Unlucky Creature
It never fails to amuse me how customers at my store are shocked... SHOCKED! I say... to discover that we are sold out of everything pertaining to Michael Jackson. I hear that Thursday night was a nuthouse, with customers screaming at the staff, fighting with each other over the last CDs, and then the one guy who just stood there and cried. Everybody today is still talking about the crying guy.
But then again maybe most people in general don't really stop to think that they aren't the only ones who had the bright idea to race down to the local music store to buy up Michael Jackson CDs the moment that they heard that he was dead. People did this with Ray Charles, though not to this extent. Heck, people are still trickling in looking for Wayman Tisdale albums. But I have never seen the sheer volume of customers pouring in looking for one artist's CD since Mary J. Blige's The Breakthrough four years ago. Luckily our store has one thing that all the other music stores in town don't: A burning station. Yesterday we broke our own record downloading and burning sales since Christmas, every last piece of it MJ material. And in fact today we just went ahead and burned everything we could ahead of time and handed them out to customers as they approached the information table with that obvious question in their eyes. And they were buying it. Burned copies of CDs. They couldn't even wait for the new shipment of Michael CDs to come in on Monday. It was now, with whatever we had, or nothing at all.
So many crazy, wild-eyed, money-spending Michael Jackson fans, all in one place. Who'd have thunk. Although my friend at work Tracy pointed out, "They're not real fans if they didn't have all this stuff in their collection already!" Speaking of which, right before I left today, I walked out to Tracy's car and she let me root through a box of vinyl in her trunk. Old records that belonged to her dad that she was going to try and sell down at American Oldies, but let me have first pick. I took home Buddy Miles' A Message To The People and We Got To Live Together, and Come Together by Ike & Tina Turner. I felt like I had the bigger score than anyone else who came into the store today.
But then again maybe most people in general don't really stop to think that they aren't the only ones who had the bright idea to race down to the local music store to buy up Michael Jackson CDs the moment that they heard that he was dead. People did this with Ray Charles, though not to this extent. Heck, people are still trickling in looking for Wayman Tisdale albums. But I have never seen the sheer volume of customers pouring in looking for one artist's CD since Mary J. Blige's The Breakthrough four years ago. Luckily our store has one thing that all the other music stores in town don't: A burning station. Yesterday we broke our own record downloading and burning sales since Christmas, every last piece of it MJ material. And in fact today we just went ahead and burned everything we could ahead of time and handed them out to customers as they approached the information table with that obvious question in their eyes. And they were buying it. Burned copies of CDs. They couldn't even wait for the new shipment of Michael CDs to come in on Monday. It was now, with whatever we had, or nothing at all.
So many crazy, wild-eyed, money-spending Michael Jackson fans, all in one place. Who'd have thunk. Although my friend at work Tracy pointed out, "They're not real fans if they didn't have all this stuff in their collection already!" Speaking of which, right before I left today, I walked out to Tracy's car and she let me root through a box of vinyl in her trunk. Old records that belonged to her dad that she was going to try and sell down at American Oldies, but let me have first pick. I took home Buddy Miles' A Message To The People and We Got To Live Together, and Come Together by Ike & Tina Turner. I felt like I had the bigger score than anyone else who came into the store today.
posted by Melissa at 2:59 PM
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