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

Hair Magic (open aprx 1975-80) not horrible , but just odd, you would walk in the front door , hair salon to the right , records in a room to the left , you would try to pay for your records , and you had to wait for one of the Hair Stylists (i think they were called Hairdresser's back then-to my 10 year old mind , they were all hot!). You really could wait 10-20 minutes until they would come over and take your money. They were cheap though no single lps were more then $3.99 , many brand new lps were $2.99. One time , this was really funny , i was about 10 yrs old, i was checking out my purchases, getting ready to leave , and the girl said to me , you are taking the envelope with you , i was like , i guess so ( As i had no idea what she was talking about). So i leave with my Mike Nesmith , Zep , Hendrix , and Elton lps-I remember the 4 lps very well , because of the following , i get home , open my records , then look in the envelope , and guess what, an envelope full of the "the MaryJane". My mom of course flipped, stormed down to the store, the funny thing was , my mom still allowed me to go there, and buy records , because of the prices on records. Hard to argue with great deals on records

 

Strange, I had a similar experience when I first moved to Oakland. My buddy at the time told me he worked at a CD shop in Montclair Village called Village Sounds, so I figured I'd go check it out. Oddly enough, their entire stock was comprised almost exactly of what you described: late 80s /early 90s promos for obscure RnB and New Jack Swing groups, like Bell Biv Devoe clones only minus the hits. I somehow managed to find a copy of the first Carole King album with The City which was hidden amidst the dross and beat feet out of there. Village Sounds closed shortly thereafter amidst rumors that is was some sort of money laundering front.

However my singularly worst record shopping experience was with this company out of New York called Midnight Records. Somewhere around 12-13 years ago I was on a huge Moody Blues kick, and was trying to track down a copy of Caught Live + 5 which for whatever reason must have been out of print at the time. A friend of mine recommended Midnight Records, so I found one of their printed flyers somewhere and called them up and placed my order. Around a month later my CD had not arrived, so I called and was told that they would get it to me "when they could". Okay then. A month later and still no CD. I call them up more than a little pissed off, and told them I was considering calling the Better Business Bureau and the NY Attorney General's office if they didn't make with the CD they had promised to deliver in two weeks. The charming lady on the phone advised me to "f***ing try it motherf***er" and laughed at me. Another month goes by with no CD! I call again and get even more of an earful from this charmer. By now I'm screaming at her too, and 100% convinced I'm never going to see my Moody Blues CD from these people. Two weeks later it arrived unscathed.

I remember reading awhile ago that Midnight Records was raided by the Feds due to their business model of selling "grey market" CDs through the mail. Certainly couldn't have happened to a nicer group of people!

 

Was this shop run by the Sopranos?

 

More like the Flying Wallenda Brothers if you ask me.

Actually, it looks like the owner runs the business out of his home now, since his storefront was closed down.

http://midnightrecords.com/Joomla/index.php

 

Amazing that the Feds have the time, energy and resources to devote to such a thing.

 

Didn't they take down Beatlefest too?

 

A lot of stories circulate about that place. They kept the cds out of the cases for awhile so you had to bring the case to the counter. For awhile, they let people play them on mini players, then they stopped that. You bought it without hearing it or else. Sometimes they wouldn't take the cds off the wall for you if they didn't like the looks of you. I heard stories of that if you asked to see a cd and showed them it was beat up they would try and force you to buy it, saying you did the damage. Their huge Goldmine ads were around a lonnng time--full of grey area cds sprinkled among legit cds. The ad would say 'Finally! Released on import cd', but when you ordered the disc, you'd find out you ordered a bootleg.

 

Great stories. I never had to deal with anything worse than eyerolling hipster clerks in Greenwich Village and overpriced vinyl at record shows.

Keep 'em coming.

 

I'd have to say Shattered Records in Cleveland, OH. While I didn't necessarily have a bad experience there, the store owner was notorious for lame business practices. For one thing, he had to buzz you in to let you into the store. My brother-in-law and his friend went there once in the '80s and bought a few things. After they left the store, his friend noticed that one of the records he just bought was cracked. He tried to take it back but the owner wouldn't let him come back inside.

I've certainly seen my fair share of stores that had minimal selection, terrible pricing, etc. over the years.

While I generally enjoy going to Amoeba Hollywood, it does have its moments where it feels like the worst store in the world. For one thing, the prices on used titles are generally too high - they get a lot of tourists, so they feed off of that. Their selection, however, is wonderful. The clerks at the registers are always very nice...but the used buyers tend to be arrogant, grumpy, and not particularly knowledgeable. Sure, they know their indie rock and hipter stuff, but I'm amazed at how many rare '80s CDs I have bought at that store in the $6 range that I easily sold on Amazon or eBay for $80-$120.

