retail

#553: Jesus’ Lyric

GETTING MORE TALE #553: Jesus’ Lyric

Many record store employees drink.  Record store people are just people, and some people drink.  And some drink, a lot. I was never much of a drinker, not until I moved in with T-Rev in ’98. Then I caught up pretty quickly (Captain Morgan’s and Coke, not beer), but I still couldn’t compete with those guys. (In fact, I still remember when I went out for my 30th birthday. I was accused by the Operations Manager/Bully of “faking” that I was drunk. I’m a light weight, and she was just a meany.)

Like me, some of the younger folks, they just couldn’t pace themselves.  The difference is they’d be drinking while having to open the store the following morning.  A lot of them would be out partying, and then we’d get the inevitable phone call the next morning. “I’m sick. Can you cover for me today?” It happened more than once, not naming names.

One guy, who helped me set up the first store that I managed, came into work hungover so many damn times. The first time, I had to send him home. He was absolutely useless. He was actually trying to work with his head down touching the counter. He was slowing me down, so I sent him home and somebody else came in.

The same guy came in hungover one Saturday morning, later on, after we opened. He had his head down on the counter when a customer approached him. He raised his head.

jasons-lyric“Uhh, excuse me. Do you have the soundtrack to Jason’s Lyric?”

The hungover employee stumbled over to the computer.

“It’s a movie soundtrack,” clarified the customer, seeing Mr. Hangover was struggling.

“No. We don’t have it.”

The customer asked him to check to see if one of our other stores had it, so he picked up the phone.  The customer went back to browsing while Mr. Hangover was making the call.   We only had three stores at the time.   One of them had Jason’s Lyric used on CD!

Mr. Hangover then walked out onto the floor to tell the customer about the CD. Only problem:  he didn’t remember who asked.   Or the exact name of the CD he asked for.  So Mr. Hangover approached somebody who looked right.

Walking up to the unsuspecting stranger he said, “Hey man. They got your Jesus’ Lyric over there.”

“What?”

“They got your Jesus’ Lyric soundtrack CD at the other store that you asked for.”

Overhearing this, the correct customer identified himself, and things got sorted.  No big surprise ending here:  Mr. Hangover was let go soon after!

#552: Alive!

GETTING MORE TALE #552: Alive!

In the spring of 1996, we opened up the big store that I managed. It was our biggest store to date. There were a lot of good times at that location, and hundreds of incredible musical finds. Around the same time, I began replacing my cassette collection with CDs in earnest. Cassettes don’t have the longevity or the sound quality of a CD. Most of my tapes were starting to sound awful, especially the ones purchased from Columbia House, who manufactured their own at a lesser cost.

Upgrading my Kiss cassette collection to CD was an early priority. Some of the first Kiss tapes I bought, like Asylum, had degraded so much they were unlistenable. The early (Canadian) CD releases had issues too; they were not perfect. Both Hotter Than Hell and Alive II (disc one) had severe problems with digital noise in specific spots. On Alive II it was “Love Gun” that was the issue. There was a terrible scratchy sound encoded onto the CD.

The differences between my boss and myself were obvious the day that Kiss Alive! came in stock, used.  It came in one of those old “fat” CD cases.  It was the first chance I had to buy the first Alive! at an affordable used price, in such great condition. The boss and I had very different personalities, almost opposites. I was a music obsessive who collected things and wanted to know all the obscure facts. He liked music but just wanted to sell CDs. I grabbed that copy of Alive! and handed it to the boss to ring in with my staff discount.

 

He sighed and gave me a look. “Don’t you already have this?”

He sounded like my dad. When I’d come home, he’d say, “More Kiss? Don’t you already have Kiss?” My boss had a lot in common with my dad.

I had the tape, but the cassette had the songs in a different order.  This was a fairly common practice.  Song order would be swapped around on cassettes, to keep sides one and two about equal in length. That reduces the amount of actual tape used to manufacture it, and therefore cuts costs. It would be cool to have a CD copy of Alive! to listen to the songs in the original order.

