(Twenty Years) Part 16: Still In The Game

In 2001, the fortunes of the newly formed Walrus Music briefly mirrored those of the industry at large, though for very different reasons. Overall, our sales were doing fine, but the enforced removal of our most profitable area of business wound up derailing the year. Luckily, we managed to make up all of our lost momentum the following year and have been trucking ahead at varying speeds ever since. The music industry as a whole, however, was now starting to feel the first real pangs from widespread P2P downloading as yearly sales began to tumble from the stratospheric heights they had reached in 2000.

While there was a lot of worrying going on at the distribution level, the overall tone of discussion back then was still more hypothetical/"what if" than bleak or despairing. Since the real bad times had yet to arrive, a lot of people initially refused to believe that the sky was truly falling, instead maintaining that this drop in sales was some kind of brief contraction or correction, and everything would be dandy again as soon as people stopped sharing mp3s and were somehow forced to buy them instead. It would take the realities of the next three years to kill that line of thinking dead once and for all.

Somehow, while the music business declined over the ensuing years, Record Den's sales not only grew, but flourished. Even now, I'm not sure I can fully explain why this was the case, but I can offer up a few ideas that might solve the equation when added together ...

1. Adults

The fact that we are still open certainly doesn't mean that downloading had no impact on our business: of course it did, but we were, I think, able to trade off clientèles before the damage got out of control. Over the years, kids had noticeably vanished from our customer mix while we started seeing more and more new customers over the age of 30 instead, many of them driving in from the other side of Cleveland or points south to patronize our store. To reflect this shift, we started to alter the store's selection slightly away from an indie-rock intensive mix into something far more classic/progressive leaning in nature, while still seeking to retain the loyalties of the few teenagers who still believed in buying music as an actual physical product rather than simply hoovering it down by the gigabyte from a file sharing service.


2. Catalog

Meanwhile, after years of successfully attempting to smother competition by maintaining a massive inventory of music, the big boxes were beginning to scale back on CD floorspace in favor of DVDs, which were still a red-hot commodity. The once-impressive rows of CDs Best Buy used to boast suddenly started looking rather thin as they were now prioritizing guaranteed hit music over "marginal" catalog or independent releases/reissues. Sure, you could walk down an aisle there and see a truly massive U2 section sporting about 150 CDs, but upon closer inspection you'd realize that 130 of those CDs were copies of How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb with a couple copies each of 4 or 5 other titles sprinkled about for appearances sake.

This restructuring of priorities at the big boxes created an opening for us, and we charged straight into it. The Den started attracting people who had grown up with rock music and weren't quite ready to let go just yet. If we were going to keep them coming back, we were going to have to retain far more deep catalog than we ever had before, and we started adjusting our buying accordingly. Luckily, the major labels had started offering substantial discounts on their catalog in order to keep it moving outside of the big boxes, and Greg jumped feet-first into these buying programs, snapping up thousands of older CDs at reduced rates and passing the savings along to stimulate sales. We had always done a pretty good job with keeping some special, hard-to-find titles of local interest handy for whoever asked, but now we were actively cultivating a reputation as the place to get anything you hadn't heard in a quarter century or more.

Once we had the ability to buy direct from two of the biggest music companies in the world, it seemed like this end of the business really started to get rolling for us. I cannot stress enough how being able to buy directly from two of the biggest music distributors has greatly increased our ability to compete with big boxes since the catalog discount programs offered at the distributor level were far better than any one-stop could offer. For a year or so, our sale bins at the front of the store could have been called "The WMG Bins" as product from that distributor overwhelmed all else. When we got Universal opened up a year or so past that, the buying balance shifted again, and we now have what looks like a mini warehouse in the back room jammed solid with CDs from WEA and Universal. These programs, coupled with an explosion in cheaper old import titles, began to transmogrify our store into a kind of classic rock heaven on Earth.


3. Vinyl

Another factor in our longevity has been the completely unexpected re-emergence of vinyl (whether used or new) as a collectible format. Aside from dance and hip-hop 12" singles and the odd Pearl Jam LP, we had been pretty much out of the vinyl market from 1990 through the end of our days in the Great Lakes Mall. We hadn't had any plans to re-enter that market in our new location until a few months after re-opening, when a customer asked us one afternoon if we carried any vinyl records. Greg and I both shook our heads no, and when the customer then asked us why, neither of us could come up with a good answer.

