The Micro Center in Cambridge, MA, has improved a lot over the years.
When they have the thing that I want, I'd prefer to go there, rather than order online.
Also, I've never seen opened returns re-shinkwrapped and sold again as new at Micro Center, unlike in stories about Fry's. There are some wire shelves where opened returns are sold at a small discount, clearly labeled.
Incidentally, would be nice to also have a good surplus and e-cycling store browsing adventure in town. But I guess the economics are difficult, when real estate is so expensive, and most of the few customers for unusual stuff are online. (That local hobbyists could save a lot of money on shipping cost of decommissioned corporate and lab gear, or make impulse purchases they wouldn't online, probably isn't enough, I'd guess.)
tapoxi · 8h ago
That store is dangerous. The last few times I went "just to browse" but I came home with an ultra wide monitor and a new PC build.
I've started buying parts retail instead of online just because of how much I enjoy Microcenter. The interior does need a bit of a renovation though, it looks almost identical to how it did in the 90s.
john01dav · 8h ago
90s anachronism is a perfectly valid aesthetic. I dislike the tendency to think that things must constantly be changed for purely aesthetic reasons. This tendency was intentionally created in order to sell more things -- look up the history of Ford and Alfred Sloan for details.
ryao · 5h ago
If it is not broken, do not fix it. Renovations would cost money, which would mean higher prices. It is better to stick with what works than see prices rise to cover pointless renovations that would harm their competitiveness. The money is better spent on expansion that would pay for itself.
walterbell · 7h ago
> identical to how it did in the 90s
Are 1990s customers and their children in Microcenter target market?
Should the next Microcenter aesthetic be 2000s, 2010s, 2020s or 2090s?
khazhoux · 7h ago
> The last few times I went "just to browse" but I came home with an ultra wide monitor and a new PC build.
Wow, that sounds like a great day!
> The interior does need a bit of a renovation though, it looks almost identical to how it did in the 90s.
I think it would really bring me joy if I walked in and they were playing early 90s Beck, Soundgarden, Letters To Cleo...
arprocter · 9h ago
>When they have the thing that I want, I'd prefer to go there, rather than order online.
Worth mentioning that they price match Amazon
I bought a CPU cooler there a few months back - the guy at checkout told me to pull up the Amazon listing on my phone so he could knock some cash off
How is that possible? Amazon has to have lower overheads than a brick and mortar.
roughly · 8h ago
Amazon prices what they can get away with, not what their costs are. Jeff Bezos’s rocketry hobby is a testament to Amazon’s ability to extract surplus.
kaonwarb · 5h ago
Almost everyone prices that way - that is how supply and demand works.
Bezos's wealth is ~100% due to stock appreciation, which in turn is tied much more closely to AWS than to the consumer store.
neilv · 9h ago
I don't recall ever asking for a price match at a brick&mortar, even though I'm aware it's available at some stores. I'd guess most people don't.
The store gets some mileage out of being known for price-matching competitors (even online competitors, where that'd be a bit much).
(Well, occasionally I have questioned in-store, when a major chain shows one price on the Web, available at a specific brick&mortar location, but when you get to that location, there's a much higher price on the shelf. Now I tend to order for pickup at those stores, which is more work for them, just to lock in the Web-advertised price, rather than the switcheroo price.)
YZF · 7h ago
In Canada Staples will also price match Amazon.
erkt · 5h ago
I will make stores price match anything and everything. I also look at every item on my grocery check out to make sure the price is exactly what the shelf said. I concede no ground to fine print sales expiration dates. However, I am a freak when it comes to remembering these things after a decade of business purchasing and I did my fair share of taking advantage of the consumer.
I frankly enjoy fighting stores on pricing and get dopamine from a good deal and it pains me to pay more than necessary even if I can afford it just fine. I understand not everyone is like this.
There was a period a year or two ago where if you leaked cookies and ad tracking to Amazon and deliberately clicked through to competing sites their algorithm would aggressively slash pricing far below MSRP. I admit I would use this technique in microcenter to get Amazon to give me ludicrously cheap pricing then turn around and make them price match for instant gratification.
Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.
lotsofpulp · 5h ago
>Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.
Then why don’t their 10-Ks and 10-Qs show it? There is a reason it has a reputation of being a cutthroat business. Out of all the big retail businesses, only Home Depot/Lowes has 8%+ profit margins, and Apple obviously.
