  | |
. | |
A L S O__T O D A Y
- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Is spam really all that bad? Weigh in on electronic junk mail in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y
Tinkerer's paradise Let's Get This Straight Who owns the desktop?
Mr. Gates, meet Mr. Antitrust The Internet strikes back - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
|
|
_______customer Disservice
_______HOW DID FRY'S BECOME A TOTEM OF
BY SIMON FIRTH | Step inside the vast new Fry's Electronics superstore in Sunnyvale, Calif., and you enter an enormous warehouse, bizarrely decorated to look like a museum, stacked to the rafters with a mind-bogglingly huge inventory of consumer electronics and staffed by some of most loathed salespeople in the world. You're also walking into the latest incarnation of a Silicon Valley legend. Fry's five local stores have such a firm place in Valley mythology that tourists visit them by the busload. An entire Yahoo category is now devoted to Web sites that satirize the chain. It's even been immortalized in fiction. When Daniel Underwood, the bug-checking hero of Douglas Coupland's Silicon Valley novel "Microserfs," needs to buy a strip of EPROM memory, he heads, of course, to his local Fry's. Once there, Daniel and his friends marvel at "the pyramids of Hostess products, the miles of computing magazines, the cascade of nerdiana lifestyle accessories: telecom wiring supplies, clips, pornography, razors, Doritos, chemicals for etching boards." Then Daniel runs into a boy who's the spitting image of his dead brother and freaks out in the aisle. As locals will tell you, stuff like that happens at Fry's all the time. Soon, people across the country may have the chance to experience their own moments of Fry's-style weirdness. A U.S. News and World Report article last year heralded the Fry's retail model as "the future of computer retailing." And in the last few years the company has expanded beyond its Valley home into Southern California and, more recently, Texas and Arizona. The chain certainly seems to be doing well. According to Computer Retail Week, Fry's, with just 16 stores, was last year the 13th largest retailer of computer merchandise in the United States, outselling considerably bigger chains like Radio Shack and PC Warehouse. Forbes estimated that Fry's grossed an average of $85 million per store last year, "among the highest in the industry." By comparison, the 272 Best Buy stores only averaged $28 million per store. What's made Fry's such a phenomenon isn't just the kookiness of some of its customers and the way its inventory makes it a technophile nirvana. On a deeper level, Fry's is flouting one of the most basic rules of retailing -- the one that says you should treat your customers nicely or they'll take their business elsewhere. That raises a tough question for the company's future: As Fry's tries to extend its reach beyond its Silicon Valley birthplace and across the United States, can its blend of superstore selection, low prices and benign (or malign) neglect of shoppers retain its appeal? Looking for a provisional answer, I recently visited the company's new Sunnyvale store. You notice the most obvious element of the Fry's formula before you even enter the store: Each outlet is decorated according to a unique theme. While other Fry's stores are designed to look like a Mayan temple, a Wild Western saloon or a UFO crash site, in Sunnyvale the standard superstore frontage is interrupted by a portico with a giant metallic "pulse" tracking across it. The theme here, it turns out, is "The History of Electronics and of Silicon Valley." Inside, another huge wave undulates around the perimeter walls of the vast interior. Near an enormous bank of checkouts, blown-up vintage photos of engineer celebrities from the Valley's early days loom over you. And among the acres of PCs, hard drives, CDs, magazines, telescopes, junk food and pharmaceuticals that make up the eclectic, engineer-friendly inventory, pyramidal glass cases display iconic examples of vintage electronic machinery (a transistor! an early Apple!) invented by the people the store presumes are heroes to its customers. The design, though, is strictly a veneer. Wandering the vast aisles, you can't miss that you're in an enormous supermarket. Stacks of discounted software beckon at the end of every aisle. Eye-level shelves are filled with high-profit items, often from cheap but little-known brands. The Fry's strategy, it seems, boils down to its own version of "pile 'em high, sell 'em low." But just by walking into the store I got an immediate taste of another, less commonplace, but apparently no less essential aspect of Fry's' retail strategy. I entered with a backpack on my shoulder; this quickly triggered the approach of a polite man who spoke little English but made it clear he suspected I might be a criminal. He pointed me to another guard who offered to take the bag off me but offered no tag, number or peg in return. He planned, it seemed, to store my unmarked bag under an exposed podium right by the exit. With so many criminals like me about? No way! I took the bag back to my car. On my second attempt, I made it inside. I even met several sales assistants who offered both help and advice. It says a lot about Fry's reputation that this came as a surprise. "It's a nightmare," Valley-born novelist Sylvia Brownrigg had told me before I went. She tried to buy a new computer at the Palo Alto Fry's a couple of months ago and came out shaking: "It's great if you know what you want, otherwise you feel underinformed, ignorant and lost." She's not alone. According to many customers and observers who fault Fry's staffing practices and service standards, the store's "pile 'em high, sell 'em low" formula has a third element: "Treat 'em rough." Is this how Fry's would describe their strategy? It's hard to tell. Another basic rule of conventional retailing the firm flouts is the one that says a store should carefully tend its public image and its relations with the media. - - - - - - - - - - - -
ILLUSTRATION BY RICHARD SALA |