With space to burn (and no better ideas to try out), we started buying and selling used LPs again for the first time in a decade. Initially, almost everything we set out to sell was priced at a dollar, with a few premium pieces going as high as five. Sales were steady, but slow, and as more people got wind of the fact that we'd take their old boxed-up records off their hands, our stock began to outgrow the bins we'd set aside to contain it. For some time, this became a concern, especially as we began stockpiling everyone's grandmother's record collections in boxes piled six feet high in the back room while the vinyl bins overflowed and spilled onto the floor. There were times when it was getting so crowded in the back that we were seriously considering shutting off all vinyl buying in an attempt to keep our stock under control, and that is when we started running into the E-bay people: the guys who earn a living buying crates of stuff at rock-bottom prices from anybody who would sell it to them and then finding people online who would pay them for whatever goodies they might come across.

At first, we were amused (and relieved) when the E-bay people would show up and cart off boxes of moldering records at a time, but it became apparent over time that LPs could become a valuable part of our profit margin, and we started becoming a bit more hands-on in the pricing and buying of used vinyl instead of simply buying everything in at a flat rate and blowing it out the door ASAP. While we still occasionally buy "by the pound" if a customer doesn't feel like going store-to-store looking for a better deal, we now have a pretty decent idea which records are worth paying more for (almost any band or act we've never heard of before) and, more importantly, which ones aren't (pretty much every album released on Columbia between 1973-1987).

These days, used vinyl sits in every open nook and cranny in the store, with the premium titles arranged semi-alphabetically in specially made bins in the back while everything else is boxed up or lined up wherever we can find room. Quite frankly, we need a better way to display our vinyl stock: sales have picked up in intensity to the extent that used LPs now regularly out-sell used CDs on a piece-count and dollar basis,and our used CDs are far easier to browse than our vinyl. Also, the profit we are able to realize from selling used vinyl has been instrumental in keeping us afloat and amending for the relatively thin margin afforded by contemporary CDs, thus we definitely owe it to ourselves to come up with some kind of new solution to displaying the hottest selling items in the store.

Now comes the weirdest part: over the last two years, used vinyl has started to bring back a good chunk of the younger customers we figured had been lost for good to downloading. Somehow, a lot of younger people have glommed onto vinyl being a more immersive, meaningful, and (let's not kid ourselves) hip listening experience than an mp3, and they have embraced the format to a mind-boggling extent, whether used or new. Where we once spent most of our time with visiting sales reps screaming about CD prices and crappy marketing ideas, now we're always pleading with them to get as much classic rock vinyl into the marketplace as quickly as possible, because we sell it faster than we can keep up with it.


For the first time since opening up at our current location, I think we've achieved the kind of store we'd always imagined we could run back in the old days when a slow afternoon could be spent blue-skying a Deak-free existence in the now-museum like expanse of Great Lakes Mall. We are all very proud of what Record Den has become and also hoping we can keep it going at full steam even as the U.S. economy goes to Hell in a hand basket all around us.

While the plan is to keep going as long as we can, the near future remains a bit hazy as I write this: our lease comes up next year, and preliminary negotiations between Greg and our corporate landlords have deadlocked over rent (they want to raise it over time, he wants a constant rate in exchange for a longer lease). For the time being, we're letting the landlords stew for a while as time is presently on our side: the longer we wait, the better idea we'll get of where we're going in a financial sense. Already lagging behind the pace of a flat 2007, we are now facing what could be a brutal summer, what with gas prices at 4 dollars a gallon (and the price of oil continuing to climb, dragging behind it the cost of just about everything else in existence) and the entertainment dollar being stretched tighter than perhaps at any point in the last thirty years. We're working just to keep ourselves respectably close to our target figures, but this has not been a banner year thus far.

What happens this summer (not to mention over the following Christmas) will impact any long range plans Greg comes up with between now and then. It's hard to guess what to expect, but I would be very surprised if Greg opts to stick in a fork in this operation next year, largely because we have an awful lot of inventory to sell, and barring the launch of a full-time internet operation, I can't imagine what the hell we'd do with all of this stuff should our day of reckoning come earlier than expected.

My feeling is that we'll end up renewing our lease on a year-to-year basis and keeping our options open. As long as people remain willing to buy music on a physical format in a retail environment, Greg will want to be open to provide that service. He has said many times in the past that he was playing to be the last man standing at local indie music retail, and you can certainly argue that he got his wish. I hope this doesn't sound like we're gloating, because we both miss the days of friendly competition and being able to visit places like Record Revolution, My Generation, Platterpuss, or Repeat The Beat: discovering cool imports and underground releases we'd never seen or heard before. This was part of the fun of working in this business, and most of it is now long gone. Sure, we're very happy to still have our doors open, but it's kind of a drag on a personal level when the nearest store that even remotely resembles our own is nearly 50 miles away.