“I have it on cassette and LP,” I explained.  “I listen to the tape, but this CD is different.  The songs are in a different order,” I finished.

He looked at me again and responded in a mocking tone, “Hey Mike, look at my shoes. The left one is different from the right one. Do you want to buy it?”

“No because I don’t collect shoes,” I answered. “I collect Kiss.”

He shrugged with frustration. I really think he was more just pissed off that I had taken some good stock for myself.

Oh well.

Staff taking “good stock” was an ongoing issue, but because getting stock at a discount was one of the established perks of working at a used CD store, there wasn’t much that could be done. I’ll give him credit; the boss considered the staff discount to be part and parcel of the job for all of us.  He eventually put a limit on how much we could buy at a time. Meanwhile, my dad would look at my collection and say “sell, sell, sell!”

He ended up getting that copy of Kiss Alive! back, when I upgraded to the 1997 remastered edition. And then he ended up getting that 1997 remastered edition back when I upgraded to the Kiss Alive! 1975-2000 box set.

He might not have understood my wants and desires as a collector, and he may have complained about me taking all the good stock, but he ended up making money when I sold back my equally good stock. No harm, no foul. Hopefully, I have bought Kiss Alive! for the final time.

#550: The Toy

GETTING MORE TALE #550: The Toy

The worst thing about running a “family oriented” used CD store was kids.  Not every kid mind you…just the ones that weren’t attended to by their parents.  Toddlers, seven year olds…whatever. They were hell to deal with, because nine times out of ten, the parents would rather scour our shelves looking for John Mellencamp discs than make sure their kids weren’t destroying the store. T-Rev used to say “People should need a license to have kids,” after witnessing the destruction they can unleash when parents don’t give a shit.

So, some typical store activities for kiddies:

  • Taking discs off the shelves and putting them elsewhere.
  • Running behind the counter and grabbing discs there.  This was especially troublesome.  Discs were in numbered slots.  If Junior takes the disc out and throws it somewhere, you have to look it up in inventory to see what slot it was supposed to be in.  How do you do that with a CD that has no title or artist printed on it?  Happened more frequently than you think.  I called those discs “lost soldiers”.
  • Just running behind the counter because why not.
  • Screaming.
  • Throwing things.
  • Spilling food or drinks.
  • Trying to attach themselves to my legs.

Talking to the parents was useless. They’d usually yell something like, “Stop that!” before turning their backs to look for some Tim McGraw discs.

So we came up with a plan to deal with it. A little toy for the kids to quietly play with in the corner! A little hobby center for the toddlers. A few kids did play quietly with it, while others just fought over it. Battles, screaming, with parents deeply immersed in the Bargain Bin looking for MuchDance ’98.

Within two weeks, the toy had developed a gross, slimy coating that you couldn’t clean off. It was disgusting; it looked like kids had been licking it (they probably were). And wouldn’t you know it? The lovely children that used to throw things around the store found something new to throw: the toy and its parts! It could and did end up anywhere in the store. Including begind the counter.  We bought that toy so kids would be occupied and leave us alone. The damned thing was way more work than it was worth.

What a disaster. I hated that fucking thing.

#549: E-Commerce Dawning

GETTING MORE TALE #549: E-Commerce Dawning

I had been trying to get out of the storefront for a while. As a manager you can only take so much retail in a lifetime, even in the Record Store. My reservoir for dealing with the public in a buy/sell situation only had about five or six years in it before I was running on pure fumes. Fortunately e-commerce was becoming a dominant force and I was chosen to manage our new website. It was a good website.  The boss knew what he wanted, and didn’t settle for less.  He listened to feedback and relentlessly tested the site.  It was a challenge since our inventory was changing minute by minute, and technology hadn’t caught up to our needs yet.  When it was finally ready to go live, it was a slow start.  It began as a one man operation.

