Strange How Potent Cheap Music Is
It appears that the inevitable day has arrived sooner than I expected. My boss received the call that the store remodeling that was scheduled for the end of the month has been moved up to, uh, Monday. Which means Sunday our store will be packing up hundreds of CDs into boxes to be shipped back to the distributor as well as several CD bins, to make way for brand new, double-wide DVD bins and several hundred more DVDs, reducing our CD stock and causing every CD and CD bin that you see in the top photo to shift to the far right hand side of the store in the bottom photo. DVDs are what's driving our sales, and sales being as pitifully poor as they are, we need to meet that demand. And as a result, reduce our music department significantly. The department, of course, in which I work.
As if I hadn't been sick with worry about this upcoming change for months as it is, I was positively nauseous all afternoon, and my boss admitted I looked pretty green in the gills so she went ahead sent me home early. Even though I have Sunday off I offered to come in later that evening to help pack CDs. "Do it if you feel like it, honey." she cooed assuringly, making me wonder if she's detected all along how much I've been secretly fretting over the status of the store all summer like I have been. Maybe I'll be able to handle things a little better by then. But today, today I just had to get out of there.
Before going home I walked into Barnes & Noble next door and bought Portnoy's Complaint, and when I got home I peeled off all my clothes and cocooned myself under the comforter, and found strange solace in Philip Roth's prose for some reason on this particular day, with the nor-easter coming in, and the winds and the rain pounding angrily against my bedroom window, feeling my stomach settle, and finding some peace for moment in the dark, still quiet of my home.
posted by Melissa at 4:53 PM
6 Comments:
Hi Mel. Long time, no see.
Wow, reducing the cd stock will mean any fringe or indie stuff will go bye-bye. But on the other hand, you get to trash that stinky toilet-water stained rug! Do you see this as the beginning of the end of the store (long term, of course)?
Stop by the new blog and say hello some time before it dies of boredom. I'm only giving this one shot, so we'll see where it goes.
linkage
Hey!!! I've missed ya!
Long term, I'm thinking. I don't see us shutting our doors anytime very soon, but we are going to be making a lot of changes as far as how we're going to keep driving revenue. Basically CDs are going to get phased out in a gradual process, favoring DVDs. And I don't even remember what the store looked like the last time you were here, but the boutique wall is thoroughly out of control. I told my boss let's just go ahead and change our store name to Spencer's Gifts.
Tracy and I have been discussing it privately amongst ourselves, and of course she's been there longer than anybody. She keeps referring to the whole place as the Titanic. But I think the Titanic went down too fast with too little resistance to make that a fair comparison. I would probably liken ourselves more to the Bismarck.
I second what Chris said. And I'd like to add my own, "this sucks".
- well I guess I want to get those cool speakers that light up to the beat
I remember way back when your store opened and I was just a freshman in high school and was first discovering Tori. I thought it was the COOLEST thing in the world that we could open up brand new cd's and actually sit down and listen to them right there in the store! HOLY crap! They had a big section set aside for that, too. And, dare I admit, it was still just getting used to portable CD players. Weird.
Yeah! The whole classical room used to be the listening room when it first opened back in 1991. I applied for a job there back then right before it opened, because Music Man had just closed and everybody from there was trying to get a job at this new place. Tracy told me that the reason I probably didn't get the job was because they had already hired too many people from MM already. Now Kevin, Tracy and I are the only three Music Man veterans working there these days.
I can still remember when that entire building, both PM and Barnes & Noble, were a Hechinger. My friends and I used to think it was hilarious that underneath the PM sign you could see the words "The World's Most Unusual Lumber Store" sun-bleached into the wall. We were there opening day just walking around, looking at all the CDs and inspecting the listening room, and saying "Wow, this really is the world's most unusual lumber store..."
I'll try and sneak some pics of the changes once we're done and post them. If we ever are done at this point.
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