This morning I went with a pal to Fry’s Electronics in Santa Clara to take advantage of a pretty serious sale. A pack of glossy photo paper, usually $3.99, only 99 cents, with two brands on sale so I could get two instead of just one. A 64MB USB Flash drive, regularly $49.99, marked down to $39.99, and with a $35.00 mail in rebate, for a final price of $4.99. My pal wanted two of the 512MB DDR RAM that was on special for $84.99, so I bought one for him, and he also scooped up a 80GB hard disk for $49.95. I can’t add any more RAM or disk to this laptop (than it already has) so I skipped those values.
Very cool. But you would not have believed the line! We thought going early might minimize this, but the parking lot was nearly full when we pulled in around 9:20. People had to line up to get the Flash drives and memory but there was one line, all the way to one side, that most people didn’t see and we did, so that didn’t take long. Walked across the store to get the glossy paper. Altogether about 10 minutes.
Then I saw a line of people and wondered what great deal had so many people waiting for it. I asked someone and he said, “Oh, this is the checkout line.” Now, you have to understand we were probably a couple of hundred feet away from the normal entrance to the checkout counter. We started walking back along the line, it turned up an aisle and I thought that was the end. Um, nope! Keep going. All the way to the far side of the store–and Fry’s is not a small store–to find the last person.
A day like today is when you finally realize why the store has 60 cash registers. Because there were probably 400-600 people in front of us on that line. Yet it was always moving and in the end we probably got to a cashier in maybe 30-35 minutes. Where we ran into another bottleneck, that took almost 15 minutes to resolve, caused by nearly everyone wanting one of the USB Flash drives. Finally signed the charge slip and left at 10:40. Time for coffee.
Some people like shopping at Fry’s and some don’t, claiming the prices are no longer the bargains they used to be, but you have to give them a lot of credit for knowing how to handle sale crowds. Most stores wouldn’t come close to moving such a crowd through in anywhere near that little time. Now to mail in for that rebate.
BillSaysThis 