(Twenty Years) Part 11: Over The River And Through The Woods ...

November 30, 2007 marked 20 years to the day since I started at Record Den, which has inspired some thought and reminiscing on the person I was then, what the job was like as the years went by, and what has kept me around until now ...

It was the Monday of Thanksgiving week, 1997 when Brian and Greg and I drove to Great Northern Mall to start another Christmas season working at the Den, only this time about 40 miles from home. This wasn't a completely new experience for me: I had worked a Saturday at this location in July of 1989 to help cover for the manager's wedding day, and I had also been stationed there for a week in late October 1995 while considering an offer from our buyer to manage the location. Both experiences had been pleasant enough, but this time we were going to be based there for at least two months, displacing the crew that was already in place at the store (even canning them if necessary), and getting the place back on its feet and in fighting shape for the holidays.

I was apprehensive with this operation right from the outset for two reasons: first (as I mentioned in the previous post), I was not happy to be offering Deak a helping hand after the way the Mentor store had been yanked out from underneath us. Secondly, Great Northern Mall was located on the other side of Cleveland in the southwestern suburb of North Olmstead, and the idea of making a 90 minute all-freeway round-trip to work five or six days a week for two months or more in my already-temperamental Pontiac Fiero was not exactly filling me with optimism. My concerns about breaking down (or more likely overheating) in the middle of I-71 or I-480 in the dead of night competed with the idea of also having to deal with Cleveland's notoriously terrible winter weather. Luckily, the weather turned out to be a total non-issue: aside from a freak October snowstorm that had dumped over a foot of snow on the east side, the rest of that winter stayed remarkably mild (at least into late January).

While the Mentor store was, at the time of its closing, the most successful outlet in the Record Den chain, the Great Northern location was at one time the real jewel in our crown. I'm sure a large part of this success derived from the store's unique placement in the sprawling shopping center, looking out directly into the middle of the food court, located between two restaurants, and within sight of a major mall entrance. During its peak, Great Northern was soundly besting us numbers-wise, but the departure of its original management team followed by years of ineffectual leadership and the collapsing of the Record Den financial infrastructure had left it a shadow of its former self.

I suspect the current crew of the Great Northern store weren't exactly pleased with our arrival, and I'll bet they were even less happy with the way we took over operations and promptly started making the place over in our image. I don't recall many blow-outs between anybody, but there were constant little battles were being silently waged over how to stock product (to mask the utter lack of catalog in the store, the racks were flooded with dozens of copies of the same CDs and cassettes, for instance), how to efficiently merchandise the front counter (this was a particularly amusing battle front as Karen, the Great Northern manager, hated the way Greg front-loaded the counter with product and was constantly undoing his displays on his off days), and the overall lackadaisical, carefree manner absences or below-par work was dealt with there (we canned one person for basically vanishing into thin air for a month after we showed up, only for Karen to re-hire the guy behind our backs).

While Brian and Greg had their hands full dealing with store politics, I did my best to stay out of the way, learn the buying ropes, and place massive daily stock orders in order to rebuild the store's skeletal inventory ASAP. It may not have been what I'd call "fun," but those few weeks between Turkey Day and Christmas week were definitely an interesting challenge in that we were given a time frame in which to make a noticeable difference in the store's fortunes, and we set about our task with relish (and I tell you, it can be a lot of fun learning how to spend someone else's money). Now that the chain was once again flush with cash in the wake of the Mentor sale, we were able to get the Great Northern store into something we considered reasonable in a relatively short time, and we looked at the experience of doing as a practice run for opening our proposed new location in the new year.

While the task of re-creating the Mentor store in North Olmstead managed to keep me occupied most of the time, working with some of the other people at that store had its ups and downs. I didn't really care much for Karen or her snotty assistant manager, and none of us liked Andy The Invisible Clerk very much. Then there was Nick, who the only person at that store who was actually fun to work with, and not even so much for his streaky work ethic as his Spicoli-by-way-of-Suge Knight approach to life. Nothing ever really bothered Nick: he just kinda rolled with the flow and went about his white-boy gangsta existence, occasionally making hilarious observations in that permanently-stoned, laid-back drawl of his. We might have been from completely different worlds, but Nick was a hoot.

