1996 was my first year of managing my own store. In the very first weeks of business, in came this little gem, Japanese import, never seen it before.
The band featured Iron Maiden’s former guitarist, Dennis Stratton. Dennis of course played on the first immortal Maiden platter and a few B-sides too. The album featured one great single, “Die For Love”, which had one of the cheesiest music videos of all time. Band must rescue blonde damsel in distress from horny-looking mad scientist.
It’s actually a really cool song, very commercial but solid and I’d been hunting for it for years. Yet another treasure that fell into my lap. Japanese import, $20 used, but with my discount more like $15.
Still, I ended up passing on it. I only really liked the one song, and I had other stuff to buy that week including the new Scorpions and King’s X. So, I made a judgement call and threw it on the shelves. I put a sticker on it that said “Dennis Stratton ex-Iron Maiden” and it sold in a couple weeks. It was after it sold that I regretted my decision! I didn’t realize how rare the disc was, and I underestimated how much I liked that one song!
Thankfully it’s since been reissued. Still, wouldn’t it have been nice to have that Japanese import? Yeah.
One of the perks to working at a record store was taking first crack at anything that came into the store. Frequently, people who worked other record stores would sell us their promos, and often we’d happily buy them, especially when they preceded the actual album.
In spring 1997, Blue Rodeo released their next album, Tremolo. Some guy from another chain sold us a promo copy several weeks before its release date. Me being a big Blue Rodeo fan, I made sure we snagged it. We couldn’t really sell promos on the shelves, but I knew several people who’d want a copy, if I didn’t take it myself. It was just a simple black and white sleeve, so I didn’t offer much for it.
I eaglerly put it into the player. Their last album, the experimental Nowhere To Here, was a hard one to love but it became one of my favourites. I was surprised to hear that Tremolo was nothing like it. I gave it a couple spins in store but it wasn’t doing anything for me. Nah, I could live without it, I thought, at least until the original release. Then I’ll try ‘er again.
I called up Bethany, one of our best customers, and massive Blue Rodeo fan. She came in immediately to pick it up. Even though us record store guys usually prefer an official release to a promo, Bethany preferred the promo. Not only was it weeks in advance and cheaper, she considered it to be a collector’s item, so it worked out for everyone!
Eventually the real thing came out, and when a cheap used one came in, I bought it and took it home. It still didn’t click. It took several months to really grow on me, but by winter it finally had. Like an onion, I had peeled the layers and uncovered the beauty within. Tremolo, like Nowhere To Here, was far from immediate for me. Its acoustics and almost complete lack of anything electric or uptempo had thrown me for a loop. But somehow during that laid back winter of ’98, Tremolo and I saw I to eye, and we have been companions ever since.
Lesson: Albums must always be listened to over time, in different contexts, before abandoning!
We used to have piles and piles of CDs, stacked on a unit behind the counter. Due to lack of space, this is where we put stock that was:
1. on hold for staff
2. on hold for customers
3. being sent elsewhere for customer orders
Unfortunately these stacks were visible to customers, although not available for sale to the general public. Sometimes you’d have a situation like this:
“Cool! I can see OK Computer by Radiohead! Is that for sale?”
And it wasn’t, which you’d explain. If the CD was on hold for someone, they’d often ask how long it was on hold for so they could be next in line, provided the other person didn’t pick it up.
When stuff was on hold for staff (who usualy snagged the best stuff and held it for longer periods of time) I didn’t like the customers seeing it. But we didn’t really have anywhere better to put it. I proposed putting it in the back room but that didn’t last long. So what we’d do is disguise it in some way. Instead of having a pile labeled “Mike”, we’d change the name. It sometimes threw the customers off the scent.
At one point, I had all the staff hold piles named after Canadian cities. That way looked like stuff that was ordered by other stores. So for example, we’d have a pile labeled “London” which would be a pile of stuff destined for that store. Next to it was a pile labeled “Saskatoon”. We didn’t have a store in Saskatoon, Saskatoon was a staff member’s pile. We didn’t have stores in Yellowknife or Winnipeg either, but those labels threw customers off the scent. They’d assume the stock was there for another store.
I liked this system, but the staff often preferred nicknames on the labels. Some people liked their nicknames, some people didn’t. There was a girl named Meredith — she really hated being caled Megadeth, for example (I assume that’s true of most Merediths out there). I hated being called Cheeser — so named because I liked what other people refer to as “cheese metal” (although I think Zakk Wylde would be happy to punch somebody in the face for calling his music cheese metal).
