Sci-Fi From My Wonder Years II

In an effort to get caught up with the massive backlog of DVDs and DVD-Rs stacking up in a silently mocking fashion in the office and on the shelves downstairs, I am attempting to start watching these things at a more accelerated pace (say, more than one every few weeks) for as long as is feasible and writing about the ones I feel are worth passing along. Perhaps this way I'll keep myself writing and hopefully lose this nagging feeling that I am unwittingly turning this condominium into a museum full of pretty silver discs. I'll also try to keep the spoilers to a minimum. Promise.

Trancers falls into that low-budget 80s sci-fi subgenre inhabited by such peers as The Terminator and Wavelength in that all of these films seem to be set in the shadier areas of Los Angeles after dark, all of them feature score music almost exclusively provided by "futuristic" synthesizers and whose characters live in neon-lit, austere living spaces that look like they were previously used in a Missing Persons video.

While it starts off wobbly establishing the 23rd century world where we first meet Jack Deth, Trancers gets into motion the instant Deth is sent "down the line" to 1985 in what plays almost exactly like an R-rated episode of Quantum Leap. Thomerson is tough as nails and impossible not to like, as is a pre-stardom Helen Hunt who plays his 20th century love interest. A complete treat, and a joy to rediscover again all these years later.

That said, I must pass along a buyer beware on the DVD edition, which seems to follow the same low-budget chic as the original feature, but with a few even cheaper quirks: I'd swear this was transferred straight from VHS. The website linked off the main menu doesn't appear to exist anymore. There is a also TRAILERS option on the main menu that when accessed tells you that over 40 trailers are available to view the moment you flip the disc over. Problem is, the other side of the DVD is coated in artwork and, of course, has nothing on it. How can I not smile at such lame authoring technique?

On the other extreme of the budget scale from Trancers sits what is, in my humble opinion, one of the all-time greats of any genre: Ridley Scott's bleakly futuristic film noir epic Blade Runner.

Wal-Mart stirs CD pricing pot with multi-tiered plan

By Ed Christman Sat Mar 1, 9:14 PM ET

NEW YORK (Billboard) - The major music companies have been resistant to lowering their price on CDs, but now they may be dragged to that point: Wal-Mart, the largest retailer of music with an estimated 22 percent market share, has proposed a five-tiered pricing scheme that would allow the discounter to sell albums at even lower prices and require the labels to bear more of the costs.

According to sources, the Wal-Mart proposal would allow for a promotional program that could comprise the top 15 to 20 hottest titles, each at $10. The rest of the pricing structure, according to several music executives who spoke with Billboard, would have hits and current titles retailing for $12, top catalog at $9, midline catalog at $7 and budget product at $5. The move would also shift the store's pricing from its $9.88 and $13.88 model to rounder sales prices.

Executives at the Bentonville, Arkansas-based discounting giant wouldn't comment on the specifics of their promotion, but Wal-Mart divisional merchandise manager for home entertainment Jeff Maas acknowledged the proposal. "When you look at sales declines with physical product, and you have a category declining like it is, you have to make decisions about what the future looks like," he said. "If you have a business that is declining and you want to turn it around, it really takes looking at it from all angles."

Maas referenced the DVD business as a model for tiered pricing. "(It) has been around for years and has worked very well," he said.

While Wal-Mart's negotiations with the labels have yet to take place, the proposal is already causing agita at the majors. Some consider the proposal a non-starter, others say further negotiations might eventually yield a workable solution, and a few see it as appropriate, given the big picture.

"I don't think this is a Wal-Mart discussion," one top executive at a major label said. "I think this is a future-of-the-business discussion. Right now everyone is paralyzed."

Some executives raised the question of whether the Federal Trade Commission would take issue with such a program were it rolled out only to Wal-Mart. But one executive said, "Making it legal is not the difficult part. The difficult part is coming to terms with it."

Another top executive said, "The decision might come down to: Do we give up 20 percent of our business (i.e., Wal-Mart) in order to not lose the entire business?"

That question assumes that Wal-Mart would either penalize or stop doing business with a major that decides not to participate in the pricing program. Moreover, if all majors take a pass, some speculate that Wal-Mart could pull music entirely from the store.

This type of speculation abounds, although the Wal-Mart proposal was presented only as a starting point. One label executive said, "This sounds like the Hail Mary pass, and if it doesn't work, they could be out of the music business; or maybe they reduce music down to a couple of racks" from the 4,000 titles carried by Wal-Marts with larger selections.