While the business side is pretty much up to Greg, there is also a possible decision to be made on my end as well. While being a Den lifer thus far has brought a measure of reassuring stability to my life, I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I have stretches of dealing with John Q. Public that make me wonder how much longer I want to keep on doing this, (especially if we do wind up getting a multi-year lease offer to stick). After years of always taking the money instead of some time off, a vacation at last looks like a reality for me, and that might be enough to "reset" and refresh myself for a bit and simply get away from the grind. If it sounds waspish and antisocial to say that I need a break from being around people, then so be it. The status of Sarah's education and job will also weigh in on my decision, particularly if she feels that better opportunities are lying in wait outside of Ohio.

Certainly, there will be much dwelling, discussion and consideration as the end of this year draws close, but the one implacable constant lying at the bottom of all of this is the simple fact that I still love my job and the idea of dropping it on my own accord in lieu of an occupation that I don't love is a rather daunting prospect, to say the least.

(Twenty Years) Part 15: Raid

The once-booming market in live bootleg CDs had been in flux for some time in early 2001. In the years following the enforcement of GATT, finding workable sources for these illicit titles was like playing a game of Whack-A-Mole (for us as well as the authorities). Also, as good titles became harder to locate, the packaging standards had started to head down the tubes, both in terms of the once-ornate booklets and cover art as well as the source music, which was occasionally being sourced not from original show tapes but from compressed digital files grabbed right off of the internet.

Granted, these were bootleggers we were dealing with and not, say, Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, so there wasn't an awful lot you could say when you got a dozen copies of a Metallica concert burned onto a generic CD-R with paper artwork straight out of a cheap PC printer and the songs all separated by a second or two of silence (since the manufacturers not only used mp3 files, but couldn't even be bothered to burn the stupid shows using Disc-At-Once). It's not like these things were sold on any kind of returnable or guaranteed basis, either: once you bought 'em, they were yours forever. For the first time since we'd started buying them in the late 80s, the problems of carrying bootlegs were starting to outweigh the benefits.

Around the end of 2000, we had found a new and local source for boots, and we'd get our orders from this guy quite literally in pieces: that is, CDs in one box, artwork and jewel cases in another. It wasn't a ton of fun standing there behind the counter and putting these things together for hours on end, but I guess it beat shrink-wrapping stacks of Italian vinyl albums in the silent back room of J.J. Newberry's. It was, of course, right while I was elbow-deep in illicit CD components that a handful of Mentor's finest came barging into the store, demanding to talk to the owner right now, while two belligerent RIAA agents threatened us with immediate shutdown if we didn't comply with their demands. Wheeee.

Over the next three hours, we had to stand by and watched as hundreds of CDs were seized and removed from the premises by the RIAA goons, with the men in blue providing the muscle. The detective in charge of the operation handled the bust as fairly as we could have hoped for, considering we had been caught completely red-handed. The RIAA guys, on the other hand, were a couple of arrogant little woodpeckers who demonstrated an amazing ignorance of what was a bootleg CD and what was not: there were a flashes of contentiousness as we would testily point out to them that such-and-such particular import live release was not, in fact, a bootleg.

In the days and weeks afterward, some friends of ours speculated that Deak must have had something to do with this bust as the timing was just too perfect to ignore. Sure, conspiracy theorists have spun vast, intricate webs of causality out of far less remarkable coincidences, but I'm fairly certain that one had nothing to do with the other in this instance. But talk about a shitty opening week ... in one day, seven grand in inventory that had just been purchased from the previous owner was wiped from the books and is probably still sitting in an evidence storage room somewhere. Ouch. We were also forced to play nice with the RIAA and help them shut down our local boot distributor as a trade-off for avoiding prosecution. When all was said and done a few weeks later, we were given an admonition from the Mentor PD never to traffic in these recordings again and that was that.

While losing a ton of money was not what I had in mind, I'd been secretly wondering for years when we'd finally leave bootlegs behind, end our constant worrying about excess visibility and stop having to play dumb whenever we were asked directly what these discs were and where they were coming from. Financially, this was a nasty blow for an operation just getting started: we're fairly certain that the total loss of that area of business cost us the year as 2001 was the first of only 2 down years we've experienced since we opened in our current location (the other, being last year, was more flat than down). That said, it was a secret relief for me to close out that particular chapter of our existence.