Stores often refuse to stock products unless they are given a comfortable enough margin on them that can be as high as 25%. That is how they can afford to do deals on CPUs to draw people into the store. Amazon also has overhead in shipping costs to customers that the brick and mortar store does not, since they receive goods in bulk that amortizes costs. They both also want as much money as they can get out of the customer, so they have little reason to lower pricing upfront unless they think that it will help them get even more money (like how microcenter cuts prices on CPUs since they expect to make it up on everything else you need to build a PC).
neepi · 4h ago
Amazon pricing isn't always that good and they lie about the discounts and retail prices, at least here in the UK. My US colleagues tell me the same is true in the US. I've actually found that general high street crap seller Argos here tends to have better retail prices than Amazon. I can just amble on down the road and get what I needed same day pick up in person rather than wait for a delivery to turn up.
kadoban · 6h ago
If every person price matched every item, they'd be screwed, but: most people don't, many items just can't be, and if eg you're price matching a $20 cpu cooler, you may also be buying a $500 cpu or a bunch of other components that they'll actually make money on.
roughly · 5h ago
This is also why different stores have different skus for items - that $20 coolermaster 40mm with red LEDs is cm40rl-w at Walmart and cm40rl-a at Amazon.
erkt · 5h ago
Retailers will absolutely budge on this technicality, this is to disarm those that aren’t aggressive. Everyone’s retail margins are wayyyyyy higher than they want the consumer to believe and their holding costs are non-negligible.
ryao · 5h ago
I thought the purpose of that was to let them avoid price matching on certain items despite having price matching policies. I have never heard of one budging on this. Have any?
fzzzy · 9h ago
They hope you'll buy a soda and a magazine or whatever. They always try to upsell protection plans.
walterbell · 9h ago
Best Buy will price match competitor websites and printed ads, via online chat, for online delivery or in-store pickup.
seattle_spring · 3h ago
It's not too uncommon for retail stores to match Amazon, as long as it's specifically both "sold by Amazon" and "shipped by Amazon". Best Buy does too, for example.
don-code · 9h ago
I was literally just there an hour ago, buying $800 worth of gear for a Wi-Fi mesh buildout.
Could I have gotten it cheaper online? Probably. But when you have 36 hours notice that you need to build out Wi-Fi, you can't beat Micro Center.
Considering New Hampshire’s lack of sales tax, I’m patiently waiting for Micro Center to establish a new presence in Nashua or Salem. The Cambridge location, while personally cherished, isn’t that accessible by car because of Boston’s stress-induced car traffic congestion. Even on foot, getting to the store is still a bit of a journey. Also, let’s not forget Massachusetts’ 6.25% sales tax.
In New Hampshire, I am positive Micro Center would attract customers from all over New England and make an absolute killing from sales, potentially overshadowing their Cambridge profits. I would never shop online or in Cambridge for hardware again. But, I’m sure they wish not to jeopardize the Cambridge store or their MIT and Boston tech hobbyist clientele. Otherwise, I am surprised they have not yet acted upon this idea.
But, a man can dream!
sfilmeyer · 6h ago
Comments like this remind me I might be the only person in Massachusetts honestly calculating my use tax for my tax return every year.
seattle_spring · 3h ago
Probably one of the only people in the country.
lotsofpulp · 3h ago
Google maps says Salem is 40min+ from Cambridge, and Nashua is 50min+ from Cambridge, and add another 10min to 20min from other parts of Boston.
Each minute of driving costs at least $0.67 (from IRS), excluding increased morbidity and mortality risks (injury from car collisions is the top health risk for most Americans).
So even using $0.50 per minute of driving, if you are only going to NH to evade sales tax, that is 80min*$0.50cents = $40. $40/0.0625 =$640.
So the first $640 of the purchase doesn't even save you any money (even more for most Bostonians further than Cambridge), and it costs you 1 to 2 hours of your life driving back and forth. If you value your leisure time at at least $100 per hour, then you're looking at spending at least $2,200 for the tax evasion to start paying off.
I'm just positing why Microcenter will not open a NH location anytime soon, because most of its customers (who are in Boston metro) won't find that it pays off to travel to NH.
vjulian · 7h ago
Oh God. I wish the sales clerks would leave me alone. They’re always trying to put their sticker on purchases and proffer useless advice. Still, it’s the best in the area, and the Trader Joe’s is a draw. I bought my first computer, an Apple //gs at Micro Center at their original, single location.
erkt · 5h ago
Just ask for their sticker and promise you will put it on your purchase. If another approaches just show them the sticker, they get it.
geerlingguy · 4h ago
St. Louis? Or do other locations also pop up near Trader Joe's?
behringer · 7h ago
They're not there for you, they're there for your grandma. They also get paid terribly, let them put their little stickers on. You never know when they might return the favor.
modeless · 11h ago
It's been more than four years since Fry's closed. I can't believe it took this long to get something better than Best Buy and bigger than Central Computers, in the middle of Silicon Valley of all places!
