Any funny stories about the *worst* record store you've been to?

Bad selection, bad prices, bad smells, you name it....any funny stories about bad record stores out there?

 

"I went to a record store, they said they specialized in hard-to-find records. Nothing was alphabetized."

Emo Philips

 

It was actually Mitch Hedberg's joke. It's on his CD Do You Believe In Gosh?

 

in a used record store in SF. years ago.

clerk ‘these look too perfect and unplayed. might be stolen'

me ‘bye, hope you can manage to stay in business'

they closed later that year...

 

I should probably throw my 2 cents in...

A CD shop in Salt Lake City called Moby Disc, they maybe had 40 CDs for sale that I'm guessing was just the owner's collection. I never went back and the next time I drove by it had closed. Weird.

 

A record store near me has all their used records (huge selection) under the CDs so you have to kneel down to look through them all.

 

A-1 Record Finders in LA was pretty weird. This was one of those stores where nothing was priced, and the bins were behind the front counter. You'd basically just have to tell the guy what you were looking for, he'd make up a list, then he'd go up and down the aisles seeing what they had. He brought them back to the cash register and then said, "give me about an hour, and I'll tell you what these will costs." A friend of mine asked, "why not just tell me the price now?", and the guy told him, "we have to check their 'fair market value' on the internet first."

My friend left and called back an hour later. No prices yet. Called at the end of the day -- no answer. Called the next morning -- the clerk wasn't in. He never did get his records.

Apparently, the store could find records but not actually sell them. They apparently closed their retail store and are now web-only; don't know the story.

Record-Rama was a pretty strange outfit...

 

I took about a hundred SACDs to a used record store in Richmond, VA just to see what they might offer. They actually knew what SACDs were, kind of. He looked them over for about 40 minutes and offered me $157 for the lot. Saying that they don't sell as many CDs anymore, even on the Internet. I thanked him for his time and left with the SACDs.
So far, in a little over a week, I have sold most of them for $1200+. Maybe I should take a job at the store!

It is a good record store, but I did notice they have about 1/2 the stock they used to.

 

a record store in Düsseldorf. supposedly one where you might find rare stuff. it was either too (!) obscure stuff, b**tlegs or counterfeits. Oh, and their Beatles LPs were way overpriced. Judging from the label, they were not in perfect condition. Bought a Book of Taliesyn LP there. Turned out to be a shoddy counterfeit (complete with off-center label). Oh, and the owner doesn't like cds so there was only a small desk with old obscure cds. Think the store was called hitsville. Competent, my a**!

 

Wait, you're saying the guy opened a store and the entire stock was 40 CDs???

 

First time I went to Toronto and record shopping on the amazing Yonge street. Felt like endless record stores. There was this one tiny shop that categorized everything under letters only, such as "A" "B" "C" etc, no names like "Beatles" or "Rolling Stones" except in one instance. Their inventory went like this: A B C D E F G H I J K L ANNE MURRAY N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z. Gave me a good laugh. She was at the height of her career at the time. Made me wonder who owned the shop.

 

One day, in the early '80s, I saw an ad in the San Fernando Valley "Green Sheet" classifieds from a store near Van Owen and Van Nuys that was selling used records. I went there, walked inside, and there was a guy who was somehow very odd. He was probably "intellectually disabled". His name was Bruce. Anyway, the Bruce's store consisted of piles and piles and piles of used records. Literally just piles. You had to crawl over records to look at records. And I quite literally found myself in the middle of piles of records hoping other records didn't topple on me as I looked through them. I had (and have) never seen anything like this. Apparently, Bruce had, for years, bought rejects from one or more of the downtown LA used record stores for pennies. He'd also dumpster dived behind Capitol at one time, things like that. He was a nice enough guy, and I learned over time that at one point he'd lived in the Bay Area and accumulated an incredible amount of vinyl there, as well (no idea what happened to that) and that he was taken care of by his parents, still (one night I came to the store, Bruce wasn't there, his parents were for some reason, and they told me "go ahead and shop, stay as long as you want, leave money on the counter if you buy anything, good night...)