Now comes the really bad part: within a couple of weeks of starting at Great Northern, my worst fears going into this season were soon realized as the Fiero started behaving erratically. I'd tried car-pooling with Greg or Brian when possible, but the way the schedule worked out didn't always make that solution workable, and eventually the Fiero started to make getting to and from work into a daily cliffhanger. Finally, one frigid Saturday night close to Christmas, the god damned thing chose to not start at all.

I was supposed to give Nick a ride home that night (he lived a few miles up I-71 from the airport, which was on my usual route), and after the Fiero proved completely unresponsive due to some kind of electrical/ignition issue, he called up an alternate way home while I sat in the office at the back of the store, fuming and wondering what to do about this situation. Going home was definitely my desired option, but it was already nearing 11:00 P.M. (we closed at 10 that night), I'd have to be back there again at 10 A.M. the following morning and any ride I might be able to get back home would take nearly an hour to get to me, then nearly another hour to get back home, and then another hour to get me back here nine hours after that. It wasn't worth the effort. I was stuck.

With a furious sigh, I called home to report my situation and set about spending a cold winter's night stuck at work. To ease my fury a bit and make some constructive use of the evening, I put on some music at low volume and set about doing some cleaning up and arranging of stock for an hour or so until I figured it was time to duck out of sight, retreat into the back room (I didn't feel it would be a good idea to call attention to myself as I had no idea how mall security might approach this situation) and try to get some sleep.

This was going to be the hard part: the carpet in the store was nearly flat and had no padding underneath, so I threw a bunch of old t-shirts down on the floor and tried to make some kind of bedding that at least approached the idea of "comfortable." My shoes would have to stay on, since even with the heat going, the floor of the office was cold thanks to the shipping door not being flush with the ground (I stuffed a couple more shirts along the bottom to get some rudimentary insulation going). For a blanket, I would have to use my winter coat ... and I wasn't wearing a long coat that year. Figures.

Now, what to use for a pillow? My gaze fell on the display of stuffed animals lying by the office door and I selected the Tasmanian Devil, which at least looked like it would offer some comfort and support ... that is, until I lay down, rested my head on it and it growled gibberish at me in a shitty approximation of Mel Blanc's voice. Oh, it talks. Of course. Jesus F. Christ. Exasperated, I tossed Taz across the office, removed some more t-shirts off the rack, rolled them up into a pillow-like shape, and used them instead. Zzzz.

Needless to say, I slept pretty horribly that night, with every toss and turn bringing me fully awake thanks to my then-bony shape poking uncomfortably through my makeshift nest. At 5 A.M. I awoke and realized I had made the terrible strategic mistake of forgetting to use the public restroom in the food court hours before (and this was probably the one Record Den in the whole chain that didn't have an employee loo). I tried my best to go back to sleep and ignore the pressing need to take a piss, but that window had already closed. I got up, irritated and wondering exactly what the hell I was going to use as a makeshift urinal. A quick scan revealed only one option: an empty Taco Bell cup standing on the desk. I then learned a bit about human bladder capacity: a medium-sized soft drink cup ain't enough for an early morning leak, folks. Luckily, by the time the cup was full, I had relieved myself enough that I could get back to sleep and worry about the rest when the rest of the mall was open.

I was awake for the day by 9 A.M., and shortly after I had covertly disposed of the Taco Bell cup in one of the disposal units outside in the shipping dock, Andy The Invisible Clerk actually showed up for a change, which was a nice surprise. Despite my absolutely evil mood, I had to smile as he took an extended look at my bleary-eyed, disheveled countenance while he punched in and said "Jesus, man, you look terrible."

Oh, it gets better: I made a few phone calls that morning and managed to set up an appointment in the early afternoon to get my car looked at by a local repair shop. Before I called for a tow, I walked out to the Fiero and decided to give it a whirl just in case, feeling an odd certainty that it was going to start up with no problems at all.