(Twenty Years) Part 14: Emancipation

It was a year and change after I became the assistant manager of the store that the day we had been waiting for all these years finally arrived: Deak had decided at last to walk away from Record Den and was negotiating the sale of the store to Greg. Typically, we found out later through other sources that selling to Greg hadn't been Deak's first choice (shocker!), but apparently no one else had been interested in buying out the location, leaving him with no choice but to work with Greg's terms. I don't even want to think about what would have happened if he had sold a store out from underneath us again, but it certainly wouldn't have been pretty.

As you might have guessed by now, Greg's nearly three decades of loyal service to the Record Den chain were richly rewarded at the end as Deak relentlessly attempted to squeeze as much dosh as possible from anything not nailed down. The negotiations, such as they were, followed a similar pattern throughout: Deak ratcheted the price of every display fixture and desk organizer on the premises as high as he dared, and then Greg would endeavor to argue him down to a suitable meeting point. There were even a few times during this process when Greg would outright refuse an offer, either trying to play hardball or from outright disinterest (this was the case when Deak was asking silly money for the internet rights to the "Record Den" name, which we wound up declining).

Interestingly, we noticed during the negotiations that Deak still seemed to place a high value on the "Record Den" name on the wholesale front, yet he had to know as well as we did that our name was Mud as far as the industry at large was concerned. In reality, the only true value the words "Record Den" had to anyone was with our customers, none of whom had any idea of the credit shenanigans our company had pulled with the majors over the previous decade. That said, it's pretty surprising that Greg was able to get us an open account with WMG (Warner Music Group), and nothing short of miraculous that he eventually finagled a way to buy direct from Universal (the biggest of the Big Four, and the Godzilla of music distribution).

While I'm sure that Greg's longstanding reputation with many sales reps and promotional execs is a lot of what greased the wheels with WMG and Universal (particularly the former), it's also fair to assume that our new company name helped put their respective credit departments at ease. The creation of "Walrus Music" as a corporation was a deliberate move to separate this new venture from the old "Record Den" in the eyes of our would-be creditors. The name was the end result of Greg and I volleying Beatle-themed ideas back and forth for a day or so in search of a cool sounding company name. I would like to note here, for the record, that I think "Walrus Music" was a bit too obvious a choice: I was trying to come up with far more obscure points of Fab reference in my ideas. That said, I have to admit that Greg probably had a point when he noted that my favorite idea might not be the most inviting-sounding business name ever ("Hello, this is Slagger's! Can I help you?"), and since he was putting up the dough to start the corporation, "Walrus Music" won the battle.

With no announcement (save for the few friends and store regulars who had been aware of the situation) or fanfare whatsoever, Record Den officially became Greg's business at the end of March, 2001 with the newly-incorporated Walrus Music taking over all operations. While we looked exactly the same on the outside, it felt wonderful walking into the store that day, knowing that we would never have to deal with Deak on a professional basis again and relishing our new found independence. Finally the masters of our own destiny, we started working out new ideas on changing things around to our liking, and wouldn't you know, the first major change to the store occurred within days of Greg's taking control ... about two, to be precise.

(Twenty Years) Part 13: I Can't Quit You Baby

While I was never a stereotypical 90s "slacker" type in appearance, there is no question that my work ethic occasionally warranted an outside adjustment. At odd times, this was simply a matter of growing comfortable and complacent with the job, and there were a couple of other occasions where I was going through some kind of life turmoil that greatly interfered with my ability and/or willingness to do anything aside from show up and occupy space behind the counter. There were never shouting matches over this (this wasn't Greg's style), but the point would be made and, if necessary, enforced by my hours being reduced to part-time (spring 1994), or being placed on involuntary sabbatical in order to get my head together and figure out what the hell I was going to do with myself (spring/summer 1990).

By the middle of 1999, though, there were new forces in play that began to affect my work performance. For the first time since I was hired, I was finally starting to tire of forever being "third key." This change in attitude was precipitated by two factors: 1) I was pinned under the proverbial glass ceiling being the third man on a three-man crew, and 2) I had met Sarah during that spring and was presented with a choice to relocate, start anew, and perhaps move up from my present position whilst doing so.

When Beth (the store's longtime assistant manager since 1989) left Record Den at the dawn of 1997 for a job downtown with the Cleveland Indians organization, I was passed over for promotion by a co-worker who had been hired 6 years after me. Thankfully, there has never been any rancor between me and Brian (who had moved ahead of me) over this, for I knew full well that I had deserved the snub considering my recent performance, and the simple truth of the matter was that Brian was the better pick of the two of us due to his retail management experience from previous jobs.

