Shopping at Fry's electronics superstore

My cell phone was in the early phases of a death spiral.  Since it is the cheapest phone on the market, it can be a darned short & quick spiral.  Time for a trip to Renton where I could check out Fry's or get a new phone at Walmart.   As a matter of personal economic principles, I was not going to pay $50 to T-Mobile in Bellevue Square for a phone when they are $15 in Renton.

Web research found the phone I wanted for $15 at Walmart.  After a delicious lunch of General Tso's chicken with a Shawna. A trip to Renton in mid-afternoon was in order.  405 was full of cars with traffic moving at a brisk pace for the most part.  Fry's was on the way.  It is an electronic superstore of immense dimensions.  Fry's has a full page ad every day in the back of the Seattle Times sports section called gadget porn by the cognoscenti.   It has been several years since I looked at those ads.  Time for a trip to gadget porn land.

After a lap around the store looking at PC motherboards, CPUs, netbooks, laptops, external Blu-Ray drives and wi-fi routers, I was at the pre-paid phone stand.  There was the phone I wanted for $19.99.  It was not worth the drive across downtown Renton through the Walmart parking lot to save $4.  Shopping mission accomplished.  The customer service rep wandered over to chat me up.  We had a great conversation about coming wireless websurfing gadgets of the smart phone/tablet ilk.  I could have foregone the zit-popping while talking part, but it was a nice conversation.

Fry's has a great system for their cash register line.  It is one line feeding into up to 25 cash registers.  Today, there were 6 open registers and a wait of several minutes.  The line is a linear corral fenced in by impulse buys on both sides for 50 feet.  I got Cinnamon Altoids.

It was the fastest phone purchase ever.  Girl scanned the bar code, I swiped my credit card and I was done.  It takes at least 10 minutes to buy a phone at the T-Mobile store register.

I am grateful for my shopping choices and look forward to an fantastic year of new Armdroid* gadgets!

*In the PC days, Wintel was the acronym for Windows computers with InTel processors.  In the coming tablet era Armdroid stands for ARM chips running Google's Android Software—this will include smart phones and tablets.