Later on, someone had all the piles named after Family Guy characters. At the time, I’d never seen an episode in my life, and I didn’t know it was a bad thing that my nickname was Quagmire! Joke was on me I guess!
The Bargain Bin was where we sold our overstock — discs we had three or more copies of — at $5.99 per disc. Which was cheap by 1996 prices. New discs went from $16.99 to $24.99 at the time.
I think it was Trev who made the sign for the Bargain Bin. Trevor was the resident sign-maker because he had some artistic ability, where my boss couldn’t read my handwriting let alone my signs. It was originally called the “Bin O’ Bargains”. It was a big red sign, and it looked something like this:
Bin ‘O Bargains. But yet 90% of customers couldn’t read it. They would always say, “What’s in your Bin Bargains?”
“Bin Bargains”? That doesn’t even make sense!
The Bin O’ Bargains, as mentioned, was a hodgepodge of overstock. Any type of music was fair game, from Alan Jackson to Hammer to Lionel Richie to Hole to the Pumpkins. $5.99 each. We later lowered this, but at the start everything in there was basically the same price. We figured, that was simplest.
Simple to us, but not to everyone else. The Bin O’ Bargains created many questions and problems for both customers and staff! I mentioned that it was for stuff we had three or more copies of. That’s an oversimplification of things, but there were also things that we’d NEVER throw in the bargain bin. For example, if by some weird coincidence, we had four copies of a Queen album: Staff would think maybe, “OK, that’s plenty of copies, I’ll put this copy of The Miracle in the Bin.”
Nooooo! No no nononono!
Queen, Metallica, Hendrix, Zeppelin, Lightfoot, …doesn’t matter how many copies we have or what we paid for them. You never, ever, ever bargain bin bands like that. If we happened to have a bunch of used copies, that’s just pure chance!
You’d also never throw a greatest hits CD in there, because they were good sellers.
Err…except those cheapie greatest hits discs that you can get new at the grocery store for around $5.
Try teaching all that to a highschool kid who just wants to work at a record store to be cool. We ended up selling all kinds of stuff for $5.99, by mistake, instead of stockpiling it. I remember once a kid handed me a copy of Metallica’s Black Album that he found in the bin at $5.99. Lucky kid! That CD never should have been in there, since it was a regular easy sale at full price. (It doesn’t matter what you think of that album, it was huge, people wanted it all the time.)
So, there was that. There was always the confusing aspect that since our Bargain Bin was overstock, you’d find the same album on our regular shelves for $11.99. So people would logically ask:
“This copy is $5.99, and this copy is $11.99. Is that because one is scratched more?”
Oooh. Hated that question. It required a set response that both stated our quality policy (all discs are guaranteed and scratch free) and a quick explanation of overstock. People were often confused and who could blame them?
After you explained the Bin O’ Bargains to them, they’d hold up the $5.99 copy. “So…I should buy this one, right?”
Yes. Yes you should.
Since the bargain bin was a hodgepodge, we just threw stuff in there — nothing was alphabetized. Which caused us problems with lazy customers who didn’t want to flip through the treasures within.
“The other day you had Bryan Adams in here. Can you help me find him?”
ARGH! Why didn’t you buy him the other day? Yeah, I’ll help you find him. Flip flip flip. Flip flip flip. Flip flip flip. I could flip the whole bin in around 5-10 minutes, but still…tedious.
We did brisk business out of the bin. The markup was decent and we might have sold 20 out of there each day. Some people used it to take chances on new music, others to pick up long-ignored albums. It just boggled my mind how many people complained about such a great deal!
“I can’t search through this bin…it’s completely random! I’m not wasting my time.”
“Can you give me a deal if I buy 5?”
We also had this frequent buyer card like a buy-10-get-one-free type of card, but it specifically said, “Not applicable with any other special deals.” The Bin O’ Bargains was already a special deal, so we weren’t allowed to stamp the card with it. Which pissed people off. Which made me wonder, “What are you complaining about? You’re already getting a CD for a quarter of its regular price.”
When the Bin O’ Bargain was full to the brim, and sales were slow, we’d have a Bargain Bin sale. Something like buy two from the bin, get one free. We were still making money and stuff cleared out of there quickly. It was one good way to get rid of all those Lionel Richie Louder Than Words discs.
But don’t worry, the Bin would fill up again in short order. There were always people looking to get rid of their Lionel Richie.
Are you a young person working in the world of retail? Have you been offered a raise and a salary instead of hourly wages?
If you answered “yes” to both those questions, then sit right back and you’ll hear a tale.
I never much liked working Saturdays, for two reasons. One, it was the longest, busiest shift. Second, when I worked alone at least I picked the music. Saturdays we had two people on, because it was the busiest day. More often than not, I didn’t think much of the music the other people picked.
