Silicon Valley finally has a big electronics retailer again: Micro Center opens
157 comments
·May 30, 2025neilv
tapoxi
That store is dangerous. The last few times I went "just to browse" but I came home with an ultra wide monitor and a new PC build.
I've started buying parts retail instead of online just because of how much I enjoy Microcenter. The interior does need a bit of a renovation though, it looks almost identical to how it did in the 90s.
john01dav
90s anachronism is a perfectly valid aesthetic. I dislike the tendency to think that things must constantly be changed for purely aesthetic reasons. This tendency was intentionally created in order to sell more things -- look up the history of Ford and Alfred Sloan for details.
ancientorange
While maintaining the 90s vibe is commendable, the keyword is maintain. Cambridge and Cincinnati complement their 90s aesthetic with grime and stains also from the 90s.
ryao
If it is not broken, do not fix it. Renovations would cost money, which would mean higher prices. It is better to stick with what works than see prices rise to cover pointless renovations that would harm their competitiveness. The money is better spent on expansion that would pay for itself.
walterbell
> identical to how it did in the 90s
Are 1990s customers and their children in Microcenter target market?
Should the next Microcenter aesthetic be 2000s, 2010s, 2020s or 2090s?
mnky9800n
3090s.
khazhoux
> The last few times I went "just to browse" but I came home with an ultra wide monitor and a new PC build.
Wow, that sounds like a great day!
> The interior does need a bit of a renovation though, it looks almost identical to how it did in the 90s.
I think it would really bring me joy if I walked in and they were playing early 90s Beck, Soundgarden, Letters To Cleo...
mnky9800n
Dude don’t update it. Do you really want it to look like Best Buy? Because that’s the ad company they will hire to remake their brand. But it will be even more of that.
arprocter
>When they have the thing that I want, I'd prefer to go there, rather than order online.
Worth mentioning that they price match Amazon
I bought a CPU cooler there a few months back - the guy at checkout told me to pull up the Amazon listing on my phone so he could knock some cash off
https://community.microcenter.com/kb/articles/6-do-you-price...
3eb7988a1663
How is that possible? Amazon has to have lower overheads than a brick and mortar.
roughly
Amazon prices what they can get away with, not what their costs are. Jeff Bezos’s rocketry hobby is a testament to Amazon’s ability to extract surplus.
ryao
Stores often refuse to stock products unless they are given a comfortable enough margin on them that can be as high as 25%. That is how they can afford to do deals on CPUs to draw people into the store. Amazon also has overhead in shipping costs to customers that the brick and mortar store does not, since they receive goods in bulk that amortizes costs. They both also want as much money as they can get out of the customer, so they have little reason to lower pricing upfront unless they think that it will help them get even more money (like how microcenter cuts prices on CPUs since they expect to make it up on everything else you need to build a PC).
neilv
I don't recall ever asking for a price match at a brick&mortar, even though I'm aware it's available at some stores. I'd guess most people don't.
The store gets some mileage out of being known for price-matching competitors (even online competitors, where that'd be a bit much).
(Well, occasionally I have questioned in-store, when a major chain shows one price on the Web, available at a specific brick&mortar location, but when you get to that location, there's a much higher price on the shelf. Now I tend to order for pickup at those stores, which is more work for them, just to lock in the Web-advertised price, rather than the switcheroo price.)
neepi
Amazon pricing isn't always that good and they lie about the discounts and retail prices, at least here in the UK. My US colleagues tell me the same is true in the US. I've actually found that general high street crap seller Argos here tends to have better retail prices than Amazon. I can just amble on down the road and get what I needed same day pick up in person rather than wait for a delivery to turn up.
kadoban
If every person price matched every item, they'd be screwed, but: most people don't, many items just can't be, and if eg you're price matching a $20 cpu cooler, you may also be buying a $500 cpu or a bunch of other components that they'll actually make money on.
fzzzy
They hope you'll buy a soda and a magazine or whatever. They always try to upsell protection plans.
