This is rather off-topic, but the only thing that saddens me about Best Buy is that it just doesn't feel the same walking in as it used to.
I remember when I got my first job, at age 14, in 1998. I cut, baled, loaded, hauled, and stacked hay in a barn for a local farmer. It was extremely hot and tiring work for an overweight geek, but it paid better than anything else I could have gotten at that age - I was paid by the bale and I want to say it worked out to about $6 / hour. I saved all summer with nothing in mind other than "I want to buy a cool tech gadget!"
At the end of that summer I convinced my grandfather to drive me ~90 miles to the nearest Best Buy, and walking in that day was the best feeling in the world - a whole store full of cool toys that I didn't have! I walked out that day with one of the first MP3 players, a Diamond Rio PMP300, and a 32MB SmartMedia card. I spent about $350 on them, which my family thought was absurd.
I proceeded to go home and fill it with songs I downloaded from UseNet, and took it to school. I went to a rural school, and I don't think anyone had a clue what it was - several people asked me if it was a MiniDisc player. I explained to them what an "MP3" was.
I wish I could recapture the feeling of walking into Best Buy in the 90s. These days I have pretty much every tech item I want, and there are very few things there that can hold my interest. It makes me a little bit sad to walk through the doors and not be excited about what I'll find. It's pretty much the very definition of a First World Problem, but it is what it is.
Back then, I wasn't really wanting "toys" as much as I was thirsting for knowledge and fields to explore. That little MP3 player introduced me to UseNet, then Napster, and finally Gnutella. It ended up being a pretty big part of what got me interested in technology in general and development in particular - I went from "Hey, this is cool, free music!" to "Hmm... LimeWire is open source, I wonder if I can figure out how to fix this bug..." over the few years following.
Ultimately, it led me to my career. I wouldn't quite go so far as to credit Best Buy with that, but it's fair to say that the store contributed a great deal to building my interest in a technology.
I think that's just the process of getting old. I'm 32 and remember fondly the 90s-00s when I discovered the internet, bought my first iPod at like 400$ cad (lol), but these days I find that I'm losing my interest in tech, especially gadgets. I love well crafted products, don't get be wrong, but I guess I lost the fascination with technology.
It's probably because I'm seeing more and more the problems it creates, like adiction to smartphones or unsecured gadgets with back doors (smartTVs, IoT devices, etc).
We're the same age and this was exactly how I felt going to CompUSA in the late 90s. My first big purchase was spending $85 on a 32mb SIMM module for my Pentium 1 system (maybe it was 2 16mb, I can't remember if they needed to be installed in pairs, maybe that was only ECC?). I would ogle the DVD burners and SCSI cards but couldn't afford either.
And then you discovered that there were online vendors who sold that same stick of RAM for $22 + S/H.
Back in those days, the price difference between stores and online/mail-order vendors was enormous. Mostly because the customer populations didn't overlap much, so they could get away with it. Also, the cost of shipping usually canceled out any cost/benefit with smaller items.
I was still much too naive about online orders back then. But you reminded me of the "rebates" fiasco. Remember those days? I once got my rebate rejected because I sent the original receipt and not a photocopy.
I worked at a CompUSA in college. Rebate rage was an incredible phenomena... I had a knife pulled on me once because of it in a return situation.
There was one crazy Packard Bell/AOL/Viewsonic rebate combo that was like $600. It had specific instructions that many people screwed up, and they were left with unreturnable (no bar code) crap gear. One guy got arrested for chaining himself to the bollards in front of the door in protest.
The amount of fraud these guys ran into was incredible too. We’d get raided by bus loads of Chinese people who would engage every employee while another crew cleaned out things like video cards and other small items. It was like a Viking raid. People would buy computers, print fake UPC/serial number stickers for rebates, strip the memory/disk and return them.
Yeah. I've always been obsessed with music, and what I miss about Best Buy circa 1998 is walking into a sea of CDs with $20 and likely leaving with 2 new CDs. I never understood how the mall music stores worked, like Tower Records or Sam Goody, because their CDs were always like $18.
I don't know if all Best Buy locations were like this, but for seemingly every artist that was signed to a label, they had their full discography + singles with amazing b-sides + even imports from Japan (imports cost like $20 though). Just aisle after aisle, so much music to buy and making really hard decisions about what's going to fit in my budget.
It what's I imagine a candy store is to a 6 year old.
I still sort of get this feeling going into Micro Center. They still have a ton of in-store inventory and cool stuff like electronics components and prosumer networking gear that you'd otherwise have to order online these days.
I feel like the main difference is not that the Best Buy stores have changed that much, it's more the dissemination of information has shifted so that the internet is where people are now discovering new products and toys. But I agree, I too have very fond memories of exploring the electronics section of stores.
I had a very similar experience, replace baling hay with mowing lawns. I was an awkward shy homeschool kid but going into circuit city and getting that 32mb mp3 player on Black Friday made me feel like the coolest kid in the world.
I suspect the recording were either much smaller (Let's call it 30 songs which seems insane still if compared to an ipod but it wouldn't exist for several years.) or there was audiophile quality hardware in it in which case carrying 1 album HiFi wasn't too bad. You could change it out after school the day you get bored of it.
I remember when I got my first job, at age 14, in 1998. I cut, baled, loaded, hauled, and stacked hay in a barn for a local farmer. It was extremely hot and tiring work for an overweight geek, but it paid better than anything else I could have gotten at that age - I was paid by the bale and I want to say it worked out to about $6 / hour. I saved all summer with nothing in mind other than "I want to buy a cool tech gadget!"
At the end of that summer I convinced my grandfather to drive me ~90 miles to the nearest Best Buy, and walking in that day was the best feeling in the world - a whole store full of cool toys that I didn't have! I walked out that day with one of the first MP3 players, a Diamond Rio PMP300, and a 32MB SmartMedia card. I spent about $350 on them, which my family thought was absurd.
I proceeded to go home and fill it with songs I downloaded from UseNet, and took it to school. I went to a rural school, and I don't think anyone had a clue what it was - several people asked me if it was a MiniDisc player. I explained to them what an "MP3" was.
I wish I could recapture the feeling of walking into Best Buy in the 90s. These days I have pretty much every tech item I want, and there are very few things there that can hold my interest. It makes me a little bit sad to walk through the doors and not be excited about what I'll find. It's pretty much the very definition of a First World Problem, but it is what it is.
Back then, I wasn't really wanting "toys" as much as I was thirsting for knowledge and fields to explore. That little MP3 player introduced me to UseNet, then Napster, and finally Gnutella. It ended up being a pretty big part of what got me interested in technology in general and development in particular - I went from "Hey, this is cool, free music!" to "Hmm... LimeWire is open source, I wonder if I can figure out how to fix this bug..." over the few years following.
Ultimately, it led me to my career. I wouldn't quite go so far as to credit Best Buy with that, but it's fair to say that the store contributed a great deal to building my interest in a technology.