Comment by burnt-resistor

This article dances around it superficially. My last high school job ended up working there as a sales associate and packing up of one of the stores. Just months sooner, Zip drives were selling like crazy. Really though, CompUSA and Fry's Electronics most directly killed them. EH had too many locations and they were too small. They weren't even 2000 sq ft, more like 1200-1500.

Interestingly, the store manager had a policy that any software that wasn't sealed in the box internally could be borrowed. All software of that era came on CD's and floppies in shrink wrapped cardboard boxes, and there was a shrink wrap machine and heatgun in the back room.

Also Not For Resale (NFR) copies were awesome. Like $10-30 for products that costed $50-1000 (in 1996 USD).

While local SV stores like NCA Peripherals also didn't survive because there were too many tiny and medium-sized hardware-focused stores. In the mid 80's and early 90's there were zillions of tiny, PC hardware stores in strip malls in SV similar to but more spread out than Huaqiangbei. Curiously though, Central Computer Systems were large and diversified enough with servers, networking, PC parts, and software, to survive. Micro Center also. Fry's, CompUSA, RadioShack, and CircuitCity weren't sufficiently adept at competing online when Amazon and such killed them off in turn, only BestBuy made it through so far.