Video shot at Tower Video 1993(?) with staff showing recent Laserdisc, Video Game & VHS releases.

It says 1990 but the SNES came out in 1991 so it has to be later. I thought this would be of interest to the video and gaming retro-philes here. Interesting to see this stuff new and on the shelf.

 

That Disney Mary Poppins laserdisc had release date April 3, 1993. Thanks to the interwebs for that. Then Beatles Black Shirt guy says "coming in March or April, well we're in March". So this is probably late March 1993. Interesting. Thanks for posting. I miss Tower. I would go to the Rockville or DC or Annapolis stores. This tape is NYC. I think the same workers worked in every Tower.

 

I worked at Suncoast at the time, but two years later I worked at Tower Video. Our phones sounded the same. What a slacker job. Everyone got high in the bathrooms. The management could afford coke. Fun times.

 

That looks a lot like the Sunset West Hollywood store.

The Japanese import section was killer!

 

Dream job by the sound of it.

 

Thank you very much for posting this.
I was a regular visitor to the US from Australia in the 90's and as soon as I landed in LA and dumped my bags at the hotel then straight to Tower on Sunset every time I was there.
In Australia at the time we did not have massive stores like Tower and Virgin with huge ranges of CD's ,Dvd's and books etc . I remember when I first set foot in Tower my head exploded I spent a small fortune ,just brilliant.
Virgin megastore down the road in LA was great to,I remember there was a great Virgin megastore in San Francisco as well .
Have not been back to the US since 2002 and I beleive that by 2004/2008 all Tower and Virgin stores had been closed. Makes me very sad to think they are no longer there as I could not imagine going to LA and not going to Tower especially .
Just goes to show the internet has not been good for everything .

 

That's what I said, but then the video swung over and showed people walking on what looks like NYC to me. It's possible the tape was shot in two different places.

Man, I felt very sad thinking about all we've lost -- not having video stores, CD stores, record stores, and so on. I must've spent at least 3 hours of my life at Tower Records every week for 25 years, minimum, all the way through about 2004 or so. (Spent far more money than I care to remember.) The Tower Video store on the Sunset Strip was a mecca, as was the big Tower Records store across the street. Starting in the mid-to-late 1990s, I went more often to the Ventura Blvd. store and the one in Encino, plus the one in the West Valley on Topanga, sometimes different stores twice a week. All of them were fantastic. Generally, the clerks were knowledgeable and helpful and were real fans.

I really miss those days. As much as I always jump and down and insist that the future is going to totally just be digital files, I readily admit that the act of going in and seeing new stuff and buying the physical media was lots and lots of fun. Especially when you stumbled upon something you weren't expecting, a new release that came right out of the blue.

We lost all that when Tower went under in December 2006, but I have to say, years earlier I slowly started buying everything on Amazon, CDNow, eBay, and other internet dealers just because of free shipping and being able to order stuff weeks or months in advance. It was a different experience, but I can see why that pushed out so many brick-and-mortar stores like Tower.

 

That's the one that was on the Upper West Side, near Lincoln Center.

 

Oh I remember it well. Starting around 1984 for me, I would make a daylong adventure out of doing the LA record stores starting with Tower and then across the street the Tower video, and next door the Tower Classical. I would get my blank cassettes at the Classical store just because I wanted to go in there anyway even if I was not buying classical that day. Then to Arron's on Melrose, and the Rene's at the end of the same block, and then over to Rockaway. And then back home to the beach where I was living at the time. But 1987 / 88 I was living in the city and could make an evening of these stores. Like after dinner I could do the full stores run in 90 minutes. In the late 80s i would go the the Tower Annex on Ventura, remember that, near Studio City but just west of Laurel Canyon? Full of closeouts and cutouts, etc. It was the junk that did not move fast enough at the big stores, but I always found some record supplies or an odd import that was mint but for a hole cut in corner.

But anyway, Tower Video tried to have some of the harder to find stuff because they were getting tourists from all over the world dropped in and they wanted to have those rare imports and indie releases. Btw, Tower Record Sunset location has been sitting there vacant for years. A few things have tried their luck at that site, but it never works out. Right now it is for lease. Tower Video also has sat vacant for 7 or 8 years but finally Chase bank has taken over.

Amoeba does not do it for me. It just feels like there are no bargains, and the used LP bins look like thrift store bins, worked over and worn out. I am not a big CD fan. And yes, I can get anything I want from Amazon, ebay, importCDs, etc. at better prices.