Maas declined to rule out those possibilities, but said he'd rather look at how Wal-Mart can help a declining category. "The customer votes every single day in our stores, and based on what they want is how we merchandise our stores."

Reuters/Billboard

Ruh roh, Raggy ...

Dear Music Industry,

Don't you just love it when the 800 pound gorillas you helped create start throwing their weight around and now have you bent over the proverbial barrel? Looks like your biggest customer is gonna start a whole new game of hardball and dictate terms to you, the very people whom they pay to supply them with their music stock. Funny old world, isn't it.

I can see you all sitting in the meeting rooms, throwing up your hands and crying poverty and maintaining to anyone who will listen that Wal-Mart is asking for the moon and stars, yet at the same time I can hear the wheels turning upstairs as you try to think of how this idea might .... just might ... bail your asses out of the frying pan, at least for the short term. We all know how seductive short term thinking is for you guys, but before you pick up the pen in desperation and sign on to this agreement, try just for once to think beyond the next quarter and walk this thing through. I'm not saying "NO! DON'T DO EET! EET'S TOO SEXY!!", but asking in effect how you're going to handle the rest of your business if you give in to your rampaging pet monster once again. What next? Will an almost certainly enraged Best Buy get the same pricing consideration when they angrily demand it? How about Target? One-stops? Independent accounts?

I guess we'll just have to wait and see how all of this falls into place. Depending on how serious Wal-Mart is with this idea (and whether they use it as a "either you are with us or against us" tactic to get their way), I get the impression this deal will not get off the table in its present form, but I can't rule out the idea of a compromise reached by all parties, especially as Sony/BMG and Universal are already experimenting with deep-discounting their lower-priced catalog tiers in a pricing fashion similar to what is in this article. If these new promotions are tied into the proposal reported above, it's not very difficult to imagine WEA and The Company That Was Once Respectfully Referred To As EMI falling into line.

I'd be delighted to see an across-the-board re-figuring of pricing strategies from the label, but I want to see these new prices offered to everyone, not just the one or two companies who can scream louder than all the others combined. That said, remembering how Universal caved in to these guys in the wake of the JumpStart kickoff, I'm also bracing for bad news.

I guess this is where Matt Drudge would say "developing ..."

Not The NY Times Book Review, 2008 Edition

The Road

World War Z

My Bass And Other Animals

The World Without Us

The Mad Scientists Club

The Assault On Reason

ILM

A Rough Guide To Pink Floyd

The Buzzard

Mind Over Matter 4

Taken By Storm

(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 ...

