Back in the 90s, I would go into my local Egghead software store almost every weekend.

Oh I’m glad this popped up. I was trying to remember the details of a computer store I remembered visiting with my dad when I was maybe 4 or 5, ‘93-‘94, Chicago.

But as soon as I read it all came back and I’m certain this was it. I tried looking but couldn’t find out: does anyone know if there was an Egghead in Chicago at that time? Based on what I could discern about their stores is that seems likely there would have been one there.

Thanks for this. Browsing the latest sierra, microprose, etc games at the local egghead store was my absolute favorite thing to do as a kid. It was in a strip mall next to an actual mall, so my parents would get me to go along on shopping trips as long as we could swing by the egghead to see what was new on the way home.

I (my parents) got my copy of X-Wing from our local Egghead in the 90s. And Lemmings! I loved browsing that store as a kid.

See also Electronics Boutique, which eventually got eaten by GameStop.

I bought all my software as a kid at egghead! They treated me like any other customer, whether I asked for a video game or a copy of windows NT server. I miss shopping at stores for electronics, it’s not the same browsing online.

I bought my first 40MB HDD card from an Egghead, in Boston, MA, on the same day I visited the Computer Museum ~1989 on a visit from the UK. I think the dollar-to-pound was 2:1 at the time and made it pretty reasonable.

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.

I worked at Egghead when they closed the stores. We all thought they were crazy. The stores got so many visitors. And all of us were super into tech, and had never bought anything online at that point.