The records were all priced at either a quarter or a dime or something like that. I can't recall the exact number, but it was trivial and unvarying.

Now the thing was, although the place was monstrous in it's way, there was a lot of incredible stuff mixed in. Test pressings, acetates, rare old soul and rock records--all kinds of things would appear in piles. And there was so much stuff to go through it took a LOT of time to get through the stuff (add to that the fact that when you came back others would have moved things around, so you had to sift through stuff you'd seen before as well).

I found some great stuff there. But it was definitely the "worst" record store you could imagine in some ways.

 

I've told this story before, but as I was browsing through a Camelot Records store many years ago, I saw a divider card in the CD section that said "Herman S. Hermits". I brought it to the attention of the manager, and though I patiently tried to explain the problem, he never did fully understand. Oh yeah, the bin didn't contain even one CD by Mr. Hermits!

 

Yeah! It was so weird.

 

Salty's Record Attic in Modesto, CA. It's a combination record store/tropical fish supplies store. The smell hits you when you go in there; fish food mixed with old dusty records. The owner had a pretty good selection, which stayed there year after year, because she charged insane prices. I don't know how she managed to stay in business.

 

We had a similarly bizarre, but better smelling, pairing in my hometown: a florist shop on one side and a record store on the other. It was called Ray's Flowers, and consisted of two narrow, connected storefronts. It wasn't necessarily bad, they just had a small selection. I do remember buying the first Allman Brothers record there.

 

Used to be a few of the "we'll tell you the prices after you bring them up" stores. I hated them. They are gone now.
So I cannot complain about any current stores.
Though the thrifts can be a good laugh at times with the psychotic prices for some junk Lp the store thinks is a lost treasure.

 

I went to a store once in Phoenix. Nothing was in any sort of order, just boxes and boxes everywhere. You had to ask the one employee what you were looking for and he'd look for it. Unbelievably, they had a lot of the things on my want list for decent prices.

The other weird thing was there was no cash register, the guy just sat on a chair by the front door and had cash in his shirt pocket. This was sometime in the '90s.

 

Peaches Records in New Orleans. It is located where either Tower or Virgin used to be. Everything is insanely overpriced. CD's that sell for 6-7 dollars on Amazon sell for 22-23 dollars here! The selection isn't that good either. Virgin and Tower were overpriced too, but at least they had deep selections from somewhat obscure artists.

 

three in New Orleans

1) 1 the guy who goes back and prices the discs based on what he thinks you will pay for them
no rare or collectable records just the usual
I took back a defective record and he wouldn't let me, saying that I could have recorded it (cassette)
I said "this may cost me $6, but never again will I buy from you, period!"
my then 9 yar old son was shocked - he had never seen me respond to someone that way
went out of business two years later

2) lp/head shop the piles of lps everywhere to get to the sorted racks of good stuff (overpriced)

3)eccletic not worst - used bookstore in French Quarter, elderly gentlemen run it. they tell you to go to the third floor, where to look for the light switch. Very rarely visited, plenty of classical and opera - the gems and the dreck, usually come out with a foot thick stack that's around $40

 

Any music store in a mall (Musicland/Sam Goody/Camelot/FYE).

Horrible selection, over priced, clueless employees (when you could find one, that is). They were almost always deserted of any other customers and I could see why.

One other example I have is a local chain of stores that has a pretty good selection, but clueless teenage employees.

I asked then where the Ravi Shankar CDs might be, and the clueless teenage idiot said "Uh, isn't he like dead?"- the answer was "no" as if that had anything to do with my request.

 

Nothing beats the half mattress/half record store close to where I used to work. It was later pointed out to me by a co-worker there was actually a third (back) room with skin flicks.

 

I saw them lisited as "Herman S. Hermits" once...told the owner since "Herman" is really Peter Noone, he might as well list them under Peter Noone....came back a week later, the listing was under "Peter No one"

 

My worst record store experience is from the late 80's at one of those mall stores when I overheard someone asking to find music by Todd Rundgren and the employee hadn't heard of him and kept telling the other employees that the person wanted music by "Todd Rundgren?!?" as if it was the craziest thing he'd ever heard.