Tonight I went to Fry's in Burbank, CA to buy a Western Digital External Hard Drive. I got to the store and rack upon rack were empty. I'm going throughout the whole store and noticing that entire aisles are totally empty. I'm having trouble finding the External Hard Drives. Ask an employee, and he tells me the aisle. Empty aisle. Look around more. Find bins of cords once overflowing a year ago completely empty and think to myself, "wow if you were a component guy, you'd be screwed with that much out." Finally find a guy in the hard drive section and asked if they had the Western Digital Hard Drive. He said they didn't. Then I asked to see the External Hard Drives they did have. "We don't currently have any external hard drives in stock." "When will you?" "I don't know."
Okay, if you're a computer store and a customer goes in to buy an external hard drive, and you are stocking none, there is a big, big, big problem. You're not carrying an entire major product category in your store at the moment? I mean it is one thing to have scant store shelves, its another thing to be sold out and totally missing entire categories of products. The area that once held external hard drives is completely empty of everything such that it never appeared they ever carried them, when this is the store I usually buy my hard drives from.
I would have bought any discount larger external hard drive tonight. They're essentially a zombie store right now. I mean the stock at the store was already as bad as you encounter several weeks into a going out of business sale.
There is no way I can see that you can turn around half your store inventory