Record Den Top 100 Sellers Of 2007

1. TRAVELING WILBURYS Traveling Wilburys Collection
2. BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN Magic
3. THE WHITE STRIPES Icky Thump
4. THE RASPBERRIES Live On Sunset Strip
5. RUSH Snakes & Arrows
6. LINKIN PARK Minutes To Midnight
7. MICHAEL STANLEY Soft Addictions
8. LED ZEPPELIN Mothership
9. PAUL McCARTNEY Memory Almost Full
10. NEIL YOUNG Live At Massey Hall
11. THE SHINS Wincing The Night Away
12. VELVET REVOLVER Libertad
13. NINE INCH NAILS Year Zero
14. OZZY OSBOURNE Black Rain
15. EAGLES Long Road Out Of Eden
16. SMASHING PUMPKINS Zeitgeist
17. DAVID GILMOUR On An Island
18. WILCO Sky Blue Sky
19. FOO FIGHTERS Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace
20. ARCADE FIRE Neon Bible
21. GENESIS A Trick Of The Tail
22. PINK FLOYD Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
23. BONE THUGS 'N HARMONY Strength & Loyalty
24. LED ZEPPELIN Led Zeppelin IV
25. AMY WINEHOUSE Back To Black
26. FALL OUT BOY Infinity On High
27. LED ZEPPELIN Led Zeppelin II
28. INSANE CLOWN POSSE The Tempest
29. ROBERT PLANT & ALISON KRAUSS Raising Sand
30. TWIZTID Independent's Day
31. PINK FLOYD The Dark Side Of The Moon
32. GENESIS Live Over Europe
33. NEIL YOUNG Chrome Dreams II
34. KANYE WEST Graduation
35. DREAM THEATER Systematic Chaos
36. BLACK SABBATH The Dio Years
37. NICKELBACK All The Right Reasons
38. LED ZEPPELIN The Song Remains The Same
39. SPOON Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
40. JOSH GROBAN Noel
41. HELLYEAH Hellyeah
42. ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA Out Of The Blue
43. THE DOORS The Best Of The Doors
44. INTERPOL Our Love To Admire
45. NEIL YOUNG Greatest Hits
46. GENESIS Wind & Wuthering
47. LED ZEPPELIN Houses Of The Holy
48. U2 The Joshua Tree
49. KORN Untitled
50. MARILYN MANSON Eat Me, Drink Me
51. MODEST MOUSE We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
52. BUCKCHERRY 15
53. SERJ TANKIAN Elect The Dead
54. RINGO STARR Photograph: The Very Best Of Ringo Starr
55. PORCUPINE TREE Fear Of A Blank Planet
56. GENESIS And Then There Were Three
57. TODD RUNDGREN A Wizard, A True Star
58. T.I. T.I. Vs. T.I.P.
59. MEGADETH United Abominations
60. ELLIOTT SMITH New Moon
61. GENESIS Duke
62. JOHN FOGERTY Revival
63. GENESIS 1976-1982
64. BLOC PARTY Weekend In The City
65. GENESIS Genesis
66. EDDIE VEDDER Into The Wild
67. TYPE O NEGATIVE Dead Again
68. THE JAMES GANG Rides Again
69. CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL Chronicle Vol. 1
70. KID ROCK Rock N Roll Jesus
71. STARZ Come Out At Night: Live In Ohio
72. AVRIL LAVIGNE Best Damn Thing
73. PETER, BJORN & JOHN Writer's Block
74. FERGIE Dutchess
75. MUSHROOMHEAD Savior Sorrow
76. SILVERSUN PICKUPS Carnavas
77. MICHAEL STANLEY BAND Right Back At Ya
78. DOWN Over The Under
79. QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE Era Vulgaris
80. MAROON 5 It Won't Be Soon Before Long
81. DAUGHTRY Daughtry
82. THE BLACK KEYS Magic Potion
83. LED ZEPPELIN Presence
84. DEEP PURPLE Machine Head
85. THE BEATLES Abbey Road
86. THE BEATLES Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
87. 50 CENT Curtis
88. GENESIS Turn It On Again: The Tour Edition
89. PRINCE Planet Earth
90. BJORK Volta
91. BRIGHT EYES Cassadaga
92. NORAH JONES Not Too Late
93. AKON Konvicted
94. RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS Stadium Arcadium
95. FUNKADELIC Maggot Brain
96. HINDER Extreme Behavior
97. GENESIS Abacab
98. GENESIS Foxtrot
99. THE TUBES The Tubes
100. STEPHEN STILLS Just Roll Tape - April 26th 1968

(Twenty Years) Part 8: The Fog Of War

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 ...

From the time I started until the end of 1994, unfriendly competition was rare in our little neck of the woods. There were dozens of record stores of varying shapes, sizes and ownerships scattered around the area, from the monoliths (Camelot Music, HMV) and mid-sized chains (Coconuts, Record Exchange, Repeat The Beat, Record Den) to little niche indie shops (My Generation, Chris' Warped Records, Ultrasound, Shattered Records, Record Revolution, Music Vault), yet there was enough business around for everyone to eke out their own slice of the pie.

While the occasional new release "scoop," midnight sale, or in-store appearance (Lita Ford at Camelot, Michael Stanley at our "grand re-opening") might drive some fickle shoppers from one location to another, no one was really at each other's throats back then. At the Den, we had been friendly with most of the employees in both of our competitors stores for years, even going so far as hiring a couple of ex-Camelot workers (namely Dale and Nate) on occasion. In the 80s, when Record Carnival was still around and a few doors down the mall from our old Newberry's location, we would often do trades with them when we needed something they had in bulk (or vice versa). As for NRM, well, I'd been harboring a bit of a crush on the manager of the location down the mall from us, but alas, she was married, and I wound up instead in an intense, yet disconnected dalliance with a younger clerk (who had ostensibly been going to set me up with her boss) as a kind of consolation prize.

