(Twenty Years) Part 12: The Dead Walk!

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 ...

We'd been privy to random strokes of luck (both good and bad) over the years, but this one just might have topped them all: Record Town had royally fucked up. Big time.

At odd times over the month of December, Greg and Deak would discuss the new store we had been promised in exchange for working that Christmas season at Great Northern Mall. The news from Deak was, at first, discouraging: it was a foregone conclusion that a non-compete clause in the sales contract that had been drawn up for the Great Lakes Mall store would keep us out of the city of Mentor for good (or long enough that it might as well be). In most cases, the terms of these agreement keep you from operating anywhere within five-miles of the place you sold your property to, which would mean that if we wanted to call ourselves "Record Den," we'd have to open somewhere in Willoughby, possibly Painesville, or maybe even Mayfield Heights.

Before we started scouting out locations, we'd need to know exactly what our legal options were, and Greg asked Deak to verify what we could and couldn't get away with. A few days later, the word came back from Deak's lawyer: not only was no such "safe distance" spelled out anywhere in the agreement, but there wasn't a "non-compete" clause in the contract at all.

We looked at each other, stunned, as this news was relayed to us: this was better than we ever could have hoped for. Deak set about looking for a vacant location in Mentor and eventually settled on a half-empty strip mall that was located within sight of Great Lakes Mall which, for our old customers, would make us a cinch to locate. On the negative side, however, we would also be about 500 feet from the front door of the local Best Buy location: certainly not the most desirable new place to set up shop, but it was the best option available.

With the opening of the new Mentor location set for early February, we had to play out the string at Great Northern just a little bit longer. For me, this was easier said than done: the standard post-Christmas slowdown that had always driven me to distraction in Mentor was far worse in North Olmstead, probably because I was now driving about 40 miles to feel bored instead of 5 and change. I tried to let the promise of a new store forty minutes closer to home give me the energy to withstand the grind out there for a couple more weeks, but by the middle of January, with the Fiero continuing to run erratically and real winter weather finally starting to arrive in the area, I couldn't take it out there anymore and requested a week off, timing my first day back at work to be the day we started fixing up our new location.

Our new digs had previously been the domain of a waterbed emporium and had been vacant for some time. Most of the preliminary work our District Manager had done was centered around removing some old drywall slabs that had once sectioned off the floorspace for display purposes and replacing them with two new (and slightly leaning) walls that sectioned the store off into a sales floor and a back room. The dimensions of the new back room were quite large, giving us room for a rear manager's office and nearly thirty feet of open space opposite that space for ... a whole lot of storage and a lunch table, I guess. It seemed like a lot of space was being wasted back there, but the sales floor itself was more than big enough to suit our purposes for the time being, so we didn't really mind.

One of the first things we did was relocate a freakin' huge two-level counter squatting uselessly in the back room area to the front of the store. That behemoth was absolute murder to move (and will likely never move again without busting), but we figured (correctly) that Greg would positively flip over the all the open space he would have to place piles of CDs, blank tapes, lighters, patches, incense, key chains, and whatever else he could think of in people's faces. To this day, the front counter remains the center of the action, if you will: all regulars who drop by make it a point to stop there first and scope out what is new, noteworthy, or on special.

It ultimately took us the better part of a decade to fully utilize all of the room we had available in this new store: early on, we were far more spacious than we are as I write this. While the basic layout of the new Record Den is still pretty much the same as it was in early February 1998, this location was stitched together slowly, as pieces and parts from the old "Traveling Road Show" arrived whenever another location closed down, and it was this haphazard fashion of acquiring displays (and product) that allowed us to shape and re-shape the store over time.

By the time we opened the new location on Saturday, February 14, 1998, a conga line of mis-matched CD bins stretched down the entire middle length of the store. The east wall was dominated by cassette display cases, while plastic and metal shelving occupied the slat boards arranged from head-to-toe level everywhere else. As a final touch, we hung up dozens of rock-themed black tapestries from the acoustical tiles in the ceiling (a little display trick we'd picked up from Great Northern) to try and eat up some of what felt like an ocean of open space.

With a little spit and polish, we had made ourselves look presentable for the public, but a few new issues were already presenting themselves by Opening Day, with a few more coming up over our first few months of operation that not only dulled our early euphoria, but also made us begin to regret our decision to stay within the Record Den corporation.

The first issue we had was the new sign for the store: done on the cheap (surprise!), it was a two-piece red-on-yellow design printed on lightweight corrugated plastic that tended to bow and vibrate in the wind. While it was big, bright and clearly visible from hundreds of feet away, it was also a major pain in the ass to deal with. None of us liked the sign from the day we set it up (we had to use transparent packing tape to hold the damn thing together, for crissakes), and it often came loose from its mooring, even blowing halfway down on a few gusty (and embarrassing) occasions.