Spooky23
Not anymore. That massive logistics network and in house courier ain’t cheap.
walterbell
Best Buy will price match competitor websites and printed ads, via online chat, for online delivery or in-store pickup.
vjulian
Oh God. I wish the sales clerks would leave me alone. They’re always trying to put their sticker on purchases and proffer useless advice. Still, it’s the best in the area, and the Trader Joe’s is a draw. I bought my first computer, an Apple //gs at Micro Center at their original, single location.
erkt
Just ask for their sticker and promise you will put it on your purchase. If another approaches just show them the sticker, they get it.
geerlingguy
St. Louis? Or do other locations also pop up near Trader Joe's?
jmlim00
One in Cambridge also happens to be next to the Trader Joe's. I'm starting to see a pattern here..
behringer
They're not there for you, they're there for your grandma. They also get paid terribly, let them put their little stickers on. You never know when they might return the favor.
fuzzfactor
Oh yes. I'm strongly in favor of having a sticker on everything and want these salespeople to get credit for every purchase even when I know exactly what I want.
Regardless if they gave me any help during that particular visit or not.
don-code
I was literally just there an hour ago, buying $800 worth of gear for a Wi-Fi mesh buildout.
Could I have gotten it cheaper online? Probably. But when you have 36 hours notice that you need to build out Wi-Fi, you can't beat Micro Center.
bitwize
A company I worked for provisioned all its software dev machines from Micro Center. That's how I'd heard of it.
syntheticnature
Not quite the same as storefront surplus, but: https://w1mx.mit.edu/flea-at-mit/
stutstev
Considering New Hampshire’s lack of sales tax, I’m patiently waiting for Micro Center to establish a new presence in Nashua or Salem. The Cambridge location, while personally cherished, isn’t that accessible by car because of Boston’s stress-induced car traffic congestion. Even on foot, getting to the store is still a bit of a journey. Also, let’s not forget Massachusetts’ 6.25% sales tax.
In New Hampshire, I am positive Micro Center would attract customers from all over New England and make an absolute killing from sales, potentially overshadowing their Cambridge profits. I would never shop online or in Cambridge for hardware again. But, I’m sure they wish not to jeopardize the Cambridge store or their MIT and Boston tech hobbyist clientele. Otherwise, I am surprised they have not yet acted upon this idea.
But, a man can dream!
sfilmeyer
Comments like this remind me I might be the only person in Massachusetts honestly calculating my use tax for my tax return every year.
seattle_spring
Probably one of the only people in the country.
Spooky23
My favorite store like this is the Apple Store in the pheasant Lane mall - the parking lot is in Massachusetts, stores are in NH.
lotsofpulp
Google maps says Salem is 40min+ from Cambridge, and Nashua is 50min+ from Cambridge, and add another 10min to 20min from other parts of Boston.
Each minute of driving costs at least $0.67 (from IRS), excluding increased morbidity and mortality risks (injury from car collisions is the top health risk for most Americans).
So even using $0.50 per minute of driving, if you are only going to NH to evade sales tax, that is 80min*$0.50cents = $40. $40/0.0625 =$640.
So the first $640 of the purchase doesn't even save you any money (even more for most Bostonians further than Cambridge), and it costs you 1 to 2 hours of your life driving back and forth. If you value your leisure time at at least $100 per hour, then you're looking at spending at least $2,200 for the tax evasion to start paying off.
I'm just positing why Microcenter will not open a NH location anytime soon, because most of its customers (who are in Boston metro) won't find that it pays off to travel to NH.
slumberlust
Tax free weekends exist in MA as well, yet a lot of people still travel across the state line to buy tax free items like booze.
It's not always logical, but sometimes you find yourself outside of the city or heading north to be wilderness and the value prop changes if you're already heading that way.