Another factor that kept any possible hurt feelings at bay is that I had been offered management jobs in the company before (I had turned down, after much internal debate, an offer to run the Great Northern Mall store during the fall of 1995), and I figured it was only a matter of time before another opportunity presented itself. What I didn't count on, of course, was the complete disintegration of the entire chain over the next two years, which effectively left me stuck at #3 for the foreseeable future. D'ohh.

Towards the end of 1998, a new opportunity did come along, but not from Record Den: Scene magazine, a local entertainment newsweekly that I had been freelancing for over the previous two and half years, was being bought out by the Phoenix-based New Times media group (now called the Village Voice Media, as I discovered while researching this post). The situation at Scene was almost perfectly analogous to what had happened the year before at the store when Record Town had come calling: anyone who wanted to stay at Scene was offered employment under the new ownership, but it was going to be a very different kind of publication than what had existed before and, unsurprisingly, most of the editorial staff abandoned ship as the transition drew near.

From the tone of his voice, it sure didn't sound like incoming music editor at Scene was very pleased with the situation he was rapidly finding himself in as everyone walked off the plank instead of swearing eternal fealty to New Times. In a subsequent fit of pique, or perhaps in a "Year Zero"-styled move to wipe out the past and start from a new blank slate, New Times consigned the old Scene culture to oblivion as every single pre-transition article and review (thousands of record, movie and concert reviews, interviews and news stories covering the Cleveland music scene going back nearly 3 decades) vanished from the web archives forever. Jerks. I sure hope someone somewhere is keeping every issue of the old Scene magazine in safe, dry place, otherwise this represents an incalculable loss.

Anyway, back to that opportunity: as we watched a high school football game and chatted about the New Times situation one Friday night that October, Steve (my editor at Scene) told me of a brand new entertainment weekly called Spot that he was seeking to get off the ground. If memory serves, Steve had managed to snare three or four of the senior music writers (of which I was one) from Scene, along with a couple of other contacts/friends from the outside to make up his new staff.

The idea was that Spot would quickly move to flank Scene, which we knew was almost certainly going to veer away from the all-music format it had owned since its inception and skew towards the socio-political turf long patrolled by the Cleveland Free Times. Spot would also attempt to reclaim Scene's old territory with a more irreverent, eye-catching approach to news coverage than the well-worn, familiar Scene style (for reference points, Steve had in mind such vibrant British music monthlies as Q and Mojo). The most enticing prospect was that if everything worked out, we would would have the entire "local entertainment" playing field all to ourselves. After laying all of this out, Steve then asked me if I could commit full-time to the new venture.

At the risk of cheapening the moment with an unintentional pun, this was one of the toughest decisions I ever had to make on the spot. I had started freelancing for Scene on a pure lark in the spring of 1996 after years of wanting to make some kind of inroads into professional writing. The whole gig had come about from me asking a regular Scene contributor named Lee (who had been coming into the store for years) exactly how one applied for a writing position down there. Lee basically told me to knock off a few "demo" album reviews and send them down to Steve's office for approval. To my great surprise, I was brought on board immediately and started submitting copy within days, eventually "graduating" to concert reviews, interviews, and feature articles. While the pay was minimal and on a per-article basis, I was finally taking steps towards my old dream career, and what I was being offered by Steve that fall evening was basically the full-time writing job I'd been wanting for years.

However, there were two problems that made me chew this over for a minute or so before I could respond. Firstly, I knew that the survival rate of new startup magazines beyond six months wasn't very good, and regardless of their new approach, we'd be going up against two long-entrenched local 800 pound gorillas. Granted, Spot wouldn't be fighting the twin titans head on as our content would be quite different from theirs, but we would have to call in favors and take a lot of time setting up credentials, advertising accounts, and taking a long, slow route to possible success.

Then there was a question of loyalties, plain and simple. While I felt like I owed Steve for giving me a shot and then respecting me enough to offer a full-time position at his next venture, I had known Greg a decade longer and felt equally, if not more indebted to him for keeping me employed over the previous eleven years. As much as I loathed having Deak skulking around the back room all day, the thought of leaving Record Den when we were just getting started over again tore at my insides. After a few months of steadily increasing momentum, sales were starting to take off and we were all excited by what might be possible as our first Christmas season in our new location approached. To make a move to Spot, I would have to jump ship from the Den at the worst possible time to do so, and that alone was unthinkable. Even if the timing hadn't been as terrible as it was, I knew full well that there was no room for a fourth full-timer at the store, and if Spot were to fail, I would be pretty well screwed for a job, at least in the short-term.