Guess what? It fuckin' did.

(Twenty Years) Part 10: The End Is The Beginning Is The End

November 30, 2007 marked 20 years to the day since I started at Record Den, which has inspired some thought and reminiscing on the person I was then, what the job was like as the years went by, and what has kept me around until now ...

Looking back from now, what happened in November 1997 wasn't exactly a surprise, but how it happened certainly was.

There had been numerous discussions over the years in the store about Greg getting out from under Deak once and for all, opening his own place and running it exactly the way he wanted. This scenario made for a nice pipe dream, and it was all one could cling to when Deak was showing up unannounced at the store and spending hours honking at us to wear slacks instead of jeans while compulsively re-arranging boxes of screeching Elmo dolls or Co-Ed Naked t-shirts or anything aside from, you know, music.

Even Greg was running out of patience dealing with the deteriorating situation: the closest he had come to leaving was during the month or so that he seriously entertained the idea of working as a buyer for a local one-stop that was being run by an old acquaintance of his. He wound up sticking around instead, but it was becoming clear that he was starting to reach his wit's end. Perhaps the most infuriating affront to Greg was our inept buyer showing up at the height of the Christmas rush a couple of years in a row and ransacking our inventory for product to redistribute to the rest of the stores, none of which were run by people able to do their own holiday-week buying anymore.

While Deak played with toys, Rome continued to burn merrily away. A veritable mobile juggling act was in progress for our district manager as Record Den locations opened and closed right and left, creating what we called "The Traveling Road Show" as it seemed like we always had a full store's inventory on the road headed somewhere from another location that Deak had closed in the dead of night without any employees aware of what was happening until the next morning. While shutting down operations and packing things up on the sly cut down on soon-to-be-canned workers ransacking the store as a parting gesture to management, this was only an incidental benefit as these commando-style closings were actually done in order to sneak out early on lease agreements. Typical.

I think it was sometime in October when we started to hear some whispers from little birdies in the know that Deak was setting up a deal to sell off parts of the dying chain in order to obtain some desperately needed cash flow, but we could never have guessed that he would, in effect, cut off the patient's head in order to save the rest of the body. Early in the afternoon of Friday, November 7, he and our district manager appeared unannounced at the store, and the looks on their faces telegraphed that bad news was coming. Greg and Deak took a walk in the mall to have their discussion, and while they were gone, the DM laid it all out for Brian (then the assistant manager) and I: we were being sold to the Record Town chain, effective in about nine days. Bam. It felt as if we'd been flattened by a train we'd never even known was approaching, like something that might happen in a Wyle E. Coyote cartoon.

The rest of that day was spent in deep discussions amongst ourselves, largely dealing in the subject matter of "well now what the fuck do we do?" Greg was in a state I'd never seen him in before: some indeterminate area equidistant between shock and fury: he'd made many offers to Deak over the years to buy out the store in the event Deak decided he wanted out of the record business, and even considering that they were never the best of friends, to have the location sold out from underneath him without any warning had taken him completely by surprise.

While my immediate knee-jerk reaction from all of this was to just walk out the door and start writing full-time (I had been freelancing for Scene on the side for a year and half by that point), I calmed down enough to entertain the idea of at least hearing out what Record Town had to offer. One thing Greg suspected was that our new masters were not going to be anything like our current regime, but that was also not necessarily a Good Thing. A major part of our success to that point in time had been dealing with imports (either legitimate and otherwise), and while we knew the boots would certainly have to go when Record Town took over, we also wondered exactly much autonomy we would be given in import buying (or any buying, for that matter).