I was sent out to do some research. The boss sent me to an e-commerce convention at the Waterloo Inn in mid-2000. I returned with plenty of notes and information about how laws would protect buyers and sellers in online sales.

When we first started e-commerce, the website was a part time job. I was still in the store most of the time, because we were only getting 10-15 orders per day. I would have time allotted to go in the back room and get the e-commerce stuff done: processing credit card orders, responding to customers, keeping the books. Customer complaints were infrequent but fun. Often it involved somebody whining that they couldn’t return something because they lost their receipt, or complaining that something was taking too long to come in. Then I’d investigate and get the other side of the story.  There was one guy we all remember that was a constant complainer.  He picked up his orders in-store.  He carried a briefcase with him, and inside that briefcase was a printout of every order he ever placed.

 

The boss told me, “This is your baby, run it however works best for you.” So I did and it went well until it was just too busy for one person to run alone. Then they decided to run the e-commerce thing full time. I was given a small staff of about three people, all people who also worked in store. We had a tiny office to work out of. It had a computer, printer, its own VISA machine and all the supplies needed to ship CDs by FedEx. We learned as we went.

I had a really good staff back there and it was fun juggling that with the store. I worked a lot of double shifts, but I was enjoying it. Things were going well, and over time we got busier and busier.  They decided they wanted a full-time manager for the position.  I was frozen out, and landed back in the store full time. I heard that oft-repeated mantra: “Your time is more valuable to us in the store.”

A couple years’ of work on that website, and suddenly it was pulled away and I was back where I didn’t want to be. My goal was to get out of the store, and I worked hours and hours above and beyond the call of duty to do it. I voluntarily came in on the morning of my Christmas Eve off (year 2000) just to process online orders, so we wouldn’t be slammed by too many when we re-opened. I poured all my energy into it knowing the goal of being out of the store was not far away. Then the floor fell out from under.

They had me transitioning into a new position of being a trainer for new staff and franchisees. That would have been fine except that was a small portion of my time.  The franchising stalled and that meant most of the time I was running a store. Promises of ever getting out had evaporated.

Like many things from the formative years, I had plenty of fond memories of toiling away on that website. Most satisfying was the feeling that I was climbing the ladder and working towards the goal of getting away from the front counter. Apparently the bosses felt that the front counter was the thing I was best at, and didn’t consider other factors such as morale and personal growth. It was like being kicked back to highschool after I’d already graduated and moved on to university.  The ironic thing was one person who eventually ran the website after me was fired for theft. Change isn’t always good.  Maybe they should have left things as-is.

The only song related to e-commerce I could find.

#547: The Redemption of the Worst McDonalds Ever

Getting More Tale #547: The Redemption of the Worst McDonalds Ever
The sequel to #536: Worst. McDonalds. EVER.

I’ve been visiting the “worst McDonalds ever” regularly in the past few weeks.  All McDonalds stores have been renovated since the 2006 disaster area we encountered in the last installment.  They’ve made a number of changes to their menu and how you order.

Where a typical McDonalds used to have a huge counter full of cash registers to order, now they have just one.  This is because they have switched over to an automated ordering/paying system using touch-screen kiosks.  You might think that removing the human element is a bad thing.  When it was first rolled out, it seemed things got slower.  Today is another story.

Using the former “worst McDonalds ever” as an example, service is now much faster and accurate.  You don’t have to get in line.  Just walk in and stroll up to a kiosk.  Follow the instructions on screen and touch what you want to order.  You can do it as a combo, and you can change sizes quite easily.  Making modifications is easy peasy.  The kiosk then reviews your order and asks you to confirm it.  Once this is done, you can either pay by debit or credit card right at the kiosk, or go to the cash register to pay.

The kiosk spits out your receipt with a number.  That number then appears on a big screen that says “now serving”.  Your number climbs to the top when your order is ready.  Usually this happens quickly.