Eventually, the low-key, eased relations between our stores began to change when "big boxes" began to arrive in the area under the names of Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Media Play, and Circuit City. Wal-Mart was the first of these new outlets to arrive (1991, if memory serves), but had very little impact on anyone's music business due to a company-wide policy of refusing to sell any "stickered" (parental advisory) product. The mass-merchant did present a bit more of a problem when it came to competition on the growing country music market, of course, but this was a genre we had never considered a cornerstone of our business and we were willing to cede that area to them and concentrate on the alternative and classic rock market (where we were doing very well indeed) instead. Thus, there was a peaceful, if tense, co-existence possible between us and Wal-Mart as long as it was only them we had to deal with. Sadly, it wasn't that way for very long.

When Best Buy appeared on the scene, things started to get a little bit hairy. The big blue box's first area location appeared in Mayfield at the end of 1994, and we started feeling the shock waves of that landing very soon after. Even though it had opened over 10 miles away, the chain's much-ballyhooed new-release pricing policies, the enormous amount of floorspace dedicated to CDs, and simple human curiosity to check out the new kid in town quickly shifted some of our local clientèle their way.

It didn't help matters much that Best Buy's weekly circulars advertising the forthcoming week's bargains ran in the Plain Dealer, whose circulation covered the entire suburban Cleveland area and thus served as a powerful lure for anyone outside of Mayfield to head on over and join the jamboree. Worse, the customers who didn't feel like hiking to Mayfield in order to land a cheap copy of the new Cranberries or R.E.M. albums started wanting us to match Best Buy's prices anyway, and they didn't seem too sympathetic when you tried to explain that if we started selling new release CDs for $9.99 a pop just because someone in another freaking county was doing so, we weren't going to last very long in a mall that was charging us five figures a month for rent.

The above got even harder to explain about two weeks later when NRM decided to take a different approach on how to handle this intrusion into their customer base by flipping into panic mode and matching all prices quoted in Best Buy's circulars. This, of course, forced our hand to follow suit, and eventually Camelot stepped in and started slashing prices as well. It was sheer business insanity ("why continue selling CDs at a nice clip for a decent profit when you can sell a lot more and make absolutely jack shit on them?"): an emerging electronics chain that at the time averaged about 8 locations per state had precipitated a full-on Christmas price war that had swept up the entire music retail base. For us, the ridiculousness of trying to compete head-on with a store about three cities away was obvious, and this silliness had to stop. With hotly-anticipated albums by Nirvana, The Eagles and Tom Petty coming to market and no one making a flippin' cent on them, eventually our assistant manager headed over to NRM to tell them, in effect, to calm the hell down and get a hold of themselves. I'm not sure if her words or a dispatch from corporate talked some sense into NRM as they backed off selling their whole inventory at cost, though the price war itself didn't exactly abate so much as head into a temporary cease-fire mode that would wane off and on over the next three years as our new competition continued to spread their wings.

Despite the critical damage being done to the perceived value of music following the 1994 price war, the industry refused to back down from front-lining new and hot releases at a list price of $18.98 and record stores found their margins beginning to shrink as they were being forced to sell their hottest stock at little or no profit and relying on aging catalog to take up the slack, if possible. This was new territory for a many stores as they had been able for a decade before this point to sell CDs at almost any price they wished without customers accusing them of being ripoff artists (unlike your average clothing store or friendly neighborhood Starbucks).

List prices are, of course, only "suggested" by the labels, and stores are free to price them however they see fit, but there is a floor to this practice as most of these new CDs were sold directly to accounts by the labels for about $11 and change (with stores that dealt with middle-man "one-stops" paying an additional $1-$1.50 per unit), which made them profitable from about $14 and up after covering operating costs and payroll. Being forced to sell huge amounts of these same titles for $11.99 (or even lower, as became custom at the big boxes by the end of the decade), would eventually have serious consequences on the rest of the retail base.

We had never had a particularly hard time beating Camelot and NRM at the pricing game and we had never tried to consciously undermine their sales strategies since the idea back then was that Best Buy was going to be our common enemy and we were a united front (or something like that). However, once Camelot closed their old store in 1995 and moved down the mall into a spiffy, lifestyle-themed, cacaphonous "superstore" sized location (which, ironically, happened to be the very slot abandoned by J.J. Newberry's 3 years earlier) and then started regularly and aggressively trying to steal Best Buy's thunder by offering new CDs at highly discounted rates, and then entered our territory by carrying imported CDs and music magazines, the gloves started to come off at last.