After a minute or so of thinking everything over, I declined Steve's offer. I would be more than happy to keep on writing and coming up with content ideas, I told him, but I couldn't leave the store at this time after all we'd gone through to land it and then set it up. I think Steve understood, though I still felt terrible for turning him down. After I dropped him off at his apartment later that night and drove home down Route 2, I wondered if I might have just made the biggest mistake of my life, because it sure felt like it.

As it turned out, I couldn't have been more wrong: about four months later, after a half-dozen or so issues had been distributed around the Cleveland area to a promising initial response, it appears that, depending on how you interpret this brief wrap-up piece, either Steve had a catastrophic falling out with the publisher or (as I had heard) Spot's sole financier developed a lethal case of cold feet and pulled the plug on the whole enterprise. It didn't matter, really: Spot never published again. The dream was over.

Steve was a pretty low-key guy emotionally, but you couldn't miss the anger and betrayal in his voice as I talked to him a day or so after the shit hit the fan. I wasn't sure what to feel: on one hand, the end of Spot ultimately marked the end of my professional writing career. On the other, I had somehow made the wisest decision of my life to that point and thus had a full-time job to fall back on, while Steve (after a stint that following Christmas working for us as part-time help) eventually landed at Lincoln Electric for a while, then ran a CD Warehouse outlet in Mayfield, and now, it appears, lives in New York City.

Within weeks of Spot ceasing to exist, Sarah and I had become an online item, and as that situation developed further, the feeling that I wasn't going anywhere at Record Den had started to gnaw at me to the point where I was seriously considering moving to Columbia, Missouri (where she lived) to see what life had to offer a thousand miles from home. With hardly anything to keep me here if I left the store, the plan was that I'd work through Christmas, save up what I could, and move sometime in early 2000. This idea was sweetened considerably when Sarah informed me that the big record store in Columbia was now hiring for a full-time position. Yahtzee! I sent off a letter and resume to the store owner, shortly thereafter informing Greg of my plans.

January 2000 came around at last, and Western civilization had failed to collapse in on itself despite all the media hysteria that the Y2K bug would send us all back to the stone age at the stroke of midnight on New Years Day. I was just starting to make final preparations for the move when the news came down that the job I thought I had a fairly good shot at was not going to happen (and I'm very glad this news was passed on to me before the move, because Goat knows what the hell kind of chaos that little snafu might have wrought after I had already arrived in Columbia). With that opportunity gone, my spirit was broken and all the little doubts about this idea that had been flittering about in the back of my mind (that I had been studiously ignoring for weeks) suddenly became a very big deal. Perhaps a bit panicked by the sudden change in the situation, I began to reconsider the idea of moving, and wondered if I might be better off staying in Ohio instead.

As luck would have it, I didn't have to think about this very long: a week or so later, Brian had accepted an offer to work full time for our ex-assistant manager Beth at a warehouse she had opened in Willoughby. While he wouldn't be leaving Record Den permanently (he offered to work Sundays in order to keep up with the biz and give Greg and I a common day off), Brian would no longer be available to be a full-time assistant manager, and the job was suddenly mine if I wanted it.

Not being a complete moron, I accepted the promotion.

(Picture of me flipping the bird while reading Q magazine by Dave M.)

(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.)

(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.)

(Twenty Years) Part 9: The Downward Spiral

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 ...

OK, I realize that I left things off on a bit of a cliffhanger note in my last "Twenty Years" installment, but I figured this might be a pretty good time to discuss the long, slow, agonizing disintegration of the Record Den chain and keep you all in suspense as to What Happened Next for a little while longer. Mua ha haaaaa.

From the time of its incorporation circa 1970 until the middle of the 1980s, the success of the Record Den more or less mirrored that of the music business as a whole. While the purse strings were ultimately controlled by the company offices in downtown Cleveland, the individual stores were managed by crews of enthusiastic, knowledgeable personnel who were passionate about music and knew how to attract others of their stripe. A sizable percentage of the managers of these stores had been hired or trained by Greg at the old Great Lakes Mall location, and it was largely this group (or "cult of personality" as the main office might have viewed them) that had been the most directly responsible for the stature Record Den once attained around the Cleveland area.

By 1985, with the industry emerging confidently from the post-disco crash and riding the building wave of the CD/MTV era, the chain had been expanding beyond metro-Cleveland and into outlying areas of Ohio (Dayton, Bowling Green, Niles) and neighboring states (Indiana, Pennsylvania, Michigan). It was also around this time that the owner of the company (we'll refer to him from now on as "Deak") dropped the news to everyone that he intended to purchase a warehouse space on the east side of Cleveland and move to centralize buying operations through the main office.