It used to be the case that we didn’t like to get McDonalds “to go” because by the time you get back, the fries are cold.  Everybody knows McDonalds fries are best when they are piping hot.  Cold McDonalds fries just don’t cut it.  I am pleased to report that I can go to the former “worst McDonalds ever” and get back to the office in time with hot fries. My turnaround time is usually 15-20 minutes from door to door.  Additionally, my order has been right every time. It seems the new kiosk system has cut down on human error.

This is all just personal experience; I have been to a few of the new McDonalds and only had a bad experience once, in Ottawa, when the new system was first introduced.  That McDonalds was drowning in confusion and upset customers, including one who claimed this was the “worst McDonalds ever”.  That first time aside, food has been fast and accurate since.

What does this mean in terms of general retail?  Automated checkout is becoming more and more common.  As long as the speed and quality remain in good standing, this trend will continue.  It will probably not impact the music business very much.  Most people who go shopping in a music store go there partly because there are humans to interact with.  As long as music stores exist, so will manual checkouts.  Of course, many folks (myself included) buy a huge chunk of their music from online retailers.  However when we do visit a music store, we want a flesh and blood human being there.

Good for McDonalds for improving their service.  I think the music business will continue on its own path.

 

#546: Worst. McDonalds. EVER.

GETTING MORE TALE #546: Worst. McDonalds. EVER.

 

The year: 2006

The place: McDonalds, Hespeler Rd. Cambridge

 

I don’t consider myself a snobbish foodie.  Yes, I like to go out and have a lovely duck confit, or rosemary lamb chops.  However I’m not picky, I’ll eat almost anything, as my gut will attest to.  I saw Super Size Me, and I’ve ordered almost everything on the McMenu once.  McDonalds are usually pretty clean…but not always.  Some in fact were downright gross.  The worst one?  Even the pissy McD’s we visited near Flint Michigan could not compete with Cambridge Ontario on the gross scale.

I was out with Jen and her friends.  It was a late night of card playing, and I wanted to just head home, but I was outvoted by the other three.  The only place that was open that late was McDonalds.  I could always go for a Big Mac, so why not?

Upon entering, we debated leaving immediately, but there was nowhere to go.  If only I had a cell phone camera back then…the scene we witnessed was an apocalypse for the record books.  In the main eating area of the restaurant, food was all over the floor and tables.  Bits of burgers smooshed onto the floor.  Fries everywhere.  Ketchup, salt, containers…the entire area was a complete disaster.  It looked as if a bunch of highschool kids had just had a food fight and left (which is probably close to the truth).

One of the staff emerged from the back room with cleaning supplies.  He took one look at the main eating area and paused.

“Woah,” he said, and returned to the back room with his cleaning supplies, not to be seen again.

I guess the place wasn’t going to get cleaned up that night!  It sure didn’t look like a manager was working.

My buddy Craig, from 107.5 Dave Rocks, raises the “worst McDonalds ever” stakes with a tale of his own.  Unlike me, he has photographic proof.  It was in Milton, on highway 25.  He entered the restroom to find that a patron before him left an “inside the park home run”.  If you’re not familiar with the terminology, an “inside the park home run” in this case refers to someone taking a shit in a urinal.  There was no conceivable reason for anyone to leave a shit in the urinal.  Baffled, disgusted and nauseous, Craig snapped a photo and handed it over to the manager.  The manager responded by offering him his drink cup.

Pictures or it didn’t happen?  Do not, under any circumstances, click the link to the evidence.

This is your final warning.  Do. not. click. the link.

*** GRAPHIC *** Inside the park home run *** GRAPHIC ***

 

You don’t see that every day.  A home run for the record books.

What happened to my (not Craig’s) “worst McDonalds ever”?  Find out in the next chapter.

#545: It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere

GETTING MORE TALE #545: It’s 5 O’Clock Somewhere

Back in the Record Store Days, 5:00 pm was when the “day” shift ended and the “night” shift began.  It was typical that the boss would call every day just before five to get the “five o’clock read”.  He wanted to see what the stores’ sales were each day at 5:00.  That tended to indicate if it would be a “good day” by the end of it or a “bad day”.

