8 defunct record store chains you will never shop at again

Yes, I haven't been in there in ages and, in fact, thought he had gone out of business. I just didn't like the atmosphere in there. I might drive by next time I'm in L.A. Just to glare

Seriously, if he's still in business I'm rather surprised.

 

Unless there's a record store afterlife...

 

Big N (or Ames - I can't remember when they changed). It was the closest. I could ride my bike there.

 

The Penguin Feather in Annandale VA. was actually The Rainbow Tree before it was bought out by The Penguin Feather. The Penguin Feather closed it's 6 locations in 1989 after being raided by customs agents for selling drug paraphernalia.

 

Sam Goody was the place to go in the '70s, but they had one bad habit. If you were buying an LP, the cashier would make a small razor slice on the bottom right corner of the back cover to pull back a small section of the shrink wrap and write the price you paid in ink on the actual cover! Boy, I hated that!

 

Peaches crate:



Basement storage of records I never play.

 

I remember when Big N was still Neisner's! Finger Lakes represent!

 

We had Record Theatre. Long gone but still alive and well in Buffalo.

I can't even remember a record store in the malls (except Record Theatre in the Rochester Midtown) back in the 80's. Later there was a FYI (or something like that) in the local mall until a few years ago. They had a good selection (of Cd's - I don't remember any vinyl) and a good size used CD area.

 

I worked at that one in 1986

 

Front Street, Worcester, MA.???

 

Did you ever ask why? That is an odd procdure unless htye had no other way to track prices for potential returns.

 

Yep... Record Theatre, Cavages, Camelot, Gerber Music, Record Archive... All of these were great records stores from Upstate NY. Then, we had the House of Guitars - which was (and still is) a totally different organism.

 

That store was located inside a former car dealership, so there were these wide, loooonnnng steps on top of what used to be a ramp at the entrance!

 

That may have been the case. They may have had people bringing in items they bought on sale, with no receipt, but with a full-price "Sam Goody" price tag attached. Or maybe the receipts didn't specify the name of the album purchased (e.g. maybe you just got an old-fashioned cash register receipt, not a hand-written one).

Maybe? Just guessing here.

 

Where were Cavages, Camelot, Gerber? (Camelot sound familiar)

I stop in the Record Archive all the time.
Yes the HOG has it's core guitar business (but the record wing is it's own .. I don't even know what to say).

 

Didn't they miss the millennium computer bug hysteria by having a POS system that ran on Fortran or Cobol? I remember seeing something in Billboard about that.

 

Think of the writing as souvenirs of how little records cost back then. I had hundreds of those records!

 

On the west coast at least, Camelot was the epitome of the shopping mall record store. Strictly top 40 and seldom worth the trouble of visiting unless you were a 12 year old girl. Might be different elsewhere.

 

That would've been a deal breaker for me, what a lot of BS!

 

I feel pretty lucky that there are still quite a few small record stores in NYC. Unfortunately we just lost Rebel, Rebel in the West Village. Loved that place!

 

I started working at a Musicland in the Euclid Square Mall (suburb of Cleveland) in 1985. By 1989, I was managing the store after it was remodeled as a Sam Goody. There was also a Recordland in the mall, which then rebranded as Record Town, and then I believe FYE. I left Sam Goody in 1992 to go manage a Coconuts store for Trans World. Then left in 1994 to go work for a major label.

We also had plenty of National Record Mart and Camelot stores in the Cleveland area, along with Peaches. There was also a small chain of mall stores called Record Den. The chain is gone, but one employee bought one store and it still exists in Mentor, OH (though it's a freestanding store; the original was in the nearby mall - first as part of Woolworth's, and then its own mall store).

 

In Columbus, OH we had Buzzard's Nest. Used to go at midnight for releases, and it was also the local Ticketmaster outlet.

 

I was at the Record Den in Mentor in May. Huge store. A bit of a mess, but huge. I found a lot of interesting used CDs there. They had an impressive display of MFSL and Audio Fidelity discs near the register. Prices were high, but I don't often see such a broad selection of these in a store.

 

Yeah, I haven't been there in a few years because I don't live there anymore, but it's my understanding that the owner makes all of his money from owning property, like apartment buildings or something, so he does the store truly as a "labor of love."

 

Sears, Zayres, Lechemere Sales in the malls around Boston. For more specialized tastes, The Music Box (a record/audio store whose showroom in back featured Klipschorns and which was an outspoken opponent of quadrophonic sound) in Wellesley. For material not carried by any of them, convincing my parents to drive to Cambridge so I could shop the Harvard Coop and several other large independent stores around the Square.