Huge multifamily development planned for Fry's Electronics Renton property, emails show

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

A Bay Area real estate development team earlier this year contacted city of Renton officials about building a large multifamily project on the site of Washington state's only Fry's Electronics store.

According to emails the Business Journal obtained through a public records request, an architect in the Seattle office of Carrier Johnson + Culture in May emailed a Renton city planner to say his firm had been awarded the job of designing an approximately 1,000-unit development on the 11.5-acre property at 800 Garden Ave. N., just east The Landing mixed-use development.

The developer, Campbell, California-based Bay West Development, has not yet responded to Business Journal inquiries. The architect, Conor Brown, declined to comment.

The move comes as Fry's appears to be struggling. In the last year, it closed stores in Palo Alto and Campbell, California, and there have been widespread reports of empty shelves at the big-box retailer's locations.

It was an eerie scene Monday when Christmas carols played at the Renton store with mostly bare shelves. The parking lot was almost empty and there were about a dozen customers inside around midday.

https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/news/2020/12/07/major-housing-project-planned-for-frys-property.html

Fry's was a bit of a candy store to tech geeks like myself. Sad to see it go.

[Ron Obvious]

1. Sad, but not surprising

It's looked moribund for two years with empty shelves, so nothing to do with Covid. Amazon more likely.

We used to drive down to Portland at least partly because of their Fry's (before Renton), and this will be the end of an era for us.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

2. Fry's was pretty cool 15 years ago. Unless, god forbid, you needed to return something.

[regnaD kciN]

5. Never had a problem returning products there...

[lapfog_1]

3. since 1989

I have been going to Fry's (sunnyvale) to buy parts to make my own "build" (like every two or three years... usually a FreeBSD or Linux build. It was so much fun doing visits every week or so to see the new mobo's / CPUs / memory etc and plan.

last few years.. no... like 5 years now since I did my own build. Laptops are the choice now... and online for other parts (external drives, wifi routers). And I usually go to BestBuy because they have a larger selection of flat panels to look at.

But the days of breadboard and bags of resistors and your own soldering iron.... long gone. I'll miss Frys.

I'll always remember those enormous checkout lines ( and 70+ check out stations at Christmas time. A Silicon Valley tradition!

[msongs]

4. never near a fry's but compusa served the same purpose nt

[SeattleVet]

6. The Renton Fry's has been a sort of ghost town for a while - at least 2 years.

Lots of empty shelves, and as their inventory shrank they were making barricades of the shelving to block off the empty spaces. The last couple of times I went there I was sorely disappointed at trying to find anything that I had on my list (mostly electronics component parts - they were one of the few places that *used* to have a decent stock, especially after Radio Shack decided that that they were going to be a cellphone store).

One of the last things I did buy (a new router) was a somewhat crappy experience. I shopped by myself, comparing the various models until I decided which one suited our needs, without any staff asking if we needed anything. I was on my way to the register with the box when I was chased down and intercepted by one of their floor workers, who pretty much demanded that I go back to the rear of the store with him so he could 'enter it into the system'. He fiddled with his terminal for a little bit, then gave me a printout showing that he was the salesperson that should get the credit for the sale. Pretty sleazy - since he had NOTHING to do with the actual sale...he was one of the two or three that had been hanging around chatting with each other while what as left of their customers fended for themselves.

At one point they were a pretty good place to find hard-to-find bits and pieces, and they actually had a very good selection of Macintosh systems and accessories. Over the past 3 years or so you could see that they were pretty much looking like Sears in their final days.