Grand opening of Fry’s Electronics San Marcos. Fred shakes the president’s hand, then writes him a 900-word letter he’ll never read.
The Fry’s store finally opened in San Marcos. The theme is “Atlantis” (or perhaps “Jules Verne”) and it’s really pretty darned cool, with fishtanks and electrical sculptures and a giant water marble.
I went to the grand opening the other day — the place was packed, and the line to get in stretched around the outside of the store. Of course I’d been there already — went on the first afternoon they were “beta test” opening; in fact I’d already bought stuff. And even returned something!
So as I was wandering around I noticed the “suits” milling about the big round fishtank near the entrance; and sure enough one of them had a nametag “Randy Fry, President.” So I shook his hand and told him I was a long time customer, and then he got a call on his cellphone.
I’ve been meaning to write to him with suggestions for a while now, so I’ll just start ranting here:
“Welcome High Tech Professionals” is one of their mottos. Seems to me like Fry’s has two classes of customers: Joe Schmoe consumers just looking for the lowest price, and geeks. The science of selling to the former is well studied. Selling to the latter, while probably much easier, is rarely done well. They need: vast selection of techie products (check); great organization of those products (not so much). A while back, we tried to find 555 timer chips — one of the most basic items a proto-geek would ever want — amid a selection of probably 5000 chips. The little chip bags on peghooks on the wall were badly organized, badly labelled, wrong chips on labelled hooks, and in a badly lit ghetto of the store.
Radical idea: recruit your best customers as customer support. Give me a name tag, and a 5% discount if I wear it any time I’m in the store — and if people have questions, they can come up and ask me. This already happens — a lot — this would just formalize it.
And, as mentioned earlier, if they ever open stores in England, they need to call them Chips.