Oh, and I agree with most people here when they talk about mall stores...however, I managed a Sam Goody in a Cleveland suburb in the late '80s-early '90s and I only hired staff with knowledge similar to mine! We had a devoted following of customers who always knew we could help them find what they needed. No "clueless" employees in my store, ever. Not on my watch!

 

Yeah, I used to get their catalogues and recall they were selling a lot of discs of, shall we say, sketchy provenance. And while I didn't have any major problems with the one order I placed with them, they weren't exactly prompt either. This was around 2000.

 

My one bad experience was a little shop on Long Island, sometime in the 80s. The guy had lots of records from the 50s and 60s, but only a few from the 70s. The ones from the 70s were fairly inexpensive, and I bought some on previous trips. But the records from the 50s and 60s were expensive.

At that time, I was trying to buy records that were in the Book of Lists as the top records of the year for each year from 1955 to 1984 or so. There was a 45 I was unfamiliar with, "He" by Al Hibbler. I couldn't find it in his bins, so I asked him if he had a copy. He found it, and then said it was $20. Now, I was a college student, working part time, and $20 was lot for me to spend on a single I never heard. So I respectfully declined. Well, this guys starts yelling at me, something like "What, are you expecting it to be free? I gotta make a living. I got overhead, etc.". This caught me off guard as I never was subjected to this kind of treatment from a store owner / employee before. I didn't know what to do, so I just turned around, left the store and never went back.

To end on a happier note, there was a record store near Hofstra University that I spent many an hour in, and bought lots of records. I miss that store!

 

I remember I went to one and the guy behind the counter was cleaning stacks of records with lighter fluid and a dirty napkin clearly making them worse than if he just left them alone.

 

I've never had a record store owner yell at me, so I guess I've gotten off easy, but I can relate to the stories of shops that open up with a laughably small inventory. I used to live near a major university, and every couple of years someone would open a new store that had a few copies of the top ten albums and not much else. They never lasted more than a month or two.

 

I had the opposite experience. When record stores were getting stomped by internet sales, I would walk into record stores that used to have snobby employees turn REALLY nice and would go out of their way to help you. One place was notorious where the owner was gay and was very rude to everyone unless if you were a skinny blonde teen male. He had pics of him hanging out with Morrissey and Trent Reznor taped to the counter. Real douche bag up until the last few months he was still in business.

Once in my late teens in the early 90s I went to a record convention on a Sunday after church. Naturally I was dressed semi casual: button down shirt and slacks, not the usual tshirt and jeans. I was looking thru one bin, and the long haired rocker behind the counter is staring at me in an unfriendly manner. Then he says to me: "Um, the DANCE records are over in this bin..." I looked up at him and said: "Actually, I was looking for a KING CRIMSON album." He looked like he felt really stupid for judging me based on looks.

And now two good stories to balance the bad ones:

In 1987, Pink Floyd was hot again. I went to the Sam Goody record store and noticed my guitar instructor working there. He came over and saw me looking thru the Pink Floyd vinyl section. I asked him which one should I buy: "The Wall", or "Momentary Lapse of Reason"? He laughed, took the two records out of my hand, and said: "Between THESE two? I would take this one and..." he mimicked taking the Momentary Lapse record and tossing it like a frisbee. "Out the window, dude!" I went home with The Wall, the first Floyd album before eventually buying their entire catalogue as they became my favorite band.

Summer of 1989, I went to Sound Warehouse and was looking at King Crimson cds based on a friend telling me I HAD to give them another try. Earlier that spring, I bought the "Young Persons Guide to King Crimson" on vinyl, and couldn't get into the music because my car broke down on me on the way home and I was in a bad mood. I sold it the next week to my friend. He kept telling me to get into this band. I picked up the cd box of Discipline, and stared at it. This old hippie dude with a deep southern hippie accent slides over to me: "Can I help you, maaaan?" I told him I was curious about King Crimson, and he said: "That music will take you closer to GOD, maaaaan!" Whoa, I thought. "If you don't like it, I will refund you the cash outta my pocket, maaaaan!" I told him its a deal. I took it home. Later that fall/winter, the 1989 EG Definitive cds of the King Crimson catalog came out, and I eventually bought every single one. King Crimson matched Pink Floyd as my all time favorite band. I later bought Thrak when it came out in 1995, and sat in the second row for that tour with my friends, who included the old hippie dude from Sound Warehouse known as Curtis. I have since lost touch with him, and miss hearing him talk about those classic prog rock days...

 

Once I went into a small one looking for some Zappa. "None of it has ever been released on CD" answered very unpolitely the elderly lady, looking at me just like I was a pile of s***t.

Came back in the same place after a year or two, and instead of that small record store and its smoke smelling old lady, I found another unrelated shop instead, probably a flower shop or so. Guess why?

 

A funny story about a good store...