The stated intent of this change in the way the chain did business was to save money, mostly by combining all of the little shipments of product moving in dribs and drabs from the distributors to each individual store into "box lot" amounts sent straight to the warehouse loading docks in order to the incur the volume discounts offered by labels to accounts who buy things by the box instead of by the handful. Problem is, the costs of distributing the product from the warehouse to all of the outlying stores (whether by company driver or UPS) tended to eradicate whatever meager amount that was saved by buying centrally. That's before we even consider the greatly-increased costs of renting the warehouse space, hiring and maintaining a staff to pull, shelve, ship and receive orders, and paying a full-time product buyer (a task once handled individually by all of the managers for no additional cost). With all of these new costs factored in the equation, the sum is, at best, a break-even proposition for a chain of maybe a dozen stores, which is exactly what Record Den was at the time.

A stab in the general direction of thrift may have been Deak's stated intention, but there was almost certainly a matter of pride behind his new warehouse as well. While he had greatly benefited from jumping into the music business at exactly the right time and letting the people who knew what they were doing guide the direction of the company for 15 years, Deak yearned to play on the same level (and thus be awarded the same respect) as locally-based major leaguers Camelot and The Record Exchange. This new warehouse was to be our notice to the industry that we intended to swim with the big fish in the little pool, and the line to start puckering up and kissing our ass starts riiiight over here, thankyouverymuch.

From the day Deak informed him of his idea, Greg was against the plan and tried to get across to Deak the simple concept "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." But Deak's biggest flaw (and believe me, he has a few) was that he was a proud man who didn't take criticism for his own ideas very well, especially from people who worked for him. In the end, being the founder and owner of the company, it was Deak's call to make and he wasn't about to be talked out of his pipe dream but something so mundane and boring as realistic expectations. So it was that the warehouse was soon opened for business, and that decision was the start of the long downward spiral into which Record Den fell over the next decade.

The next step taken by Deak (referred to in an earlier post in the series), was the computerization of the company's inventory on a store-by-store basis. As each store was brought online, a buying program Deak had commissioned was implemented to automate the business of (re)stocking inventory. I'm not sure when this buying program was originally written or for what kind of music, but it was often set almost completely at odds with the way any sane record store would buy their product, particularly in the way it multiplied ordered copies based on sales. Let's say a new Rush album was being released this week and we ordered 100 copies right off the bat, knowing that Rush fans show up early and in force to obtain their long-awaited new album. Once that wave has hit, the game is up, and you can sell 75 copies of that new album in a week and then maybe 25 over the next year. Unfortunately, the buying program used by the warehouse didn't think that way, and unless you could short-circuit the process, you'd sell 75 copies of that Rush album in a week and then get shipped about 100 more the following Monday. With experienced managers, this program tic would be a minor irritation, but with the crop of inexperienced managers hired over the next few years following the transition, it often resulted in stores being choked with dozens of copies of hit albums they didn't need in the first place.

This buying problem gets further compounded when you then factor in returns: the major labels cut off unlimited product returns after they were nearly snowed under during the post-disco crash, and one-stops generally function on a "you can return 1 piece for every 10 you buy" rule, so if Record Den was buying too much product to return quickly, we had to kinda "swish it around" the system for a while. Attempts at controlling buying costs a few years later resulted in comical amounts of dead inventory being shunted around from new store to new store in order to fill these locations up with anything that was handy in the hopes that some of that nonreturnable merchandise would sell off before it was boxed up and sent abroad once again.

Things were shaky enough with one buyer (an expatriate from NRM) and an outmoded restocking system, but the addition of a full-time indie buyer in 1994 might have been Deak's worst idea during my tenure with the company. I believe the reasoning here was that our main buyer was too overwhelmed dealing with the major labels to divert attention to all of the small fry doing business underneath the radar, and with these labels suddenly a hot item in the wake of breakthrough independent albums by The Offspring, Rancid, Morphine, and Liz Phair, (not to mention sundry pre-Pearl Jam/early Nirvana projects), it was decided someone should be delegated to man the pump in that area alone.

To virtually no-one's surprise, the woman Deak selected for this task was in way over her head and had absolutely no idea what in the hell she was doing, and within months we were becoming bogged down in no-name garage-rock, techno, low-fi pop and punk records that did little but collect dust. Six months to a year later, the stores cleared these records out from their inventory to make room for newer product and all of these unsold independently-distributed titles wound up back in the warehouse from whence they came. A year or so after the indie boom came the inevitable shake-out, and while some of the more popular minor labels quietly consolidated back-door deals with the majors, a bunch of operations simply went out of business and disappeared into the night, sticking us with skids of unsaleable (and, more importantly, nonreturnable) CDs that damn near capsized the company.