Hizonner · 9h ago
I get the feeling the real Fry's died long before that. It seemed like it was going downhill when I left the area about 18 years ago. Less parts, less tools, less test equipment, more packaged gadgets.
tgma · 2h ago
Fry's had an interesting vibe and felt you time traveled to the 90s, but my gosh they were so weird. They searched your bag on the way out. Microcenter is a godsend although it'll be hard to beat B&H with Payboo card.
NelsonMinar · 9h ago
Yeah Fry's was pretty awful.
awful · 9h ago
Agreed; went into Fry's, off Lawrence?, just before it closed. Visited area on and off again over the years since. Central Computer did seem to have what I needed for that moment, but the area seemed barren, was simply not the same, and especially after experiencing Fry's, Weird Stuff, Halted?, Anchor, Computer Literacy, et al. in the late 1980s and 90s.
ts4z · 3h ago
Hear hear. I guess we still have Anchor.
mosdl · 10h ago
We had a Microcenter that closed in 2012, took them that long to return.
Animats · 3h ago
I've been happy with Central Computer. Three machines and two repairs in ten years.
delfinom · 5h ago
PC hardware is a competitive and margin tight business, especially due to online sales. At the same time, the inventory can be very expensive on the books. It makes the calculus for viability of a physical store quite challenging. It's why Microcenter has relatively few stores for the US.
dylan604 · 10h ago
Who in Silicon Valley uses actual computers and not something in the cloud? Do any start ups use actual hardware that you'd get at some place like MicroCenter? Don't they just get handed shiny new Apple hardware (something from HP/Dell if they're on a budget) to interface with the cloud?
vladgur · 10h ago
Youre not wrong.
I have a pc with 24GB 3090 card capable of running LLMs locally, but our electricity costs make API calls much more reasonable.
Even gaming -- streaming geforce now is cheaper than ammortizing cost of power + hardware over time
john01dav · 8h ago
For my personal use, I'll take the hit in cost for the additional control that owning the hardware gives me. Even less restrictive things like blocking sideloading are unacceptable to me.
jzer0cool · 5h ago
Cost break down please
tdeck · 10h ago
I think many of the employees have gaming rigs at home and would buy parts there.
Nextgrid · 5m ago
You'd be surprised by how many "tech" people have no clue on about how to build a rig, nor have any willingness to learn.
dimator · 10h ago
The store has lots of other tech enthusiast stuff, like a huge selection of 3D printers.
geerlingguy · 4h ago
And a full aisle of electronics / hobbyist gear, including decent soldering stations, fluke gear, tons of components, and a good smattering of SparkFun and Adafruit's catalog.
nickthegreek · 10h ago
They have great small business machines and more importantly, everything you need without waiting for amazon. Their in-house prebuilt brand PowerSpec have great prices for the hardware and work nicely whether you go for a gaming version or office build.
kanbara · 45m ago
silicon valley-ite here: we have normal gaming machines and linux boxen too …
Braxton1980 · 10h ago
I'm lucky to be about 10 mins away from the one in Westchester NY.
They have a dedicated asile to custom water cooling items which shows how serious they are about enthusiasts.
I used to order my new set ups on Newegg but now I just got to Microcenter
stevenwoo · 9h ago
Newegg has deteriorated in my experience and now not materially different from Amazon, with wrong items shipped and multiple dropshippers commingling inventory so provenance of stuff is questionable. Do not recommend.
somat · 8h ago
It is a shame.
I think the tipping point was newegg the store vs newegg the marketplace.
Newegg "the store" was pretty great, newegg "the marketplace" not so much. And unlike amazon at least newegg tells you who the seller is and keeps a big "only show results from the newegg store" filter present. but even despite that the store is not nearly as great as it once was.
I wonder if there is anything left of amazon "the store", perhaps if you buy a book? Or has amazon "the marketplace" consumed everything.
dpiers · 1h ago
Amazon has surpassed Newegg as my online parts provider of choice.
It's not that things can't go wrong, it's just that they are much better at handling it than Newegg these days.
nvllsvm · 10h ago
Same for me and the Wayne, PA store. Prices are competitive and they're one of the few places I know that carries Bawls energy drinks.
uqual · 8h ago
It's good to finally have something "between" Best Buy and Central Computer (et al) back in the SV after Fry's died its slow and painful death as the previous Micro Center in Santa Clara closed.
Unfortunately this new one is in the same shopping center as Harbor Freight and it's close to where I live - this could get expensive... Mean to shop at one, end up shopping at both...
The lines on the "insider" opening day 5/28 were pretty long - I waited about an hour in line just to get into the store and the checkout line was over an hour long.