I discovered there was more to the daily 5:00 call than just sales.

The sly dual purpose was to make sure employees didn’t take off early.  The bosses could have asked anybody to do a “five o’clock read” but they usually asked for the managers (except when they were mad at/not speaking to the managers).  The cover was blown when the boss called Jonathan the accountant at five one day.

“I’m just calling to see how it is over there,” said the boss.

Jonathan was an accountant.  It’s always the same over there.

He came out to tell me.  “Man!  Can you believe they were checking to make sure I was still here?  They asked me ‘how it was going’ in the accounting office.  The accounting office!  You think it’s a coincidence he called right before five?  He was checking on me.”  He was pissed!

No early home time if you’re an accountant, or a store manager either!  I was busted leaving a few minutes early one Friday.  It didn’t matter that I showed up for work an hour and a half early.  That five minutes at the end was all they wanted to talk about.  I was given “the talk” and never once mentioned how the person giving me the talk was usually out well before five on a Friday.

Sneaky, sneaky, sneaky!

#541: When the Packaging Gets Wrecked

GETTING MORE TALE #541: When the Packaging Gets Wrecked

It’s so easy for a store to wreck the very product that you want to buy.  It happens every day.  A CD jewel case helps protect your precious music…if it comes in a CD jewel case.  How did stores wreck the packaging?  Here are some of the most common!

  1. Box cutters

When you open up a fresh shipment of music, it’s very easy to damage the product inside with a box cutter and it happens all the time.  If it’s LPs inside the box, or digipack CDs, it’s very easy to cut open the top-most item inside the box.  Not only do you see this happen with music but toys and games too.  I’ve seen a few toys on shelves with the bubbles accidentally scored by overzealous box cutters.  I’ve accidentally done it to a few CDs because I wasn’t being careful enough.

  1. Price (and other) tags

I have some great examples here.  The first revolves around a rare Led Zeppelin Complete Studio Recordings box set.  This deluxe box set was released in 1993, but by 1996 it was deleted and hard to find.  The boss man apparently knew somebody from Warner who supposedly had a cache of them stashed away.  If so that would have been a potential goldmine.

If there was a cache of them or not, I don’t know, but we did get one to sell.  We sold it as new, but because of the format of stores (all CD cases on display were empty), the boss opened it up.  I believed this to be a mistake and I still do.  I think we could have sold it just as easily had we kept the sealed box on display behind the counter somehow.  But we didn’t, and we had to put stickers all over the now opened box set to proclaim that it was BRAND NEW and OUT OF PRINT.

IMG_00000655

One customer came up to the counter to complain.

“Why is this thing so expensive?” he asked, for good reason.

“It’s brand new,” I answered.  “The owner brought this one in sealed, and he opened it himself, so I can vouch for the fact that it’s brand new.”

“Yeah but he put stickers all over it!” complained the customer.  “Can you give me a deal?”

We were only selling the box for a few dollars over cost, so no deals were to be had.

We eventually sold that box set after it had sat there for a few weeks.  The stickers came off no problem, but had they stayed on there a while longer, they might have been an issue.  Sticker residue on paper can leave nasty stains, sticky spots, or even tears.

Our price tags were usually pretty good.  At one point we ordered a cheaper batch, and they were just awful.  You couldn’t peel them off in one piece, and you’d always leave paper on whatever you were peeling them off from.  Whenever we re-priced something, we were supposed to completely remove the old tag, leaving nothing behind.  These tags made that a chore.  It was a relief when that batch was used up.

The worst price tags I have seen in any store in my life came from Dr. Disc.   They are still around, though only in Hamilton now, and I don’t know if they still use the Yellow Tags of Death.  These tags had a magnetic security chip embedded in them, and left a horrible red residue on everything.  It was like taking a red crayon and melting it on your CD cover.  You could never get the red residue off, unless you used a product like Goo Gone, but it left its own oily residue behind that was equally impossible to remove.  I had to replace the case on every used CD I ever bought from Dr. Disc.  Every single case!