I agree that MC won't open one here, as we can't even get an IKEA closer than Stoughton.
modeless
It's been more than four years since Fry's closed. I can't believe it took this long to get something better than Best Buy and bigger than Central Computers, in the middle of Silicon Valley of all places!
Hizonner
I get the feeling the real Fry's died long before that. It seemed like it was going downhill when I left the area about 18 years ago. Less parts, less tools, less test equipment, more packaged gadgets.
hakfoo
TBH, I've been hoping they make a Wolf of Wall Street style movie about the store. There was obviously kooky stuff going on business wise, and that means there could be an entertaining story.
toast0
I think a lot of that was following what sold. If nobody is buying these things at Fry's, it doesn't make sense for them to stock them.
IMHO, there was a drop in good deals around the time they got rid of the purchaser who was doing the embezzleing (2008), and also new stores started opening with 'boring corporate store' theme ('new' sunnyvale store, vegas). If I'm gonna be at a boring corporate store and not getting good deals, why bother?
Then there was the year? or so of circling the drain when there was some sort of credit problem and they tried to switch from owning inventory to a consignment model and most of their vendors weren't interested so they had no inventory.
tgma
Fry's had an interesting vibe and felt you time traveled to the 90s, but my gosh they were so weird. They searched your bag on the way out. Microcenter is a godsend although it'll be hard to beat B&H with Payboo card.
tecleandor
I only use B&H site for checking general prices or reviews, as they won't stop discriminating people.
A discrimination lawsuit almost every year since 2009.
https://www.thephoblographer.com/2024/07/09/bh-photo-lawsuit...
NelsonMinar
Yeah Fry's was pretty awful.
awful
Agreed; went into Fry's, off Lawrence?, just before it closed. Visited area on and off again over the years since. Central Computer did seem to have what I needed for that moment, but the area seemed barren, was simply not the same, and especially after experiencing Fry's, Weird Stuff, Halted?, Anchor, Computer Literacy, et al. in the late 1980s and 90s.
ts4z
Hear hear. I guess we still have Anchor.
mosdl
We had a Microcenter that closed in 2012, took them that long to return.
Animats
I've been happy with Central Computer. Three machines and two repairs in ten years.
delfinom
PC hardware is a competitive and margin tight business, especially due to online sales. At the same time, the inventory can be very expensive on the books. It makes the calculus for viability of a physical store quite challenging. It's why Microcenter has relatively few stores for the US.
dylan604
Who in Silicon Valley uses actual computers and not something in the cloud? Do any start ups use actual hardware that you'd get at some place like MicroCenter? Don't they just get handed shiny new Apple hardware (something from HP/Dell if they're on a budget) to interface with the cloud?
vladgur
Youre not wrong.
I have a pc with 24GB 3090 card capable of running LLMs locally, but our electricity costs make API calls much more reasonable.
Even gaming -- streaming geforce now is cheaper than ammortizing cost of power + hardware over time
john01dav
For my personal use, I'll take the hit in cost for the additional control that owning the hardware gives me. Even less restrictive things like blocking sideloading are unacceptable to me.
jzer0cool
Cost break down please
tdeck
I think many of the employees have gaming rigs at home and would buy parts there.
Nextgrid
You'd be surprised by how many "tech" people have no clue on about how to build a rig, nor have any willingness to learn.
dimator
The store has lots of other tech enthusiast stuff, like a huge selection of 3D printers.
geerlingguy
And a full aisle of electronics / hobbyist gear, including decent soldering stations, fluke gear, tons of components, and a good smattering of SparkFun and Adafruit's catalog.
nickthegreek
They have great small business machines and more importantly, everything you need without waiting for amazon. Their in-house prebuilt brand PowerSpec have great prices for the hardware and work nicely whether you go for a gaming version or office build.
kanbara
silicon valley-ite here: we have normal gaming machines and linux boxen too …
Braxton1980
I'm lucky to be about 10 mins away from the one in Westchester NY.
They have a dedicated asile to custom water cooling items which shows how serious they are about enthusiasts.