However, based on my purchases that day, I fear they will be unpleasant to shop at - even when busy, they were annoyingly upselling extended warranties. The sales associate on the floor tried to sell me on a plan for a laptop I bought and then, while there were hundreds of people waiting to checkout, the cashier spent time doing so AGAIN. Both were just following their mandated scripts and were at least nice about it all. They apparently also have some sort of rule that the customer buying something like a laptop also needs to "meet" with the sales associate's manager/supervisor - which was a completely useless awkward perfunctory handshake (and the customer survey asked if this meeting had happened so it appears to be an annoying institutional rule).
arcanemachiner · 8h ago
> the customer survey asked if this meeting had happened so it appears to be an annoying institutional rule
Whenever I get a survey that asks dumb questions like that, I just answer "yes" so that the employees don't get harassed for not asking those dumb questions to me in person.
"Were you warmly welcomed by a team member?" You bet I was!
"Did one of our team members tell you about our partnership with the Heart and Stroke Foundation?" Sure, why not?
vunderba · 7h ago
There's a great parody of the whole customer satisfaction thing on a very underrated comedy series called "Corporate". Five out of five!
The store had pre-opening for the past 2 days. I drove by on Wednesday and the parking lot was completely full with folks parking across the street and walking over. I thought I would be able to stroll in and get the free USB drive but ended up not able to visit yet. Talk about pent up demand!
This made me chuckle. Betteridge’s law is more of what you’d call a guideline than a rule.
vunderba · 7h ago
I used to love visiting the Microcenter near our family home back in the early 90s. In those halcyon days, they had a exceptionally LIBERAL return policy - 30 days even on opened software. (the L.L. Bean of electronics).
As a child whose modest income was derived solely from weekly lawn mowing, needless to say I coincidentally became quite accomplished at beating PC games within a month's time.
In defense of my somewhat dubious behavior, I did go back as an older teenager with far more disposable income and purchase a ton of big-box PC games from them. Most of which I still have including one of my all-time favorite RPGs, Betrayal at Krondor.
pss314 · 3h ago
Per this reddit post, at the Santa Clara location there were some 5090 GPU retail boxes filled with crossbody backpacks instead of the GPU. Microcenter did eventually track this to a particular supplier.
Am I the only one amused that nVidia flagship GPUs are now so large that you can fit 3 backbacks inside their packaging?
bschwindHN · 3h ago
I got into electronics around 2016, right around when I was visiting my hometown from living abroad. There's been a Micro Center there for years and I ended up spending hours there looking at all the ESP8266 boards they had there, along with the various supplies of Arduinos and Adafruit boards. Pretty "recent" in terms of electronics tech, but somehow this is already close to 10 years ago :c
mcbuckeye · 9h ago
I got my first computer, an Apple ][+, at the original Micro Center store in Upper Arlington (Columbus), Ohio.
The store was tiny and then grew over time to be huge. I live in NJ now and they have a store about 40 minutes away from me. I'm surprised they are still around given e-commerce and all the other stores that have collapsed. Happy they are--it's always fun to walk through the store like in the good old days and see what you can find.
kevinsync · 9h ago
Yup, I go in the Columbus store semi-frequently -- have since the mid-90's. They've kept up with the times so it's a little less "smells like nerd" (which bums me out), but they are very competent, very good on price, and sometimes it's just NICE to zip up 315 to get something instead of hitting Amazon or Ebay.
In comparison, Best Buy is a disaster lol; I hadn't been since Obama was in office, needed to buy a new tv, and it felt more like "electronics" Value City Furniture crossed with TJ Maxx than anything that came before it (Sun TV, Incredible Universe, etc).
At least at Micro Center you can expect a disheveled-yet-tucked-Oxford salesperson to come bother you until you say "I'm good, just put your sticker on the stuff I'm gonna buy" rather than some burned-out retail drone in a blue polo who tries to hard-sell you on a sound bar you didn't ask for!
monksy · 9h ago
It's amazing for the area that claims it's the tech center didn't have a microcenter until now. I like having a microcenter in Chicago.
dehrmann · 8h ago
They had one in Santa Clara in or near the Mercado shopping center until around 2012.
absurdo · 10h ago
I am afraid of asking but what does Sayal classify as? I figured it would take negative time for someone to post Radio Shack in commentary because it’s basically a knee jerk reaction, but I do appreciate a store like Sayal although they’re proper electronics parts seller. These stores are more like finished product distributors. Maybe I’m too picky.
tdeck · 10h ago
I haven't heard of Sayal, but there is Anchor Electronics in Santa Clara that sells what I would think you're looking for.
In my mind microcenter mostly sells PC parts that you plug in or stick into a card slot, although apparently they do also sell some electronics components a hobbyist might solder to a board.
modeless · 4h ago
Anchor Electronics is totally awesome. Very small but very interesting collection of stuff that you definitely won't find at any other store that still exists in the Bay Area.
absurdo · 10h ago
> Anchor Electronics in Santa Clara
Looks about right! I thought Sayal was scattered across US so my bad :l
A big box product store opening that sells plug and play stuff is to me, personally, not worthy of bearing the title Electronics. It’s not news worthy for hackers. I could say that out of smugness but very often I’m confronted with sales staff that don’t know much about what they’re selling, and I end up (playfully?) educating them about the products, so I suspect this would be much the same.