  1. Regular wear and tear

This is all but unavoidable.  Stuff gets damaged in shipping.  Customers drop stuff.  In our store, just about every front cover of Metallica’s Load CD was dog-eared.  Its thickness made it hard to put back in the CD case.  When the CD came out new, our display copies took severe beatings.  The front covers were so damaged that we had to sell them as used.

If you see something in a store that’s a little dinged up, but not too badly, ask if you can get a discount.  If you ask nicely, they will usually agree.  Whether it is worth it or not, is up to you!  Remember, most things tend to show up again.  You can usually wait until you find a better condition copy.

Are you picky?  Some of my customers were so picky that I actually told them “I don’t think buying anything used is really for you.”  Do you want everything as mint as possible?  Let us know in the comments.

 

#526: Location, Location, Location

GETTING MORE TALE #526: Location, Location, Location

I worked at many Record Store locations over the years, often temporarily for training and managing.  Some of them I spent a few days at, others were several weeks or months in total.  Each one had its own flavour and clientele.  While experiences and mileage may vary, here are some memories of some favourite locations (all in Ontario, Canada).

 

cambridge1. Cambridge

The store in Cambridge was our first to carry movies, initially in VHS format.  It was a lot of fun working there from time to time, buying and selling used movies.  There was always something I wanted for my collection, and it broke up the monotony of seeing nothing but CDs every day.

Cambridge was also interesting because we used to get a number of people coming in just to ask where the strip club was.  “It used to be around here!”  I don’t know why the dudes looking for the strip club kept stopping in the Record Store (as opposed to the Tim Hortons or a gas station or anywhere else), but they did indeed used to ask.

Some of the customers in Cambridge were…well, let’s just say they were not all our best and brightest.  T-Rev managed that store, and I took over temporarily when he was on road trips elsewhere setting up new stores.  The customers there wore me down more than anywhere else.  Especially when they came in to sell, which was frequently.  Cambridge bought a lot of stock.  If the customer wasn’t happy with my offer, they’d ask when the “regular guy” would be back.  Maddening since I was more generous than a lot of other folks.

There was one customer in Cambridge who hated selling to me, he always asked where “the regular guy” was.  He asked my name and I told him it was Sanchez.  When T-Rev came back, we had a laugh over the employee named “Sanchez” who was apparently low-balling this customer for his dance CDs.

 

hamilton2. Hamilton

The store I worked at in Hamilton was pretty quiet most of the time.  There was a lunch time rush when kids from the nearby highschool would come in to listen to and occasionally buy CDs.  Given Steeltown’s reputation, I was pleasantly surprised to find the kids I dealt with to be polite and friendly, more than I was used to seeing.  The adults weren’t always so friendly, but no more or less than any of the other stores I worked in.  Hamilton was a shitty place to drive (confusing one-way streets), but I didn’t mind working there at all.

 

kitchener3. Kitchener

I worked in three different stores in the Kitchener area.  One of the other guys there used to refer to Kitchener as a “ham & egger” town, a phrase I never heard before.  A lot of blue collar customers.  It was still a step up from Cambridge, depending on which Kitchener location I was working in.

I’ve said many times that my favourite store was the original one, in a small mall in Kitchener.  It was our only mall store ever.  It was a special place to work.  It was tiny and compact.  It could get really busy on the weekends.  There were a lot of regular customers, more than I remember elsewhere, probably due to the fact we were in a mall.  There was a familiarity – I knew them, and they knew me.  When I was eventually given a larger store elsewhere to manager, I missed the faces I would see on a regular basis at the mall.