I mean, I hope it’s obvious by now — I’m a rocker! Unfortunately I didn’t work with many other rockers. On the other hand, they didn’t think much of my Journey discs. We actually later wrote it into the training manual — try not to knowingly pick music that your co-workers disliked! That narrowed the scope for me!
But as I said, Saturdays were our busiest days. Makes sense — kids are off school, a lot of other people have the day off — why not pick up tunes for the weekend?
One day, the boss called a staff meeting. He was giving us store managers a raise, and a salary. The only catch? We had to work one extra Saturday per month. They decided (and logically so) that our best people needed to be working on our busiest days. Therefore managers must work a minimum of two Saturdays a month. Makes sense. Previously we were only working one Saturday per month, and I knew that it was a free ride of sorts. I wasn’t surprised when it ended, although it definitely meant less cottage time.
Later that week, T-Rev called me.
“Have you done the math on your new salary yet?”
“No,” I answered. “Why?”
“Well,” he explained, “Even though he called it a raise, when you account for the extra Saturday we’re working, we’re actually making less money per hour now.”
“No shit,” I answered. “That sucks.” Once we were on salary, we couldn’t go back.
Salaries came with all sorts of interesting loopholes. For example, as managers if we couldn’t get someone to work a shift and we were short people, it usually fell on us to work the hours. Now, we weren’t getting paid extra to do it anymore. Another new duty that came with the salary was stock transfers: Driving stock around town to another store in rush-hour traffic. The gas in your tank and miles on your car? “That’s all a part of your salary”.
Not to mention all the extra hours I started to do in training duty and putting out fires, and the aforementioned twice-weekly stock deliveries. I did the math one time — you don’t wanna know how much more money I would have made on my old hourly wage! Enough to buy several of those new Iron Maiden picture disc sets!
So, young grasshoppers: if you too find yourselves pinned on the horns of a dilemma like this, think hard on your options!
RECORD STORE TALES PART 69: Porn Don’t Go Platinum
Back in June, I posted an old story called Porn Don’t Go Platinum. It was part 69, and how could I resist posting a story about a time that porn came into our stores? It didn’t happen often. Probably less than five times in my experience. People didn’t get it; just because we bought and sold CD’s and DVD’s didn’t mean we bought and sold that kind. Nor did I want to touch somebody’s used porn movies.
Anyway I kind of assumed at the time that I’d start getting random hits for Google searches about porn. Which is what happened. Pretty much every day, I get hits for the following terms.
69 porn
real 69 porn
69porno kiss
Sometimes, throw this one in. Cheaper people, I’m assuming.
free 69 porn
That’s fine, whatever. Then I got this one. Go back and read the original post and you’ll see why:
missing teeth porn -old
But then I started noticing really weird ones. Here’s one for example:
japen lebrains for the first time fuck
If anybody can tell me what that means…don’t. I don’t wanna know.
Around the summer of 1998 or so, we just got the internet at home. I immediately found it to be an excellent source of both music purchases, but also music information. For example: I did not know that if you wanted to type out Prince’s symbol name using regular characters, you could just type O-{+>.
I’m not a fan of O-{+> although my cousin Geoff has seen him live a few times. I respect the man, and I respect his prolific output, big time. But we were always sitting on tons of his stuff, some of it had been there for years. Not so much the hits, more like Emancipation. Chaos and Disorder. The Gold Experience. Come. They might be great albums — I don’t know. These discs had been there so long that their price tags were faded and had to be remade to be legible. And we had buckets of them.
Anyway, we had so many discs of O-{+> that he took up two rows. I decided for fun to re-make his header card with his symbol name instead of Prince. He wasn’t going by the name Prince at the time, just O-{+>. A lot of people would come into the store and ask about his name change. “What does it mean?” “Has he gone crazy?” It was a conversation starter. Seemed like a harmless enough thing to do.
I came in one day and I noticed the header cards were changed back. I asked the girl who was working, what happened to the ones I made?
“Oh, I meant to tell you. [Head office person] was in and she saw them and changed them back.”
Figures. We literally could not do anything different. It sucked. When I talked to that person later that day, I asked why she changed the header cards?
“Because we have a hard enough time trying to sell Prince as it is! Why make it harder to find it on the shelves?”
Well…no offence, you obviously know better than I do…but I would think the two rows full of his discs filed under “P” with his face on them would be the first easiest way to notice his Royal Highess! Trust me…finding O-{+> wasn’t the problem. Nobody wanted those discs once they found them!
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