The “Maker” space as it’s called today is amazing but I guess done to death so nobody talks about it?
There are of course no real contenders today that warrant bringing up Radio Shack in any way (but people still do as if it’s relevant). RS put a gorilla’s weight behind teaching people how to fish that when they left, they left a massive cultural void that nobody has since filled and is unlikely to fill. The world has moved on.
II2II · 9h ago
Like it or not, and I'm in the not category, most people conflate electronics with consumer electronics. It is just something we have to deal with.
That said, a big box computer retailer is worth something. For the most part, I've found that sales people know something about computers. Contrast that to general consumer electronics stores where sales people know nothing about everything. If you know what you want, they also tend to be better than smaller computer stores. In that case, you're basically paying someone to do mail order for you.
HorizonXP · 10h ago
Can you link to Sayal?
Because I’m in Toronto, grew up here, have lived in SF/Bay, back when Fry’s was around.
Sayal in Toronto was my go to electronics store. I didn’t realize they were in the US? Unless it’s a different one.
bdcravens · 5h ago
While I've built machines using parts from Microcenter, it's been several years, as I eventually went all-in on Macbooks (though you can often get one cheaper there than at the Apple Store). However, as I've gotten into 3d printing and other maker tech in the last year, I'm now there at least once a month, and have spent more than I ever did.
redwood · 10h ago
I miss Fry's
JKCalhoun · 9h ago
I miss WeirdStuff.
dehrmann · 8h ago
I remember strolling through there and seeing all the weird hardware childhood me drooled over. Adult me did not walk out with a Snappy video capture thingy or a Jaz drive.
duskwuff · 7h ago
I walked through the store on their last day and was amazed at just how much unalloyed junk they had on the shelves - boxes of unidentified circuit boards with bent connectors and components broken off, shelves of empty binders, etc. Lots of neat, weird old stuff, but a lot of things which no one would ever buy.
redwood · 8h ago
How about HalTech?
JKCalhoun · 4h ago
Yeah, Haltek was great. A friend had a knack for finding valuable stuff — would go into Haltek and come out with a dozen of some obscure digital numerical display from the mid 70's or whatever.
JoshTriplett · 6h ago
I miss Incredible Universe.
MPSimmons · 6h ago
Man, I am glad I live near a Microcenter. It's great that they have a big maker section now, too.
reid · 7h ago
Parking lot is completely full. I parked nearby and walked over. They’re giving away free mugs today with Micro Center Silicon Valley on it.
Huge Ubiquiti display and demo area. I didn’t buy anything today because the checkout line was too long. My daughter liked the Magna Tile selection in the toys area.
Really great to have this much selection nearby.
av3csr · 10h ago
Was nice seeing that the 5090 exists, but boy, those prices.
maz1b · 4h ago
Surprising - but a good change! I recently picked up an M3 Ultra from there.
dustbunny · 7h ago
My mind is blown that this is new.
My small city in Canada has an awesome Memory Express in it. And it's packed with ~16 year old gamers and their dads spending big $ on stuff.
grg0 · 7h ago
$3719 for a GPU certainly is new.
I'm fucking pumped for brick-and-mortar, though. Bring more bricks.
blindriver · 10h ago
When did Microcenter re-gain its popularity? I remember when it was around before it closed down, beside AMC Mercado, and the prices were crazy expensive even back then. Did they somehow lower their prices?
dminvs · 10h ago
I always liked going to well-stocked stores and browsing for stuff. That was Fry's until they shot themselves in the foot.
Micro Center might not be optimal on price, but sometimes you just want to wander a store full of cool stuff and maybe walk out with something you didn't expect, instead of another anonymous box of schmutz from Amazon or wherever
ryao · 4h ago
Unfortunately, Microcenter’s selection often leaves me disappointed. In particular, they stock almost no ECC RAM for AM5 machines. They do not stock many graphics cards that have ECC VRAM either. Their best card in stock that has ECC VRAM is this nearly obsolete ampere card:
When online became infested with counterfeits and opened returns with no way to distinguish.
Anyone ordering computer parts from Amazon is just asking to get fleeced nowadays.
bdcravens · 5h ago
I think the explosion of 3D printing has a lot to do with it.
lotsofpulp · 10h ago
A lot of the physical open to the public stores took a beating before South Dakota v Wayfair was decided in June 2018, since it was trivial to spend ~7% less by shopping from a website with a presence outside of your state.
I doubt Microcenter ever expands to the number of locations that BestBuy /circuit city/compusa/etc had, but it might have enough of a market for one or two locations in the top 10 to 20 metros.
datavirtue · 10h ago
Their shoppers are all on the savvy scale and could easily use their prime membership to buy parts on Amazon, but they don't.
