many other Fry's over time when I needed parts or components while on business travel. I have turned too many hotel rooms into temporary labs, and counted on Fry's to stock obscure replacement parts or other components that could not be found within hundreds of miles from any other source.
Honestly, I doubt the failure was caused by the pandemic. While the pandemic may have pushed them into closing a little sooner, it was obvious to me several years ago that they were in severe decline and would fail soon. The stores looked bare and devoid of both products and customers. The staffing levels were bare bones and the staff lacked any product knowledge or any interest to help customers.
When Fry's closed, I learned from our local media that their inventory had shifted to a consignment model (... and I believe it happened a year or so before the pandemic). That must have been a last-chance, desperate act.. Manufacturers supplied the goods at zero cost, and Fry's paid them only when an item actually sold. Many manufacturers balked at that and refused those non-standard, last-resort methods. When I learned that (after the fact), it confirmed that I had been right about their situation.
I am not an economist, but from my own personal observations of living through the era, I would say that Frys rode the huge wave of popularity and growth of computers and everything related to them that started in the early 1980s and lasted about 25 years. Eventually the market saturated, computers became low-cost, mass-produced commodities (household appliances, not so special). Many computer hobbyists shifted from computers to pen turning.
Joking aside, many people are evolving from computers to cell phones. Cell phones are merely smaller computers, of course, but their portability, extended communications and special features makes them a game changer. The special features that make them a game changer include their user interfaces (the way people interact with them), precision location features, etc.
(Personal note: ... and this is not the place to discuss who the true beneficiaries of those features are.)
For an example of an industry that experienced a similar boom cycle, I remember the massive high fidelity stereo retailers that occupied a similar space in the market. That started about 15 years earlier than Fry's, and declined in a nearly identical way. Anyone remember Pacific Stereo? Cal Stereo? etc. ??