Far more worrisome to us was the product situation, which was in flux once again. While boxes of CDs and tapes had been shipped our way the instant we started setting up shop, there were nowhere near enough of them for our liking. Despite loading up the TELXON with stock orders, very little was appearing from the warehouse, and a lot of what was appearing was obviously being shunted our way from other stores in the chain. To our mounting irritation, it had become apparent that we'd be opening with only a skeleton inventory: our initial plan had been to overwhelm people from the instant we opened, in effect saying "we're back and nothing is changed!" but that was just not to be.

Basically, two things had happened:

1. The money from the sale of the Mentor store was already nearly used up, and Deak was in the process of selling off the rest of the chain piecemeal. One of the stores he sold that spring was the Great Northern Store we had just refurbished over the previous Christmas break. It's only business, of course, but I felt oddly cheated to have spent five weeks of my time getting that store back on its feet only to have it sold to NRM the minute we were finished.

2. Deak was in the process of completely screwing over every single major supplier he did business with. Playing shell games with his money (largely as a result of his divorce settlement), he cried poverty with the major labels, declaring himself bankrupt and forced the labels to either accept reduced payments (say, ten cents on the dollar) or nothing at all. The labels, having no choice, took the reduced amounts and zeroed out their Record Den accounts for good. It was stunts like this that left the chain saddled with an absolutely horrendous reputation at the wholesale level: a reputation that would be tripping us up for years to come as we'd search for new or alternate suppliers as the need arose.

Then came the worst news of all: with the Record Den chain being chopped up and sold off to the highest bidder, Deak obviously had no further need for a warehouse. With only one or two remaining stores left to worry about, he also had no need for his support staff. Paring down the workforce to two (both of them largely secretarial positions), Deak shuttered the warehouse/headquarters complex in Mayfield and relocated his office ... to the "mysteriously" over-sized back room of our new store.

To say we were horror struck by this development would be underselling it: things had been tense enough around the store when we dealt with Deak face-to-face only once or twice a week during the transition and opening, but now we'd be dealing with his presence every day for the foreseeable future. Once we realized the real reason the back room was so large, it became obvious that this move had been in the cards from the day this new store had been picked out. Moreso than ever before, I thought we should have bolted when we had the goddamned chance. I felt like we'd been had.

Greg wasn't at all pleased with this development either, but he had also been developing a fair degree of bargaining leverage with Deak ever since the selling of the Great Lakes Mall store and the refurbishing of the Great Northern Mall location. Thus, an understanding of sorts had apparently been reached between the two of them: no matter what, he knew what he was doing and Deak was to step back and keep out of the way and let us run the store as we saw fit. Incredibly, this understanding seemed to sink in, and Deak largely stayed out of our hair over the next three years. It wasn't always easy having him back there, and there were a few occasions when Greg would deliberately play the loudest, most obnoxious CD he could get his hands on (Deak's office was positioned directly below one of the massive speakers at the rear of the sales floor) as a measure of revenge for being second-guessed or micromanaged.

It took a while for our new location to become viable: business had started off very wobbly (our gross total for the month of February, 1998 amounted to less than a current week's total business), but by the fall we'd started to hit a respectable stride upon which we could base our expectations from month to month. We also changed greatly in character as a store: following many years of being a "Top 40" kind of outlet in composition and sales, competition with the Evil Empire across the street had started us down in a far more overtly college rock/underground direction. Within a year or so, we had started figuring out how to flank Best Buy and eke out an existence batting clean-up on some mainstream titles while delving farther into independent, deep catalog, and import product.

As time passed, and the effects of the music industry's short-sightedness became more apparent, we began to realize just how lucky we had been in the long run that Deak had sold the Great Lakes store out from under us. It's funny to write this now, but Deak's desperate, ill-fated attempt to save his own floundering company ultimately resulted in what we have now (though certainly not by conscious design). We now depend heavily on used vinyl, CDs, DVDs and even some VHSs to generate the profit margins that are now a near-impossibility with contemporary hits, and this reliance would have been impossible in the mall (who frowned on the idea of anything used being sold anywhere on the premises). We have no dress codes, no silly restrictions on window displays, no enforced sidewalk sales, we can set our own opening and closing times and we play whatever music we like. Perhaps even more than our original run-down, cluttered J.J. Newberry's location, this is truly our own store.

Oh, one more angle to follow up before we move on: not long after we opened, a gaggle of Record Town execs stopped by for a visit and oh, were they pissed. No longer was it all smiles and "glad to have you aboard," but instead a lot of veiled threats, banging of shoes on tables and cries of "vee vill crush you!!" I sometimes wonder if one of these guys (or, more likely, some poor schmuck in their legal department) eventually lost their head for neglecting to dot their i's and cross their t's when they drew up that sales agreement for the Great Lakes Mall store. It didn't matter much in the long run: within a year, they had quit fencing with Camelot Music and opted to simply swallow them up instead. In time, this newest subsidiary of the Record Town empire changed their name to FYE (For Your Entertainment), and their massive, sprawling "lifestyle"-themed superstore was cut down to less than half its old size and refitted into a typical mall record store. C'est la vie.

(Pictures of the store taken by Dave M.)