Using electronics is fun. (See: Xbox) Buying electronics is not fun, though. I hate shopping in general, unless it involves trying on shoes or going to Sephora. I like to get in, find exactly what I’m looking for, and the the eff outta Dodge. There’s only a couple of options, really. You could shop online, but that makes returns and in store, side-by-side comparisons difficult if you don’t know exactly what you want. Really the only two places that are likely to have the things you need are the big box stores Best Buy and Fry’s.

Best Buy is well lit, clean, neatly organized, and the staff are generally well informed about their area of the store. For example, all Best Buy staff I’ve ever met in the video game section are hardcore gamers, and they share my pain when we talk about the Red Circle of Death, how Microsoft still sucks at designing stable hardware, and that if Halo were available on PlayStation, Sony would eat the Xbox for breakfast. Stuff is usually a pretty good price, and sale prices are awesome. Apart from the fact that the manager of every Best Buy store will murder the employees with laser cannons if they don’t ask you how you’re doing every 32.7 seconds, it’s not a bad place to shop. But they won’t have everything, and they won’t have individual components. You can buy a PC at Best Buy, but not very many PC parts.

Fry’s, on the other hand, sells everything and I mean everything from motherboards to lamps to porn on Blu-Ray. And it’s all cheap. But shopping at Fry’s is like getting an enema. You don’t want to go there, but you have to. So you just grit your teeth, clench your buttocks, and try to get it over with as quickly as possible. I had to go there today, and I still have that icky feeling deep down inside.

I’m not saying don’t shop there. I’m just saying educate yourself to the risks first.

Reasons to shop at Fry’s:

1. They have everything. Yes, everything. In one store.
2. There isn’t some jackass in a blue shirt by the front entrance saying “Welcome to Best Buy, I love you,” to every shopper who walks in the front door.
3. The prices are extremely good. There are generally no gimmicky sales, but you can very likely get the most competitive price on what you’re looking for at Fry’s.

Reasons not to shop at Fry’s (aka you get what you pay for):

1. The entire staff wears cheap, cheesy suits that make them look like used car salesmen.
2. The entire staff have no ability to communicate in the English language, even if English is their mother tongue.
3. Nobody on the entire staff knows anything about electronics. Some are only vaguely aware that they are working in an electronics store.
4. Every Fry’s is roughly the size of Tibet, and without your very own Sherpa your odds of escaping are slim. My local Fry’s is so big that it has a restaurant and showers in the bathroom because it takes at least a week to walk from one end to the other. Today I met a woman clad in a robe made from the discarded manuals of HD-DVD players who had set up camp at the base of a mountain of keyboard trays. She said that she’s been living there since 1996, surviving on beef jerky, Rock Star energy drinks, and the hope that one day she’ll be reunited with her WOW guild.
5. At Fry’s, the only apparent organization scheme they follow is to divide each kind of product evenly and randomly between every shelf on the store, guaranteeing that you must walk down every aisle to find what you want.
6. All the signs at Fry’s are about as big as a postcard and all of the price tags are printed in illegible pale gray robotext, so even a competent non-doofus still can’t find anything easily.
7. If you are stupid enough to ask for help, the sales person will drag you back to their station and make you stand there while they put all your items in a computer so they can get commission on it, wasting tons of your time.
8. Fry’s doesn’t trust its customers to wait in line unassisted. They actually pay some dope to stand at the head of the line and help you line up properly. You must then kneel to the gate keeper and kiss their pinkie ring before you are granted permission to walk to the next open register.
9. You get the KGB shakedown at the exit from an illiterate person who insists on checking every single item in your bag against your receipt. Nothing makes me feel better about a company than seeing that they are going to assume that I am a thief, yet they seem not to have heard of a simple device called a magnetic security strip which causes exit alarms to beep.