Fry's

I have had some pretty lousy experiences at Fry's over the years, but the kind folks at the Plano Fry's seemed determined to take the cake this afternoon. I had finally diagnosed the problem with my home theater PC today: bad power supply. So, I took off for Fry's, knowing exactly what I wanted and where in the store I wanted to go. In and out... I was not in the mood for browsing the aisles. I walked in, grabbed my power supply and two gigabit ethernet switches, and headed towards the checkout line.

Now, the checkout line at the Plano Fry's resembles the line for a ride at Six Flags more than your average retail store. It has switchbacks, is nearly half the width of the store (and this is a *very* large store), and merchandise lining both sides of the aisle. Today, they had all of the switchbacks open, and the line spilled out the back, nearly half of it sticking out of the normal area. Straightened out, this line would have gone around more than half of the store's outer wall.

Naturally, I didn't have a cart with me, so I was forced to carry my merchandise (power supplies aren't all that light) for nearly an hour waiting to check out. Apparently, their POS server was down or something... (Here, POS may stand for "Point of Sale" or something else, you decide)

You know... Fry's ran CompUSA out of business by giving people a better selection and offering competitive, up-to-date pricing. Someone else needs to run Fry's out of business by running a store that doesn't take a giant crap on the customer every third time he shops there.