I think it was a day later that a gray-suited regional manager/drone appeared in our store to welcome all of us to the wonderful world of Record Town and give us a little added background as to what was going on. As it happened, the purchase of our store was not much more than a chess move in the grand game Record Town was playing against Camelot Music (their nemesis on a national scale). While they initially weren't that thrilled with the size and location of our store relative to theirs, they were astounded at the sales numbers Deak had supplied them and that factor more than anything else had sealed the deal (nevermind the fact that those amazing numbers were all sourced from our 1996 sales year, before Best Buy and Circuit City had moved in across the street, and before the mall entrance nearest to us had been closed off: the combined effect of these had knocked our 1997 expectations down considerably). Their thinking, essentially, was that if a Mickey Mouse local chain could mount a serious challenge to a Camelot Superstore in a little shoe box-sized mall outlet store, then imagine what could happen with the amazing buying might and superior brainpower of Record Town behind us!

Inadvertent condescension aside, the regional manager drone didn't seem like a bad guy, but he addressed our concerns about how things would go under their ownership a little too easily (and vaguely) for our comfort. It felt like we were being told pretty much exactly what we wanted to hear, and we knew a lot of it was probably complete bullshit. This was confirmed a couple of days later when Greg sat in on a conference call with some company bigwigs, the results of said chat were enough to steer him away from staying when the switchover happened. Surprisingly, he opted instead to appeal to Deak to relocate us elsewhere in the company, if at least for the short term. Deak, maybe feeling more than a tinge of guilt (or perhaps eager to have Greg aboard in his effort to right the ship), agreed to let anyone who wanted to stay the opportunity to work at the chain's Great Northern Mall store until a long-term solution (namely a brand-new Lake County store) could be found.

I remember that I had some serious reservations about this idea at the time, and I discussed them with Greg during that last week we were open. Central to my misgivings was the feeling that we might be jumping from the frying pan into the fire by hanging around with Deak (not that working for Record Town sounded like any more charming of an idea, granted). I asked him if this might be the opportunity we'd been talking about for years to get away from this guy at long last, but Greg answered that he was just not ready to open up a new store from scratch and that Great Northern was only a short term solution, one way or the other. Reluctantly, I stayed aboard, hoping I wasn't making a terrible mistake by doing so.

Deak's next move was easy to predict: Record Town would be buying our store lock, stock and barrel, including (hopefully) any product that was in it at the time of the inventory that would be conducted before the sale was finalized. With nine days before that happened, Deak dumped nearly half the warehouse on us over that final week as box after box of deleted and inactive product arrived at our shipping door and was dutifully packed away in understock to be absorbed by our new owners (who, I am told, wound up bouncing a hell of a lot of this garbage right back at Deak. Hee hee.).

Greg was also playing a couple of shell games of his own with the imports, shipping all of the bootlegs and the cream of the legitimate product to Great Northern and directing all the outlying Record Dens to transfer their dead import stock to Mentor at once so that they would be also be absorbed into Record Town's inventory. We also shipped hundreds of the hard-to-find/specialty domestic CDs that gave our inventory its distinctive character to Great Northern as well to kick-start the process of rebuilding that store's stock and reputation.

Fridays and Saturdays were always our busiest days, but that last weekend we were open at Great Lakes Mall felt a lot more like a funeral wake than a couple of days at work. Between a notice I had slipped into the Scene's local news section about the transition, an interview Greg had done with the Lake County News-Herald about the store's closing, and word traveling around, it was a sad two days of goodbyes and well wishes from many of our core regulars.

Melancholy as they were, Friday and Saturday were a parties in the park compared to Sunday, which was a miserable slog. Jim and I worked that day (as usual), and we were joined by a Record Town manager from the Euclid Square Mall store who was slated to take over our store first thing Monday morning. The new manager set up a table at the front of the store and started immediately badgering everyone who walked by to fill out a job application. While I found this irritating on its own (particularly in the way she went after people like some kind of used car salesman), I started getting snappy when she also decided to start playing store manager a day early, bossing Jim and I around to do random tasks as the day progressed, constantly on us to lower the volume of the music and castigating me directly at one point for daring to have a cigarette in the back room during a typical afternoon lull in business with an annoyed "you're not supposed to be back here!"