In the late 1990's there was a store on Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood called Shattered. The owner was a big Rolling Stones fan so there was usually some interesting Stones items as well as other collectibles. I was browsing there one afternoon and was the only shopper in the store. The person running the register - who didn't know me at all - asked me to watch the store while she ran out to get lunch! I said no problem and luckily I'm an honest person as I could have cleaned out the register and some choice items.

 

Record Man - Redwood City, CA. Lots of lps and none of them are priced. Everytime I would go into a store like this I would grab one record I knew was worth $5, take it to the counter and see what happened. I pull out a common Johnny Cash Greatest Hits 80's pressing. After 5 minutes of looking at price guides he says "the book says $60". I asked "what book?". He says "none of your business". Goodbye I say. This was in the early 1990's. I think this place is still there but I never went back.

 

The two best stores I've been to are Music Gator in Sumter, SC and Papa Jazz in Columbia, SC. I picked up the target of Houses of the Holy, the original cds of Bob Seger Night Moves and Stranger in Town and Bob Dylan John Wesley Harding original cd for 20 bucks.

 

I used to shop there occasionally when I lived in NYC. I wasn't in an area I spent a lot of time in. They had some good stuff in stock. I don't remember the employees being particularly rude, but it was New York so they had a lot of competition. Definitely a 60s and garage/psych vibe.

 

In 1986, someone tried to open a record store in the obscure, then "in-decline", small town outside Louisville, from where I hail. It' was called "Dad's Records". It had this vibe of some sort of thinly-disguised "Great Society" government project, as in "Give these poor reformees post-jail jobs by funding their record store". Alternately, maybe even undercover cops thinking: "We'll set up this record store, and sting all the druggie kids in this here town".

The mullet heads who ran it didn't know anything about music. The inventory was too scant, and selection of music too unfocused, to really qualify as a store. The posters taped to the front window when it opened were all ads for Lou Reed's "Mistrial" I mean, there were only 2 Velvets fans in town, and we formed a band, so I guess that our little band was their target market demographic.

I went in and tried to talk to the "Dude" about Lou Reed. "Oh, yeeah-Lou Reeed, the mistial maaaan" in an attempt at a knowing voice was about as far as we got. I asked if they had any Velvets reissues, and got the "Who are they?" from our resident self-proclaimed expert on "The Mistrial Man".

That being said, I got myself a copy of "Mistrial" and The Call's "Reconciled". A month after "Dad's Records" opened, it was gone.

Not "Ha-ha" funny, but it was such a strange encounter, so peculiar and fly-by-night. To a film fan from the mid-1980's, it was like a record store in fictional Lumberton, if you get my reference.

 

Space Records, Stockholm. - They had an interesting selection of US import CDs you couldn't always find elsewhere, but they always overcharged, marking them as 'deluxe edition' when they clearly weren't (some cases it was like 299kr for a regular CD you could get for under 200kr elsewhere). The guy in there got very aggressive when I questioned him on it or tried to barter, saying that the places who sold them cheaper were second hand or chain stores. This store actually has a reputation, I've seen many make similar comments online about it. I'm not surprised to read that it closed down:

http://www.recordjunkie.com/stores/view/30

Also, a dealer who was a regular at record fairs in Stockholm - he kept his records in foldover plastic sleeves and would not let you take the record out to inspect the condition yourself, you had to ask him. On two occasions I didn't realise this and he looked like he was going to kill me. Luckily I did buy both of them and they were in very nice condition. It makes me wonder, surely others who went to fairs where he went to had the same experience.

 

I went to a used record store in Kingston Ontario. I can't tell you if it was good or bad with any certainty but I can say for sure that there were too many records. Stuff was jammed into the racks as tightly as it would go so, you couldn't actually look in the racks without taking stuff out. That was compounded by the fact that there were piles of things on the floor, so you couldn't get near the racks anwyay. Maybe I was just not in the right frame of mind for that layout - could be he had everything I ever wanted, but I did price a few things and thought it wasn't worth my while. I remember thinking if it had been properly organized, it could be a real goldmine.

 

Not really horrible but certainly odd and funny was the Burlington (VT) Fye - the one in the big mall - last Monday, now carrying used vinyl: Arthur Fiedler and Mantovani collection LP sets at $7.99 anyone? Yet, "Who's Next" Decca original was priced $5... Couldn't check its condition though: shop sealed, so you gotta ask at the cash registrer I suppose... Yes, they don't have a clue, and it surely won't last long...

 

There are stores like that here in Boston. I hate it when you have to move a carton of records out of the way or move a horizontal pile of records off the top of a vertical bin.

 

I live here, and I haven't been in that shop in years. FWIW, the shop has been in business for at least 15 years, so who knows how they've lasted with such bizarre pricing as you've outlined...