Record Store Confidential

Former record store employees - we're a different breed, we are.  It's like there's this secret society.  You're in a group of people, and you relate some incident from back when you worked at whatever record store - especially the independent, non-big chain ones - and there'll always be this one person nodding their head knowingly, with this twinkle of sorts in their eye, and then you know that's another former record store employee.

That scene in the movie Empire Records where someone throws on some song and the entire staff is bopping around the store dancing and doing all sorts of crazy stuff?  It happens.  It does.

CDs were still a little new during my employment at the record store - not real new, but still kinda new.  We still had plenty of vinyl around the store at the time.

Shortly after we opened that store, which was the largest record store in Memphis at the time, one of the goodies we got in was the brand new Beatles box set, the one that came in that really nice wooden rolltop box.  I seem to recall it had a $300 price tag on it at the time - or probably $299.98 in truth - I could be wrong.

We sold a couple of them right off the bat, but we had another one for sale behind the counter forever that sat there and sat there for months.  I wanted to open it up so bad so many times.

Finally, after it had been sitting there for months unsold, our manager agreed to open it.  After some consultation among all employees there at the time, Rubber Soul went into the CD player.

I stood behind the counter singing and ringing up what few customers were there at the time, and had a big laugh watching our most uptight employee be-bopping up and down the aisles putting away new stock, singing and dancing with his head bobbing up and town to "Run for Your Life" and "I'm Looking Through You".

The most fun job I ever had, with many, many fond memories.  If the pay hadn't been so incredibly little - heck, I'd probably still be there.