Last Updated: Wednesday, August 15 2001
First, a disclaimer:
I DO NOT ACTUALLY WORK FOR FRY'S ELECTRONICS. I'm a consultant,
and I do some of their ISP and UNIX stuff for them. I've never even
worked in a store. My statements are not Fry's policy, and some of
what's below could in fact be outright lies. If you go to your
friends and say "Hey, look at this page! It's written by this
guy who works at Fry's...", you're saying the wrong thing. It's
a page. It's about Fry's. That's where I draw the line.
Note to journalists: I don't hate you. You can put this stuff in your
articles, that's fine. Just make sure you read the disclaimer and
understand that half of what's in here is rumor and the other half is
myth, and if you quote me as anything resembling an authoritative
reference, your editor (or whatever the equivalent is at your
organization) will probably laugh at you and use your paper as an
example of why it's important to get your references straight before
you quote 'em. (And if you whine about this being a run-on, go look
up "pedantic" in the dictionary and read the opening paragraph of A
Tale of Two Cities).
Another thing: I'm one of those benign hacker types that you read about in the media. You know, the ones who wear white hats and keep the bad guys out? Think "locksmith", not "safecracker". Same skills, different intentions.
So there's going to be some pretty hard-core geek speak in this document, even though it's going to piss off the journalists looking for an efficient (read "free") reference for their piece on Fry's. Go punch any terms you don't understand into a search engine if you're interested, or just stick to the facts if you're not.
I don't know why people think this. My working theory is that Fry's customer service sucked rocks up until about 1999 or so, and then they started to care. A person that I work with (who's been in and out of Fry's since the very beginning) says that Fry's has always been concerned about the price of the products more than almost any other aspect of their stores. That's what keeps people coming back, he says. I suppose that it was simply not cost-effective to hire quality people until around 1999, and then they could afford it. Or maybe their system got better.
What was that about their system? Well, Fry's is the McDonald's of retailers. McDonald's big claim to fame is that they developed a system that allowed nonprofessionals to make hamburgers. It's simple: instead of hiring expensive professionals to do a job, hire people with the minimum needed skillset and then design a system to support them. Fry's did exactly that. They have capacity for more than eighty registers at some of their stores so that lines move fast. Compare a Fry's to, say, a Costco at peak hours and you'll see what I'm talking about. If they increased the wage for the floor associates, the prices would go up or their margin would suffer. So they hire nonprofessionals and you get fast moving lines and low prices. The trade-off is that the people aren't going to be able to answer the really hard questions that the customers have.
One thing that keeps coming up about the service is that, well, let's say that the associates aren't exactly to win any Dublins anytime soon. My personal experience is that if you're in a hurry, yeah, it gets frustrating trying to talk to some of the people there. Sometimes I get lucky and the associate knows where to find product X and I go put uot fires. On the other hand, if I have the product speced out beforehand and I know what I need, I just go to the store and grab it. Arguably, I should be doing that anyway, because I'm-putting-out-fires-mode really sucks if you're doing it too much.
The other theory that I have is that they don't want people purchasing peripherials or hanging out in the components department if the customers don't know what they're doing. It's kind of a weak argument, but they do have low margins, and when people return stuff because they stuck their brand new 1GHz Athlon into a motherboard without slapping a heat sink on top of it, it wipes out the profit on a whole bunch of those units. So maybe Fry's doesn't provide very good pre-sales support, and the moron who wanted to save $20 on a heat sink goes and fries a mail-order processor instead. I don't know too much about the AVTA department (which sells the TVs and Maytag washers and stuff), but I think that I've received better pre-sales advice from those associates (based on my last few applicance purchases) than from the components associates. Then again, it's kind of hard to screw up when you're recommending a toaster to someone.
*laughing* Oh man, you should see the stuff we get about that in the support@frys.com mailbox...
The web site had been planned out for quite some time: it wasn't going to be a retail site, it was going to be a big billboard for our ISP services. There would be a clear division between the store operations and the ISP operations. It kind of sat on the drawing board while I tried to show the guy who backed up the Netware servers for the internal IS department (which I had nothing to do with at that time) how to write HTML that wouldn't make people laugh their heads off.
The content was mostly finished around July 2000, and then I went to DefCon 8 for a weekend to get some hands-on experience with what the bad guys on the 'net were doing at that time. I had been up for something like 50 hours straight during the convention before they shut down and I had to drag my ass over to LAS to get my flight. It got delayed, and I got some clam chowder and a sandwich at a 50's style cafe in the far terminal, the one you have to take the tram that goes really fast and makes you fall down to. I don't remember when it happened (50 hours...), but at some point someone called me and said the web site needed to go up that night because the Word Had Come Down from the brother Fry that was running the ISP project (and no, I won't say who he is). I got an hour of sleep on the flight back to SJC, checked my van out of the parking garage, and drove a mile up Brokaw to the corporate office. The first thing I realize is that (oh no), we don't have any hardware for a web server, and (oh noooooo!) the web site looks like crap, even though most of the content is there.
So I get the backup guy to finish the stuff lickety-split (he worked nights), while I figured out what to do. I ended up grabbing a crappy sample case from one of the buyers' cubicles and sticking a mobo and Celeron 533 processor in it. Then I realize (OH NO!!!!) there's no hard drives, anywhere. I end up finding a 200 meg IDE drive (which only supported PIO 1) that was on its last leg, and thinking "oh, that will work fine". I dd'ed the OpenBSD 2.7 floppy images to some blanks and the install program starts sucking the OS tarballs off the Canadian primary mirror using our yummy T3 goodness. Then I start banging away in an emacs window, trying to get the CSS sheet for the web site finalized, taking care of the DNS entries for the web server, installing my personal extra spicy custom security and IDS packages (I remember installing a layer 5 filter to prevent non-printable characters in the GET requests, thinking something stupid like "none of the Apache people use wide characters, so what if there's a bug in the input parsing?"), and contacting the upstream ISP (who was at the time providing reverse zones for the address block that I was going to use). Plugging the MAC address into our secure switch, dealing with stupid hardware problems with the web server, and configuring Apache and OpenSSH kept me up until about 7 AM or so.
That was when it was supposed to go live. I didn't know what to do, so I vaguely remember putting a page that said something like "THE WEB SITE IS GOING TO GO UP SOON. REALLY, WE MEAN IT. GIVE US ANOTHER 30 MINUTES OR SO. HEY, THE FIRST PERSON TO REPORT THIS MESSAGE TO (censored)@frys.com GETS A BISCUIT!" in 128px high letters. Maybe it was <BLINK>ing too, I don't remember.
So then we got, like, 20 emails (one demanded a "Scottish" biscuit) saying that they saw the page, and I knew everything was cool. The web site got finalized (to the point where it didn't make me wonder whether to laugh or cry), I scp'ed it over to the box, prayed it wouldn't get written to the bad areas of the disk, and sent the word that it was 8AM and all was well.
After that point, there were some half-hearted attempts from brother Fry to make the web site review process official and get the directors involved. That triggered a bunch of political stuff which I didn't understand, and so the web site stayed sucky except for minor updates.
Didn't you read the disclaimer?
Go look "Netcraft" up in a search engine, you cretin.