I just had to find other things in life besides collecting. I have storage rooms and closets full of media, as I was doing thrift stores at the same time as those record stores. I currently have enough things to dig through, I needed to get satisfied, and enjoy what I have.

But I did grow up thinking that this searching and finding things (record stores) would be a part of my life until death. I had no idea it was a short limited time offer. Why did nobody tell me, I might have bought even more than I did.

 

Yeah, this was definitely an experience I just thought would keep on keepin' on forever. I was really affected by their demise in 2006, and actually felt very guilty that I hadn't visited the Sunset store in a year or so. I had tried to buy a lot of stuff from Tower.com, but they had a bad habit of abruptly canceling orders without warning, which drove me crazy when I was ordering 20 CDs three months ahead of release. For that reason, I moved all my buying to Amazon (which had bought CDNow), and never looked back.

 

Sneakers! Great movie.
I've referred often to working in record retail back in the day, and one of the best things about the company I worked for is that we were really on top of the latest LD releases, and had a pretty good selection of titles. Until I saw Tower's entire floor of LD's (and Virgin's even bigger selection). Quite humbling. Seeing the depth of copy (amount of each title carried) makes my old buyer self envious once again.

 

Speaking of which, the building is shuttered yet again. Maybe someone should open a record store there.

 

I recently needed to access an old computer of mine, I got a laugh when looking at the favorites icons, one was CDNow.

 

Like a million other folks, I have too many fond memories of visiting Tower. The midnight sales for the “Beatles Anthology” albums (especially the first one), knowing a dude at one back in the 80s who scored me a bunch of posters and promo stuff.

Both cool and sad is that I found pics of all three of the Tower locations I most regularly frequented back then. Sad because they all come from the “going out of business” sales in 2006:

I visted this one less frequently; I recall the staff being extra stoned and spaced out at this one, at least in the late years. San Jose, CA:




The building and the “tower” are still there; now it’s a BevMo:



Maybe my favorite of the three, Campbell, CA. This building is totally gone now:



I liked this one too, in Mountain View, CA. Building is still there (I think it's a Sprouts food store now); it turned into a Rasputin Music for awhile but then they moved:

 

I'm sure most of us on this site wish we could still have the best of both worlds (brick and mortar and online). I made the transition as well to Amazon in 2000 simply because they had what I was looking for. But like most of us, I could spend hours in Tower just perusing the bins and shelves....

 

That definitely looks like the one that was in Lincoln Square (67th Street side/corner). I used to go there many times. Some of the staff look familiar. I miss those days.

 

From what I heard, the main Seattle Tower near the Space Needle was one of the busiest and most profitable locations. They moved twice in the three years before the end; once when their old building was sold for a huge condo complex and they set up shop in trailers in a vacant lot until their new location a block away opened. The new location was huge and posters from local shows all of the way around on the wall. When the closing was announced I refused to go back in because I found it so depressing and knew that the "bargains" would be limited until the very end.

The local chain Silver Platters set up shop in the former Tower location almost immediately after Tower closed and they lasted until two years ago, when rising rents and declining sales forced them out into a more industrial area. The last time I checked in the spring the building was empty.

 

You know you have Amoeba in Hollywood, right? Probably the best record store in the country and they have a damn good video selection, too.

 

I get the nostalgia here, but honestly what I remember most about stores like Tower and Suncoast was how insanely expensive everything was.

 

I was never a Suncoast fan, but Tower's sale prices were pretty good and they were the only place you could go to and find an artist's entire catalog and a good selection of imports.

 

Yeah I live in Sacramento, Tower country, and they just didn't change with the times. Their prices became ridiculously high just as their staff became even more arrogant, insouciant and basically useless. By the end, they were pretty much a toy store that also sold CD's. I miss the great selection, but that's about it.

 

That's a great video! Really takes me back! Thanks for posting it.

 

Yup, Suncoast, as well as Samgoody were expensive stores back when they were in our local supermall.

 

I don't totally blame Tower for this as the labels kept the list prices high and there were advertising agreements that shared costs if Tower kept a certain price, but both Tower and the labels could have done much more to drop prices.

 

They've copped an attitude that they did not have the first 4 or 5 years that they were open. I think it's a great place for used CDs, and not great at all for used LPs. For some reason I don't have the fun in that Hollywood store I used to get in the old days.