I also missed the “unique” individuals you’d meet at the mall store.  Malls have a whole ecosystem of life forms, unlike others in the outside world.  There was Johnny Walker, so named because every day he would walk the circuit around the mall, talking to himself, all day.  One day, something peculiar happened.  He came in, stopped talking to himself, and bought a tape.  He paid for his cassette and then resumed walking and talking to himself again.  I only saw that happen once.  There was Butts, the guy who would dig through ashtrays looking for cigarette butts.  Let’s not forget Trevor the Security Guard, and the drunks at the restaurant next door.  It was a blast!  I didn’t care for the mallrats, but they were a minor annoyance.

 

oakville4. Oakville

I did not like working on Oakville, as was discussed in Record Store Tales Part 16: Travelling Man.  Many of those customers were snooty; just too good for you.  They felt entitled to park in the fire lane, because they were more important than you.  Read the Oakville tale for the misery that was working there.

 

mississauga

5. Mississauga

More than any other location, I may have resented Mississauga the most.  It was a shit location.  There was nothing of any value around.  There was a health products store, but nowhere to buy a snack or a lunch.  There was no foot traffic.  Across the street was an empty field.  It was a dead store from the day it opened.  I invested myself deeply in my work.  There are many things in life that can crush your soul.  One of them is working hard at something (training employees, helping set up a store) and seeing it come up to nothing.  That was Mississauga.  In the used CD business, you depend on customers bringing in good stuff for you to re-sell.  Mississauga provided very little good stuff.

 

There were more, all with tales of their own.   These however were five of the most memorable, each for its own reasons.  While a change of scenery is nice once in a while, there is nothing better than working in a location you love.

 

#514: Infinite Dreams

ESCHER

Do you ever have recurring dreams?

I sure do, like they’re going out of style – always have.  I used to, and still have, a number of the classic Freudian recurring dreams:  Teeth falling out, being unable to speak, or even see.  They were usually quite upsetting.  Freud believed that many of these recurring dreams are expressions of neurosis and compulsive behaviour and I think when it came to me, he was right!  Anxiety is suspected as a major cause of recurring dreams.  When I finally graduated school and had seen the last of essays, homework, exams and marks, I continued having anxious school dreams in a big way.  They would usually involve an exam that I had forgotten was occurring, or an essay due that day that I hadn’t started yet.  These dreams happened for years after graduation.

I thought I had “outgrown” recurring dreams, but they started again not long after quitting the Record Store.  Usually they would involve me starting there again, except as a part time employee without the responsibilities I had before.  In the dreams, I would show up at the store, except it wasn’t my old store.  In fact it wasn’t a store that existed in real life at all.  The most common dream featured a store in the mall, much larger than any I’d actually worked in.  I wouldn’t know any of the people I worked with in the dream, and they didn’t know me.

In some of the dreams, the Boss man would pop into the store, and in some, the office bully would show up, but be nice as pie, as if nothing ever happened.

If Freud was right and that all dreams are rooted in some kind of wish fulfillment, it’s clear that I missed working at the Record Store, but in an idealized way of not having responsibility or an office bully.  However, Freud also stated that in adults, dreams are self-censored and distorted and impossible to interpret alone.  Carl Jung believed that dreams were symbolic scenes and much more complex.

It’s interesting to look at these recurring dreams and try to remember the details, but ultimately it’s impossible to “figure them out” looking for some deep truth or hidden meaning.  Within these dreams, I had never forgotten how to do the job.  I jumped behind the dream-counter, helming the dream-computer and bought dream-CDs from dream-sellers.  It was exactly like the old days, with all the problems and excitement that happen when you buy used music from the public: the anticipation of seeing something so rare that the store just had to acquire it, and then the tension of buying it from the customer who wanted more for it.  It was all there, clearly remembered.

It is very interesting that these recurring dreams all but ceased after writing Record Store Tales.  Perhaps Freud’s wish fulfillment has something to do with this.  By re-living all the memories in print form, perhaps my unconscious mind realized that what my dream wishes were not at all what I wanted?

Never had a dream where I showed up at work wearing no pants, though!