Camelot was also starting to come after us on other fronts, the most risky of which for us by far was the area of bootleg CDs. These weren't the kind of bootlegs you see being sold on city street corners (basically inferior copies of contemporary hit albums) but instead live recordings of illicit origin, and often dubious sound quality, that had become a sizable portion of our profit over the years as they were often sold for nearly two to three times their cost. In 1994, we were selling these "import live CDs from Italy" (as we obliquely referred to them) hand over fist as the market for these recordings seemed to explode in conjunction with the rise of alternative rock (though boots by classic rock artists remained a major attraction as well). In time, though, these titles became high-risk for us as trade laws were being amended in late 1994, effectively changing these items from "gray area" product to something a little more unpleasantly black-and-white. Suppliers such as Oxygen, Vigotone, The Swingin' Pig, Condor, Pyramid, KTS, and Great Dane began to regularly go in and out of business as each country they were based in (Italy, Germany, Australia, Japan) began aggressively going after bootleggers to bring themselves in line with the refurbished GATT treaty.

Even to this day, I still haven't gotten over the fact that we not only carried these CDs for years, but also sold truckloads of them in a freaking suburban shopping mall. These were usually the kind of thing you'd expect to come across in a fanzine mail-order form, the back room of a mom and pop store located next to the adult book shop, or from some shady character at a record swap. Yet, here we were, in effect giving these boots their own display area at the rear of the store by filing them in with our import section (I'd wager the boots outnumbered the legit imports by a 7-1 margin at their peak).

Incredibly, these recordings survived the Great Lakes Mall era of Record Den, though seem to I recall a few of our outlying locations running into problems carrying and selling these discs from time to time, largely due to other stores narcing on them to whomever would listen. With Camelot sending their district people over to us every single time they were in town (we had a couple of sales reps giving us heads-ups whenever this was imminent), we had to be on our toes in order to keep our little operation away from prying eyes. I'm sure most of the reason our boots survived as long as they did was that we were always in a constant state of paranoia whenever someone in a business suit started poking around the imports section, and we would often resort to silly diversionary tactics like blocking off the section with a ladder so we could "repair a light fixture" or throwing down a heap of t-shirts across the bin and faking an inventory check if we suspected that we were being scoped out. There were, I'm sure, several occasions when we were mistaken about our visitor's intentions, but I'm also confident we managed to duck a bullet a few times as well.

Another skirmish in the hostilities breaking out between us and Camelot was our increasingly frequent violations of street dates on new releases, which was a gambit to not only undercut Camelot's sales on Tuesday, but to also make a little extra money on our own as we could usually get a little more dosh for a hot album release if it was being sold early. While we tended to play this game quietly most of the time, there were instances once in a while where we decided to flaunt it a bit, which would seriously piss off Camelot's then-manager (who looked a bit like a dyspeptic Chris Elliott), especially when the Bone Thugs-N-Harmony album The Art Of War arrived in late July 1997 and we'd plowed through dozens of it over the weekend before street date, including a copy sold to one of his employees (whoops!). A few minutes after that Sunday morning transaction occurred, the manager stormed down to our front counter in a righteous fury, with a copy of the CD in his hand and dramatically read us the riot act:

Camelot Manager: (angrily) "I called down here a few minutes ago and you said you didn't have this album for sale yet!"

Me: "Yes?" (I'd had a pretty good idea that phone call had been from another store and was a little amused that I was being confronted over this.)

Camelot Manager: (incredulous) "Why did you lie to me?"

Me: (A tight smile) "I didn't think you were really interested."

Camelot Manager: (ominous tone) "Do you have any idea what can happen to this store for doing this? Or your job?"

Me: "Yup." I knew perfectly well what could and would happen: nothing.

Incensed, the manager stormed out and apparently made a phone call later that day to his District Manager, who then called the local Sony branch first thing Monday morning. The call was then routed directly to their Sony salesman, who was also our Sony salesman, and who also happened to be a friend of Greg's for twenty years. "Hello, Sony Music! What? Record Den was selling the Bone album early? Well, I'll get right on it! Thanks for the call!" Ha ha haaaa...

Our little turf war with Camelot continued until Chris Elliott was shown the door a few months later, and the new manager seemed a bit more amenable to leaving us alone and concentrating on his own business. By then, we all had our hands full with more pressing concerns: Best Buy and Circuit City had both arrived in Mentor during the spring of that year. Worse, they had both opened directly across Plaza Boulevard from the Great Lakes Mall ... in fact, if you walked out the emergency exit in the back room of our store and then walked out into the shipping dock five feet to your left, you could actually see their front doors and that big crooked sign of theirs looming in the distance. Tweaking Camelot's nose was just a little pissing contest in the grand scheme of things: the real war was just now getting started.