I used to order my new set ups on Newegg but now I just got to Microcenter
stevenwoo
Newegg has deteriorated in my experience and now not materially different from Amazon, with wrong items shipped and multiple dropshippers commingling inventory so provenance of stuff is questionable. Do not recommend.
somat
It is a shame.
I think the tipping point was newegg the store vs newegg the marketplace.
Newegg "the store" was pretty great, newegg "the marketplace" not so much. And unlike amazon at least newegg tells you who the seller is and keeps a big "only show results from the newegg store" filter present. but even despite that the store is not nearly as great as it once was.
I wonder if there is anything left of amazon "the store", perhaps if you buy a book? Or has amazon "the marketplace" consumed everything.
bradfa
Totally agree. 20ish years ago Newegg was my one stop for computing purchases online. Now I just use it to gauge pricing as I find their search and filtering to still be the best.
Most of my online computing purchases now come from B&H in New York City. Super fast shipping and I’ve never had a bad order experience.
raisedbyninjas
Newegg was purchased by a Chinese investment firm about 10 years ago. It's like Walmart.com reseller marketplace over there ever since. I definitely visit my local Microcenter when they have it in stock. They also have a "one time use" coupon for $10 3d printer filament.
dpiers
Amazon has surpassed Newegg as my online parts provider of choice.
It's not that things can't go wrong, it's just that they are much better at handling it than Newegg these days.
nvllsvm
Same for me and the Wayne, PA store. Prices are competitive and they're one of the few places I know that carries Bawls energy drinks.
epoxyhockey
The store had pre-opening for the past 2 days. I drove by on Wednesday and the parking lot was completely full with folks parking across the street and walking over. I thought I would be able to stroll in and get the free USB drive but ended up not able to visit yet. Talk about pent up demand!
sm_1024
Interesting part is they have actually been open for a week now. They did a quiet opening on the 25th and it was still busy that day
uqual
It's good to finally have something "between" Best Buy and Central Computer (et al) back in the SV after Fry's died its slow and painful death as the previous Micro Center in Santa Clara closed.
Unfortunately this new one is in the same shopping center as Harbor Freight and it's close to where I live - this could get expensive... Mean to shop at one, end up shopping at both...
The lines on the "insider" opening day 5/28 were pretty long - I waited about an hour in line just to get into the store and the checkout line was over an hour long.
However, based on my purchases that day, I fear they will be unpleasant to shop at - even when busy, they were annoyingly upselling extended warranties. The sales associate on the floor tried to sell me on a plan for a laptop I bought and then, while there were hundreds of people waiting to checkout, the cashier spent time doing so AGAIN. Both were just following their mandated scripts and were at least nice about it all. They apparently also have some sort of rule that the customer buying something like a laptop also needs to "meet" with the sales associate's manager/supervisor - which was a completely useless awkward perfunctory handshake (and the customer survey asked if this meeting had happened so it appears to be an annoying institutional rule).
arcanemachiner
> the customer survey asked if this meeting had happened so it appears to be an annoying institutional rule
Whenever I get a survey that asks dumb questions like that, I just answer "yes" so that the employees don't get harassed for not asking those dumb questions to me in person.
"Were you warmly welcomed by a team member?" You bet I was!
"Did one of our team members tell you about our partnership with the Heart and Stroke Foundation?" Sure, why not?
vunderba
There's a great parody of the whole customer satisfaction thing on a very underrated comedy series called "Corporate". Five out of five!
vunderba
I used to love visiting the Microcenter near our family home back in the early 90s. In those halcyon days, they had a exceptionally LIBERAL return policy - 30 days even on opened software. (the L.L. Bean of electronics).
As a child whose modest income was derived solely from weekly lawn mowing, needless to say I coincidentally became quite accomplished at beating PC games within a month's time.
