The Fry’s chain completely taps into MSE: Male Shopping Energy. This is to say that most guys have about 73 calories of shopping energy, and once these calories are gone, they’re gone for the day—if not the week—and can’t be regenerated simply by having an Orange Julius at the Food Fair.
Douglas Coupland, Microserfs.
The OG. The first Fry’s, before the empire, before the madness spread across the valley like some beautiful, doomed fever dream.
And they went Wild West with it.
Not ironically. Not in that winking, aren’t-we-clever way that makes you want to put your fist through drywall. They committed. Each location had its own thing, its own weird, ambitious theme park aesthetic… but this one? Saloon doors. Wooden facades. The whole cowboy fantasy, right there between the RAM modules and the HDMI cables.
It was absurd. It was perfect. It’s gone now, of course.