From the industry's figures-obsessed standpoint, Best Buy morphed from a fearless agent provocateur into a true power player at the end of 1995. Armed with the first new song released by the group in 25 years, the first volume of the The Beatles' Anthology series was released during the Thanksgiving week kickoff to the Christmas season and sold an eye-popping 800,000-plus copies in five days, with over a quarter of those sales coming from Best Boy stores alone. The key to this powerhouse performance was an exclusive deal struck by the chain with Capitol Records to offer customers a little something extra (in this case, an interview CD containing new photos and the like) that could not be had by shopping at any other chain. From there, simply factor in the baby boomer drawing power of the biggest band of all time, and a tie-in with the biggest multimedia event of the year, price low, have the labels pay for the ads, mix well and serve.

The Anthology debut was an astounding flexing of muscle from what was then a 300-store chain, and the industry quickly began to institute new sales and advertising policies designed to cater to this emerging titan and grant Best Buy and its peers V.I.P. status in regards to certain key releases, ensuring that this handful of accounts would set the pace for sales and marketing over the rest of the decade. Over the next few years, Best Buy, Circuit City and Wal-Mart began to regularly feature "exclusive" bonus content with key releases as they were increasingly feted for their power to blow these new albums right out the door. In a business completely in thrall to who was #1 on any given week (or owned the biggest market share each quarter), this was all that mattered, any long-term effects be damned.

The problem with this thinking, of course, was that the music industry was making a classic mistake of placing all of its eggs in one basket. Contrary to popular belief, "big boxes" are not record stores, and the only reason they carried as many CDs as they did in the middle of the 1990s is because that's where the sales were. Blinded by greed, the major distributors were only too happy to keep these titans supplied with cheap music until a point was reached somewhere around 2002 when it wasn't really apparent anymore exactly which party was calling the shots. By then, the sales picture was changing rapidly, with the big boxes were slowly beginning to back away from CDs and looking into DVDs, cell phones, mp3 players, and video games instead, and the increasingly worried record labels being forced, in effect, to pay the big boxes to carry their music.

Perhaps the most glaring sign of the power the big boxes wielded over the music industry came during the third quarter of 2003, when Universal was readying its JumpStart pricing campaign. Increasingly alarmed at the mushrooming downloading problem and mindful of widespread customer complaints of corporate price gouging, Universal took the unprecedented step of dropping list prices across the board on most of its best selling catalog. Retailers may not have been exactly thrilled with this idea since it actually ended up squeezing their margins (the list prices dropped downwards, sure, but the vendor costs didn't move very far), but they had also been screaming for years for a level playing field with which to compete with the big boxes, and this appeared to be exactly what they were looking for. Thus, reaction to JumpStart was nearly unanimously positive ... until it emerged that the only way Best Buy and Wal-Mart would participate in this campaign would be for Universal to offer them an additional discount on their product, or else they weren't interested. Initially, Universal held firm on the idea that no one would get special discounts anymore, but the big boxes were playing hardball now, and it was suddenly apparent just how much the tables had been turned against the record companies by the very accounts they had built up over the previous ten years. It was a giant game of chicken, but in the end Universal had to capitulate or potentially lose not only a huge amount of business, but eventually a sizable chunk of their roster: artist managers would almost certainly waste no time seeking to extract their clients from their contracts and spirit them to a distributor that would sell to the big boys. To say this was a disheartening development would be an understatement, but it was certainly no surprise, either.

Back to 1997: customers voted with their feet for lower prices instead of service and selection, and the rest of the music retail base slowly began to disintegrate. This slow attrition of record stores was noticeable at first in the malls, which (due to their high rents) generally forced these locations to sport the highest CD prices of all. Almost weekly, new closings and "reorganizations" were reported in Hits and Billboard, but very few people running the labels seemed to give a shit since these stores, individually, were mere blips on the radar when it came to a quarterly earnings report. So it was that when Best Buy waltzed into our backyard at last, we knew then that it was "do or die" time and the odds were stacked in their favor.

What we didn't know then was that we were about to be completely blindsided by some earth-shattering news, yet that awful development would turn out to be the best thing that could have ever happened to us.