If there is one thing Greg and Deak have in common, it is a stubborn streak, and their opposing ideas as to how to run the stores often resulted in arguments where neither side would easily back down. By sheer force of will, Greg had largely managed to shield the Great Lakes Mall store from Deak's worst transgressions of taste and logic, and he had also developed over time a way of "handling" edicts from corporate that managed to both soothe Deak's ego and keep his own sanity intact. Among the initiatives we successfully ducked during those years:

* A pointless, profit-free alliance with Ticketmaster. The money for the tickets being sold went nearly entirely to Ticketmaster while we were awarded the "privilege" of selling their ducats (and a single-digit slice of the pie). As to whether our slice was ever big enough to make up for additional employees being scheduled to handle a long line of people whenever Wrestlemania was announced, you'd have to ask Deak, but I get the distinct idea it wasn't.

* Those "frequent buyer cards" that promised a "free CD" after every 20 purchases. This was a direct rip from the Camelot playbook and, funnily enough, we still get asked about reinstating the program to this day, which only underlines the fact that very few people ever figured out how these things really work. You see, any store accepting these cards could only place x amount of items on sale (say, 20 or so). With everything else basically at (or close to) full list price, chances were that you, the customer, were actually paying more for each CD you purchased on that program than you normally would if most of the stock was on sale instead (which is the way we've always preferred to run it). Ergo, by the time you were finally rewarded with your "free CD," you had, in effect, already paid for it (and then some).

* Deak had a bizarre fascination with coin-op machines, whether they dispensed gum balls, M&Ms, lottery numbers or your goddamned horoscope. We were constantly under siege to have these things installed in our store and Greg always found inventive ways to keep them out.

There were also a few battles we couldn't win, such as being forced to hire Deak's daughter to work alongside us, which at least beat having to hire his son, I suppose (we barely managed to keep him out). Worse, Deak also had some interminable hard-on for kiddie fads all throughout the 1990s, and we were constantly getting boxes of stuffed animals and other silly shit to feature at the front counter. What prompted our sudden leap into Disneyland is beyond me, but I'd wager that Deak was getting hammered by phone vendors to keep up with the whole hacky sack/Beanie Baby/Tickle-Me-Elmo/slap bracelet thing ("I just sold 100,000 to Camelot Records, you know!!"). It was bad enough that Deak was apparently a sucker for this crap, but he also fussed over the merchandising of these products to a near-obsessive degree (likely because he had been talked into purchasing hundreds of the fucking things and needed to blow them out ASAP). In an act of inspired vengeance, Greg "performed surgery" on one of Deak's insanely annoying Talking Elmo dolls, removing the original pressure-triggered voice box and replacing it with "The Final Word" from Spencer's. Thus, instead of saying "Elmo love you!" and "Let's play!," our specially modified Muppet would drop such bon mots as "You're an asshole!" "Fuck you!" and "Eat shit!"

While we waged our little battles with Deak, the decline of the chain continued inexorably onward and eventually became noticeable to those on the outside. With so much money tied up in junk and maintaining an increasingly unprofitable warehouse/office suite, costs had to be cut quickly and the easiest way to gain a few spare bucks is to restrict buying (or in our case, buying and paying). While returns were restricted, labels would still sell you as much as you were allowed to buy and then bill you for it in 30-60 days. If no payment was made after that point, you were shut off until at least some money came down the pike, and it was here that the Record Den name became infamous in wholesale as office employees would beg and plead for leniency over the phone with credit departments, staving off payments for as long as possible. During any given week in the mid 90s, we were usually on credit hold with at least one of the Big Six (as they were back then), and often more.

The biggest danger to this practice of always being on hold was missing out on new releases, and to make sure we cleared that hurdle, we would buy from one-stops (industry parlance for "middle men") to land the hot stuff until we came off hold with whatever company it was that was mad at us that particular week. Over time, as credit holds got longer in duration and spread across multiple companies, the one-stops began to shoulder a significant burden of our business and, as you can probably guess, we eventually started getting into trouble with them as well over erratic (or skipped) payments.

It's never a good sign when a chain is on hold with the majors, but when said business can't even afford to keep up with the one-stops (who are then opting to conduct further business C.O.D. rather than risk accepting a rubber check), that is the surest sign to everyone that there is blood in the water. Even Deak (who had been continually distracted by a long and messy divorce) knew things were looking pretty bad for the company, and he finally came to the realization that desperate times called for desperate measures ...