this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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I used to go to Best Buy weekly to look for new movies and games, but since they eliminated movies and scaled back games, I've been doing all that shopping on Amazon instead... I guess it shows who wants my money and who doesn't.
Best Buy is going to end up being just another "Hey, remember ~~Fry's~~? ~~Circuit City~~? ~~CompUSA~~? ~~Good Guys~~? ~~Tower~~? ~~Computer City~~?"
Jesus Christ, content warning for that body count you crossed off at the end there.
Fuck. I miss all those shops. Can I get a R.I.P. for Babbages, Game Crazy (pre-hollywood buyout) and Software Etc... while we're at it?
No sense in not going totally dark here. Haha
Babbages, Software Etc., EB Games, and Funcoland all got absorbed into what is now Gamestop, but who knows how long they'll hold on.
Game releases this year have been super light, unless there are some major announcements coming up, it's not looking great for them. :(
Oh yeah man, GameStop was at the forefront of what the industry as a whole is doing now. Acquiring, consuming, shitting out a husk.
I'm of 2 minds with GameStop nowadays. On one hand, it's somewhat nice to still have a physical game store. On the other, it's fucking GameStop and all the baggage that comes with that.
I don't see much of a future for physical shops at this point. Especially with Best Buy, Walmart and Kroger phasing out retail space.
Soon we'll have nothing but digital and subscription and I guess we'll like it? I'll hold on to my dragons hoard of physical games as long as I can (thanks Game Crazy for employing new throughout high school) but it'll be painful the day I realize I'm no longer adding new stuff to it.
I don't know that I can forgive them for killing Think Geek. :(
As an avid Bawls drinker, I 100% agree with this sentiment.
You can still get Bawls if you travel to the US! In certain states. If the state has a Microcenter.
Aww man, good to know! I wish we had a microcenter nearby. Closest one is at least a state away.
Maybe they'll ship it. Haha
I remember software etc. They had a big event for the dreamcast being released. 9/9/99. I wore that free shirt with the date that I got there from playing sonic adventure for like 15 years
We had a pretty big event at Game Crazy. I think those shirts finally got retired after my kid grew out of them quite a few years ago.
I unfortunately... put them in the dryer to much throughout the years and they seem to have shrank. Yeah, that's what happened.
Tower Records was my cult. I miss that place the most.
We had one in Minneapolis at the Mall of America when it opened. It had a great selection but I was still partial to Cheapo, Northern Lights, and Positively 4th St. Cheapo is still around and I stop in there a few times a year. The other 2 closed down a long time ago -- possibly before MOA opened in the early 90's I think,
Went to the one in LA on a trip recently. Was awesome to see that much great music on one spot again.
It's wild that we probably won't see a return to those types of stores ever again. COVID really put the final nail in the coffin.
I only ever remember RadioShack selling prepaid phones, RC cars, and other consumer electronics, but apparently at one point in time they sold small-scale electronic components for hobbyists.
lol yeah, in the 90s you could go in there and buy a couple resistors, a couple capacitors, and a couple (expensive, crappy) LEDs
I can see how that didn’t work out for them though
They did indeed, and the Radio Shack in my town was one the last ones I ever saw to still sell individual components although the selection did shrink rapidly in the final years. The other locations around and about seemingly all turned into basically exclusively cell phone stores, right around the time the cell phone boom was happening. The problem with that: So was every other retailer on Earth, but most of those other retailers also had other product lines to fall back on. The inevitable tanking happened shortly thereafter.
There are somehow apparently still around 500 Radio Shack stores still operating, I believe all of which are privately owned. I have seen a couple in my travels, all of them located far out into the sticks in Appalachia and the Midwest, presumably all locations that are not served well by larger competitors or the internet.
I've been in one of the ones in the sticks in the Midwest that, at least five years ago, was still there and still sold some hobbyist electronics kits. I should have bought a couple, I need the soldering practice.
As well as the tools to go with them.
And almost every product or device you bought there had a schematic of the internal circuits printed in the manual that came in the box.
At one point it was a mecca for electronics tinkerers and hobbyists.
I still have a soldering iron and a couple spools on solder that I bought there way back in history.
Wonder if microcenter sells movies and tv shows. I don't buy stuff on Amazon anymore and try to buy stuff on ebay or local stores
Not to any meaningful degree. You're better off at Vintage Stock tbh
Can't think where I've seen any there, some software but not even really games since those have largely gone for distribution via Steam or similar.
The two I know of (Marietta, Madison Heights) never really did and I've been going there since the 90s.
Website only shows 9 games in stock at the Madison Heights store, lol.
They do not. But they are the best place to buy TVs IMHO.
I miss full-power circuit city, when it was dying a slow death it was kinda hard to watch.
That said, nothing I miss more than radioshack.
And the infuriating thing is you get to cross of CompUSA twice from your list, because after they tanked the first time they got bought by TigerDirect, the brand was resurrected, and then they tanked again.
At least we still have MicroCenter. For now.
BestBuy has always sucked, and the only reason I'd ever go there is if I'm really hard up for something and I'm willing to get fleeced for the convenience. That's it. They have:
But it's the only tech store in my area, aside from whatever Target or Walmart happens to have, so if I really need a SATA to USB cable or something, it's my only option for same day stuff.
So I'd be a little sad about them going out of business, but not overly so because they completely suck. I can count the things I've bought there on one hand, because the shopping experience is awful imo. I purchased tons of things at Fry's in the 2-ish years I lived near one and had money to spend. I prefer to buy at a brick and mortar (I spend a ton at Target), but BestBuy ain't it. If a Microcenter opened up near me, I'd do all my tech shopping there, but I refuse to shop at BestBuy.
The only time that I ended up going into Best Buy over just ordering something off of Amazon was when I found that they would price match an online Amazon retailer and was capable of buying something at nearly 65 to 70% off. But I was capable of having it directly delivered to a store where I didn't have to worry about some porch pirate taking off with something that had a general MSRP of like 1,500 bucks and was capable of walking in looking at an inspecting it and deciding whether or not I was actually going to take delivery of it cuz if it was damaged for the Box had been dropped or anything like that I was going to refuse it on the spot and tell them to get me another one which isn't something you can do when you order off of Amazon.
I also used them to price match a TV that was on Amazon that they still had sitting on the shop floor got it Hefty $50 off on that one but it wasn't anywhere near what I got off for the new amp/source that I ended up buying.