If the customer isn't savvy the knowledgeable customer service adds a lot of value.
tschwimmer · 9h ago
I am a "savvy shopper" and have no desire to buy components on Amazon anymore. Their stock co-mingling doesn't work for speciality computer components. I've received items marked as new that were clearly open box returns. I've received completely nonfunctional components. I've received the wrong item a few times. The component I've had the most success with are SSDs, but for anything beyond that I prefer to buy from brick and mortar because of their "curation." To be honest, it's a shame because the Amazon shopping experience is vastly superior but they send you crap, so it's unusable for this vertical. I still buy other junk from Amazon, but nothing that's particularly performance sensitive.
mrbluecoat · 7h ago
Reminds me of when I started working at a new Best Buy back when they were the cool new kid on the block
rayiner · 9h ago
I grew up going to the Microcenter in Vienna, VA. Bought a monitor there just a couple of years ago. Hasn’t changed at all in 25 years!
mrexroad · 6h ago
Same! I think last time I was there was to buy a iMac — back when they first released the different colors. Bought lots of parts back in that era too. Glad to hear it’s still there.
orionblastar · 10h ago
Microcenter is what Radio Shack should have become.
macNchz · 10h ago
It was founded by two Radio Shack employees!
jbaber · 7h ago
That explains a lot.
walterbell · 7h ago
For reboot of US mainline electronics manufacturing, we need a video comparing US electronic parts retail with Shenzen electronic parts retail.
myself248 · 10h ago
And we all watched Radio Shack run face-first into the same wall, over and over and over and over. The market was exploding and it was theirs to lose, and boy did they ever.
a_e_k · 10h ago
Now if we could only get one near Seattle!
(I've never really understood why a tech hub as large and historical as Seattle doesn't have one. It's weird that it's such a relative desert.)
asteroidburger · 3h ago
There's already a bunch of vacant Walgreens / Rite Aid / Bartell Drugs locations, with more to come. Surely one of the bigger ones would be adequate.
spacecadet · 8h ago
One of us.
whalesalad · 6h ago
I used to live a mile or so from the location in Michigan. Previously I lived a few miles from the one in Tustin, CA. Growing up I was a few miles from Fry’s in Burbank and went there all the time. Now I live out in the boonies and it’s certainly made me realize how fortunate I was all these years
mixmastamyk · 7h ago
Wish there was one near Los Angeles, especially now that Fry's is gone. There's a MC in in Orange County, but it's a bit too far with Best Buy close and online deliveries.
evbogue · 7h ago
I've been shopping at Microcenter in Chicago since I was a kid. I bought my last 3 computers there.
I couldn't believe upon moving to the bay in the aughts that there was nowhere to buy a decent computer. I'm glad they finally have a place to buy a computer out there.
yahoozoo · 10h ago
At first I was impressed with the number of people lined up to go in the store. Then I realized every single person was just an employee.
dimator · 10h ago
Other micro centers have a ton of employees so I'm not surprised. They're actually knowledgeable and helpful, the opposite of what Fry's had. And they're everywhere, not in a pushy sense, but just available.
nickthegreek · 10h ago
They also earn commission and are motivated to help you. I’ve actually had employees replace items I had chosen to save me cash. You don’t see service like that often.
datavirtue · 10h ago
I live next to the Cincinnati store and have been going there for more than thirty years. There are people waiting at the door every morning when it opens and it is swamped with people from open to close.
The service is unmatched by any retailer.
yahoozoo · 8h ago
That’s cool, I’ll just use Amazon and wait 1 extra day though
When they have the thing that I want, I'd prefer to go there, rather than order online.
Also, I've never seen opened returns re-shinkwrapped and sold again as new at Micro Center, unlike in stories about Fry's. There are some wire shelves where opened returns are sold at a small discount, clearly labeled.
Incidentally, would be nice to also have a good surplus and e-cycling store browsing adventure in town. But I guess the economics are difficult, when real estate is so expensive, and most of the few customers for unusual stuff are online. (That local hobbyists could save a lot of money on shipping cost of decommissioned corporate and lab gear, or make impulse purchases they wouldn't online, probably isn't enough, I'd guess.)
I've started buying parts retail instead of online just because of how much I enjoy Microcenter. The interior does need a bit of a renovation though, it looks almost identical to how it did in the 90s.
Are 1990s customers and their children in Microcenter target market?
Should the next Microcenter aesthetic be 2000s, 2010s, 2020s or 2090s?
Wow, that sounds like a great day!
> The interior does need a bit of a renovation though, it looks almost identical to how it did in the 90s.
I think it would really bring me joy if I walked in and they were playing early 90s Beck, Soundgarden, Letters To Cleo...