In defense of my somewhat dubious behavior, I did go back as an older teenager with far more disposable income and purchase a ton of big-box PC games from them. Most of which I still have including one of my all-time favorite RPGs, Betrayal at Krondor.
walterbell
Fry's Electronics discussion threads
"Demolishing the Fry's Electronics in Burbank", 100 comments (2025), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43677862
"Fry's Electronics is closing all stores", 300 comments (2021), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26246435
"Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?", 350 comments (2020), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945492
"The Fry's Era", 150 comments (2019), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20853834
Electronics Surplus Stores
"Sundown for Surplus" (2018), https://www.eham.net/article/41444
"End of an Era: Weird Stuff Warehouse closed" (2018), https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/04/08/sjm-l-weirdstuff-0408...
roughly
> “Fry's Electronics is closing all stores", 300 comments (2021), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26246435
> "Is Fry’s Electronics in trouble?", 350 comments (2020), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21945492
This made me chuckle. Betteridge’s law is more of what you’d call a guideline than a rule.
mcbuckeye
I got my first computer, an Apple ][+, at the original Micro Center store in Upper Arlington (Columbus), Ohio.
The store was tiny and then grew over time to be huge. I live in NJ now and they have a store about 40 minutes away from me. I'm surprised they are still around given e-commerce and all the other stores that have collapsed. Happy they are--it's always fun to walk through the store like in the good old days and see what you can find.
kevinsync
Yup, I go in the Columbus store semi-frequently -- have since the mid-90's. They've kept up with the times so it's a little less "smells like nerd" (which bums me out), but they are very competent, very good on price, and sometimes it's just NICE to zip up 315 to get something instead of hitting Amazon or Ebay.
In comparison, Best Buy is a disaster lol; I hadn't been since Obama was in office, needed to buy a new tv, and it felt more like "electronics" Value City Furniture crossed with TJ Maxx than anything that came before it (Sun TV, Incredible Universe, etc).
At least at Micro Center you can expect a disheveled-yet-tucked-Oxford salesperson to come bother you until you say "I'm good, just put your sticker on the stuff I'm gonna buy" rather than some burned-out retail drone in a blue polo who tries to hard-sell you on a sound bar you didn't ask for!
mnky9800n
I wonder if it will include an old bin with unopened copies of dark forces Jedi knight and other old stuff that just never sold all the copies for sale in a discount bin. The Microcenter in Atlanta was a treasure of old software that you had to have at some point in the past.
monksy
It's amazing for the area that claims it's the tech center didn't have a microcenter until now. I like having a microcenter in Chicago.
dehrmann
They had one in Santa Clara in or near the Mercado shopping center until around 2012.
pss314
Per this reddit post, at the Santa Clara location there were some 5090 GPU retail boxes filled with crossbody backpacks instead of the GPU. Microcenter did eventually track this to a particular supplier.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Microcenter/comments/1kymzcd/update...
mtlmtlmtlmtl
Am I the only one amused that nVidia flagship GPUs are now so large that you can fit 3 backbacks inside their packaging?
bschwindHN
I got into electronics around 2016, right around when I was visiting my hometown from living abroad. There's been a Micro Center there for years and I ended up spending hours there looking at all the ESP8266 boards they had there, along with the various supplies of Arduinos and Adafruit boards. Pretty "recent" in terms of electronics tech, but somehow this is already close to 10 years ago :c
The Micro Center in Cambridge, MA, has improved a lot over the years.
When they have the thing that I want, I'd prefer to go there, rather than order online.
Also, I've never seen opened returns re-shinkwrapped and sold again as new at Micro Center, unlike in stories about Fry's. There are some wire shelves where opened returns are sold at a small discount, clearly labeled.
Incidentally, would be nice to also have a good surplus and e-cycling store browsing adventure in town. But I guess the economics are difficult, when real estate is so expensive, and most of the few customers for unusual stuff are online. (That local hobbyists could save a lot of money on shipping cost of decommissioned corporate and lab gear, or make impulse purchases they wouldn't online, probably isn't enough, I'd guess.)