Fry's Electronics Purchased Expensive Back-up drive as new but was actually a returned item that was unmarked as returned. Fountain Valley California

Your experience is not unusual. For many years, Fry's has had a habit of putting returned items right back on the shelf. One of their employees even showed me the shrinkwrapping machine they have in the back, in order to make the boxes appear to be unopened.

I'm not sure what the rationale is behind this practice, other than hoping that eventually someone who buys the item will not bother to return it.

My company's IT department quit buying items at Fry's because of this practice. The last time we bought there we picked up 32 Ethernet NICs for our computers. About 1/2 of them had obviously been opened before (torn internal wrapping, poorly folded manuals, unsealed discs), and 10 of them were non-functional. It's just not worth bothering with them if you need something that will work the first time.

The most common complaint I hear from friends that still shop there is that the stuff they buy has obviously been opened before, and they get a lot of merchandise that is Dead On Arrival.