Worth mentioning that they price match Amazon
I bought a CPU cooler there a few months back - the guy at checkout told me to pull up the Amazon listing on my phone so he could knock some cash off
https://community.microcenter.com/kb/articles/6-do-you-price...
Bezos's wealth is ~100% due to stock appreciation, which in turn is tied much more closely to AWS than to the consumer store.
The store gets some mileage out of being known for price-matching competitors (even online competitors, where that'd be a bit much).
(Well, occasionally I have questioned in-store, when a major chain shows one price on the Web, available at a specific brick&mortar location, but when you get to that location, there's a much higher price on the shelf. Now I tend to order for pickup at those stores, which is more work for them, just to lock in the Web-advertised price, rather than the switcheroo price.)
I frankly enjoy fighting stores on pricing and get dopamine from a good deal and it pains me to pay more than necessary even if I can afford it just fine. I understand not everyone is like this.
There was a period a year or two ago where if you leaked cookies and ad tracking to Amazon and deliberately clicked through to competing sites their algorithm would aggressively slash pricing far below MSRP. I admit I would use this technique in microcenter to get Amazon to give me ludicrously cheap pricing then turn around and make them price match for instant gratification.
Retail/amazon operate at a much higher margin than most people realize.
Then why don’t their 10-Ks and 10-Qs show it? There is a reason it has a reputation of being a cutthroat business. Out of all the big retail businesses, only Home Depot/Lowes has 8%+ profit margins, and Apple obviously.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-pr...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BBY/best-buy/net-p...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/COST/costco/net-pr...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KR/kroger/net-prof...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ACI/albertsons/net...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TGT/target/net-pro...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/JWN/nordstrom/net-...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/M/macys/net-profit...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WBA/walgreens/net-...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CVS/cvs-health/net...
Could I have gotten it cheaper online? Probably. But when you have 36 hours notice that you need to build out Wi-Fi, you can't beat Micro Center.
In New Hampshire, I am positive Micro Center would attract customers from all over New England and make an absolute killing from sales, potentially overshadowing their Cambridge profits. I would never shop online or in Cambridge for hardware again. But, I’m sure they wish not to jeopardize the Cambridge store or their MIT and Boston tech hobbyist clientele. Otherwise, I am surprised they have not yet acted upon this idea.
But, a man can dream!
Each minute of driving costs at least $0.67 (from IRS), excluding increased morbidity and mortality risks (injury from car collisions is the top health risk for most Americans).
So even using $0.50 per minute of driving, if you are only going to NH to evade sales tax, that is 80min*$0.50cents = $40. $40/0.0625 =$640.
So the first $640 of the purchase doesn't even save you any money (even more for most Bostonians further than Cambridge), and it costs you 1 to 2 hours of your life driving back and forth. If you value your leisure time at at least $100 per hour, then you're looking at spending at least $2,200 for the tax evasion to start paying off.
I'm just positing why Microcenter will not open a NH location anytime soon, because most of its customers (who are in Boston metro) won't find that it pays off to travel to NH.
I have a pc with 24GB 3090 card capable of running LLMs locally, but our electricity costs make API calls much more reasonable.
Even gaming -- streaming geforce now is cheaper than ammortizing cost of power + hardware over time
They have a dedicated asile to custom water cooling items which shows how serious they are about enthusiasts.
I used to order my new set ups on Newegg but now I just got to Microcenter
I think the tipping point was newegg the store vs newegg the marketplace.
Newegg "the store" was pretty great, newegg "the marketplace" not so much. And unlike amazon at least newegg tells you who the seller is and keeps a big "only show results from the newegg store" filter present. but even despite that the store is not nearly as great as it once was.
I wonder if there is anything left of amazon "the store", perhaps if you buy a book? Or has amazon "the marketplace" consumed everything.
It's not that things can't go wrong, it's just that they are much better at handling it than Newegg these days.
Unfortunately this new one is in the same shopping center as Harbor Freight and it's close to where I live - this could get expensive... Mean to shop at one, end up shopping at both...
The lines on the "insider" opening day 5/28 were pretty long - I waited about an hour in line just to get into the store and the checkout line was over an hour long.
However, based on my purchases that day, I fear they will be unpleasant to shop at - even when busy, they were annoyingly upselling extended warranties. The sales associate on the floor tried to sell me on a plan for a laptop I bought and then, while there were hundreds of people waiting to checkout, the cashier spent time doing so AGAIN. Both were just following their mandated scripts and were at least nice about it all. They apparently also have some sort of rule that the customer buying something like a laptop also needs to "meet" with the sales associate's manager/supervisor - which was a completely useless awkward perfunctory handshake (and the customer survey asked if this meeting had happened so it appears to be an annoying institutional rule).