By about five o clock, even the normally easygoing Jim was staring daggers at Record Town Woman's back: he was as annoyed as I that our planned send-off for the old Record Den was instead a sneak preview of the kind of obnoxious, scolding dicketry that awaited us if we'd opted to stick around instead of heading to Great Northern. Any doubts we might have harbored about jumping ship were put to rest for good that day: both of us had been there too long to have someone new march in and act like we'd been shipped in from the temp agency last week. As a little parting shot to the new regime, I selected a closing theme, Pink Floyd's "Welcome To The Machine," played at the highest volume I could get away with while the inventory team started to assemble in the store a few minutes before closing. Jim grinned: he got the point. That was all that mattered.

Greg came in as we were closing up shop and the Record Town inventory drones were getting their counting machines revved up. I was actually kinda curious to hang out for a while and watch the process, but I had to review a KMFDM concert that night, so I had to meet up with an old friend and ex co-worker after finishing up the deposit and phoning the sales to the office one last time. We stopped back after the show a few hours later, and the counting was still going on, with members of the team frequently expressing consternation and exasperation at the esoteric titles they were scanning. Just a few minutes of listening to them was giving me a headache: Greg had been there for the better part of five hours enduring their blather. He was as weary, bored, and as ready to walk away from that store as I had been earlier that evening. It felt completely wrong to end this chapter of our lives this way, but at the very least there was the promise of a new beginning (maybe in Willoughby or Painesville) sometime in the new year.

We had all decided to take a week long vacation/break before starting at Great Northern to decompress a bit before heading straight into Thanksgiving Week and the subsequent holiday season on the other side of Cleveland. A few days into that break, my curiosity got the best of me, and I headed to the mall and walked into what had only a few days ago been Record Den. The change was already dramatic: the imports had been rounded up, marked down, and unceremoniously dumped into a bin near the front of the store, the old "RECORD DEN IMPORT" tags obscured behind much larger white bar-coded sale stickers. The back window, which we had used to keep an eye on things while eating lunch or having a smoke in the back room was completely obscured by a wall of portable tape cassette racks (since no one was ever to be in the back room anyway, there was no need for that window). Best of all, there was some god awful crossover R&B crap being played on the stereo that was so overwhelming the damaged speakers we'd left behind for the new tenants (I had helped blow those cones out a year or so before doing a particularly loud airing of disc 2 of Pink Floyd's P.U.L.S.E.) that it kinda made the whole enterprise feel pathetic and fake. I didn't feel any sorrow or anger, just an amused kind of contempt: the twenty-some-odd years of work put into that store's inventory and image had been undone virtually overnight, and walking into that Record Town that evening felt no different at all from entering NRM or Camelot.

We were told a few months later that the manager of that store had taken a lot of abuse over that Christmas season from customers who didn't know what had happened: many of them voicing displeasure with the new store, and nearly all of them asking where the hell the old stock and the old crew had gone. For a short time, I actually felt kind of bad for her as I wondered how I'd handle continually being subjected to that kind of grilling. Then I'd remember how that final Sunday at the old Record Den went and feel my face stretching into a mean-spirited, pitiless grin. Welcome to the machine, indeed.


P.S.: During our spring 1997 inventory, I returned from a lunch break spent in the food court and was told by our rascally District Manager that my mother had called, wanted me to call her back ASAP, and that she left the number she could be reached at. The DM had written the number down and left it by the phone in the back room. I gave him an "ok, thanks," headed back to the phone, dialed the number, and was immensely surprised when a throaty, breathless voice immediately started spelling out a number of sexual acts she wanted to perform on me right then and there. A free phone porn line!! Kick ass!!!

Of course, this little stunt was then perpetrated numerous times over the following weeks on other employees and store regulars when applicable. Towards the end of that awful final Sunday at the Den, in a fit of malicious pique, I wrote that same phone number down on a slip of paper in black magic marker and added the words MALL SECURITY on top of it. After a moment's hesitation, I taped it up on the wall at eye-level next to the phone line conduit as you see in the picture above. God, do I wish I could have been there to see their faces the first time they had a shoplifter. Ha haaa.

(Record Den pictures taken by Dave M.)