Whenever I get a survey that asks dumb questions like that, I just answer "yes" so that the employees don't get harassed for not asking those dumb questions to me in person.
"Were you warmly welcomed by a team member?" You bet I was!
"Did one of our team members tell you about our partnership with the Heart and Stroke Foundation?" Sure, why not?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvHZfAT0F94
"Demolishing the Fry's Electronics in Burbank", 100 comments (2025), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43677862
"Fry's Electronics is closing all stores", 300 comments (2021), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26246435
"Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?", 350 comments (2020), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945492
"The Fry's Era", 150 comments (2019), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20853834
Electronics Surplus Stores
"Sundown for Surplus" (2018), https://www.eham.net/article/41444
"End of an Era: Weird Stuff Warehouse closed" (2018), https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/08/sjm-l-weirdstuff-0408...
> "Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?", 350 comments (2020), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945492
This made me chuckle. Betteridge’s law is more of what you’d call a guideline than a rule.
As a child whose modest income was derived solely from weekly lawn mowing, needless to say I coincidentally became quite accomplished at beating PC games within a month's time.
In defense of my somewhat dubious behavior, I did go back as an older teenager with far more disposable income and purchase a ton of big-box PC games from them. Most of which I still have including one of my all-time favorite RPGs, Betrayal at Krondor.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Microcenter/comments/1kymzcd/update...
The store was tiny and then grew over time to be huge. I live in NJ now and they have a store about 40 minutes away from me. I'm surprised they are still around given e-commerce and all the other stores that have collapsed. Happy they are--it's always fun to walk through the store like in the good old days and see what you can find.
In comparison, Best Buy is a disaster lol; I hadn't been since Obama was in office, needed to buy a new tv, and it felt more like "electronics" Value City Furniture crossed with TJ Maxx than anything that came before it (Sun TV, Incredible Universe, etc).
At least at Micro Center you can expect a disheveled-yet-tucked-Oxford salesperson to come bother you until you say "I'm good, just put your sticker on the stuff I'm gonna buy" rather than some burned-out retail drone in a blue polo who tries to hard-sell you on a sound bar you didn't ask for!
In my mind microcenter mostly sells PC parts that you plug in or stick into a card slot, although apparently they do also sell some electronics components a hobbyist might solder to a board.
Looks about right! I thought Sayal was scattered across US so my bad :l
A big box product store opening that sells plug and play stuff is to me, personally, not worthy of bearing the title Electronics. It’s not news worthy for hackers. I could say that out of smugness but very often I’m confronted with sales staff that don’t know much about what they’re selling, and I end up (playfully?) educating them about the products, so I suspect this would be much the same.
The “Maker” space as it’s called today is amazing but I guess done to death so nobody talks about it?
There are of course no real contenders today that warrant bringing up Radio Shack in any way (but people still do as if it’s relevant). RS put a gorilla’s weight behind teaching people how to fish that when they left, they left a massive cultural void that nobody has since filled and is unlikely to fill. The world has moved on.
That said, a big box computer retailer is worth something. For the most part, I've found that sales people know something about computers. Contrast that to general consumer electronics stores where sales people know nothing about everything. If you know what you want, they also tend to be better than smaller computer stores. In that case, you're basically paying someone to do mail order for you.
Because I’m in Toronto, grew up here, have lived in SF/Bay, back when Fry’s was around.
Sayal in Toronto was my go to electronics store. I didn’t realize they were in the US? Unless it’s a different one.
Huge Ubiquiti display and demo area. I didn’t buy anything today because the checkout line was too long. My daughter liked the Magna Tile selection in the toys area.
Really great to have this much selection nearby.
My small city in Canada has an awesome Memory Express in it. And it's packed with ~16 year old gamers and their dads spending big $ on stuff.
I'm fucking pumped for brick-and-mortar, though. Bring more bricks.
Micro Center might not be optimal on price, but sometimes you just want to wander a store full of cool stuff and maybe walk out with something you didn't expect, instead of another anonymous box of schmutz from Amazon or wherever
https://www.microcenter.com/product/652517/pny-nvidia-rtx-a4...
When online became infested with counterfeits and opened returns with no way to distinguish.
Anyone ordering computer parts from Amazon is just asking to get fleeced nowadays.
I doubt Microcenter ever expands to the number of locations that BestBuy /circuit city/compusa/etc had, but it might have enough of a market for one or two locations in the top 10 to 20 metros.
If the customer isn't savvy the knowledgeable customer service adds a lot of value.
(I've never really understood why a tech hub as large and historical as Seattle doesn't have one. It's weird that it's such a relative desert.)
I couldn't believe upon moving to the bay in the aughts that there was nowhere to buy a decent computer. I'm glad they finally have a place to buy a computer out there.
The service is unmatched by any retailer.