the pathos of unsold stock

just get back from a visit to my local record store, a decent-enough place that seems to get a bit sadder each time i go. every time i go the only customers -- if indeed there are customers -- are a bunch of mouth-breathing middle-aged dudes; not a person under 35 in sight. doesn't bode well.

saddest of all, though, are the LPs and CDs -- particularly the CDs -- that have been sitting in their shelves, unsold, for years and years. CDs that aren't necessarily horrid -- this isn't the warehouse of shitty '90s record-club CDs that's down the road apiece -- but just sort of mediocre. some of time i've been tempted, out of pity, to buy a few times -- but always decided otherwise.

for example, there's one cd of mediocre '90s zaire soukous--"la guerre des stars"--that has been sitting there, priced at $7.99, for at least three years, maybe four. no one is ever going to buy this. it will still be there when, a few years down the road, the store likely goes out of business.

or all the lynn anderson LPs in the country/folk section. nobody has ever, will ever buy these. at least not in these parts.

there's a great pathos in unsold stock, at least to me. mostly it's on behalf of the store owners, who (one presumes on the basis of the unsold items) aren't doing too well--also the pathos of incomplete knowledge, since if the owners were savvy they'd find a pricing scheme that would have gotten this shit out of the door years ago.

this is such a 'u' post

"u"?

http://img.maniadb.com/images/album/182/182836_1_f.jpg

you're talking about two factors at work here... obsolete formats as well as niche merchandising.

luckily for the market, such things as trends occur where previously ignored niches of music get rediscovered.

look at the market for disco/italo/electro records over the past 10 years.

And heck for vinyl in general, from what I hear.

as someone who is intimately involved in the buying & selling of records, yes it is very depressing.
but on the other hand, if all those County LPs had sold in the seventies & eighties, I wouldn't have been able to fill out my collection with unplayed copies direct from the source. the "warehouse find" is always a nice thing. well, usually i guess. we have literally 100 sealed original copies of the "Portrait of the Originals" which sell at the rate of about 15/year. But it's really annoying/frustrating to order a new release or record that you really like and order maybe a bit too optimistically (5, 8 copies) and just see people ignore it forever.

you know what i say? fucking make it move. or shoot it. or give it away. or throw it out the window. GET. IT. OUT. if you can't do that? find another hobby. on the other hand, if new vinyl sits around long enough in a store, you can turn a tidy profit on ebay. (see a sealed Tool album gathering dust in the new section of a store for 20 bucks? buy it!) (i bought anne briggs on bo' weavil for 30 bucks just to sell on ebay. made 30 dollars profit.)

"But it's really annoying/frustrating to order a new release or record that you really like and order maybe a bit too optimistically (5, 8 copies) and just see people ignore it forever."

small comfort, but ebay can be your friend a year later too.

it's true tho that a lot of it has to do with the effort to sell the records--a sharpie note that says "killer!!!" will move records in most places i'd think.

but really, just order 3 of everything.

"a sharpie note that says "killer!!!" will move records in most places i'd think"

Big deal, imo. If I halfway like a place and I'm in a funk one night after work or something, I'll often walk in without any purchasing plans and pick up whatever has a convincing staff review taped to it. Even bigger deal when you're sixteen and terrified of anyone who might know more than you and thus refuse to actually talk to the staff but want a suggestion.

guy at the record store in question today saw me eyeing that leonard cohen "live at the isle of wight" thing and said, "i've never actually heard any leonard cohen, but everyone tells me that one is good."

er, i guess he's being honest?

Least likely recordstoreowner ever?

he's just the help, not the owner. but it was still a bit surprising.

eh, i've been a huge music dork and record collector/store clerk for years now and there's plenty of stuff i've never bothered to check out. ELP for example, or joe jackson or whatever.

someone made me pick one of three elvis costello albums for them the other day. i pretended like i had a preference.

ha.

also, for real, have a sale. you know? local used book store here is having a 3 day sale right now and everything in the store is 50% off cuz he's got so much stuff. even the local chain fye store has every cd in the store that isn't used selling for 9.99 right now. not like i want any of it, but it really is the way to go. the people who don't want to do stuff like this? i dunno. maybe they own the building they're in? maybe they are just biding their time until retirement? went to a store like this in mass a while back. just godawful cd dungeon. horrible huge empty space filled with horrible overpriced CDs. and they've been there forever. how they sell stuff is beyond me. they had a big used vinyl section too and it was filled with dollar stuff priced at 7 or 8 bucks.

i was only open for 2 months when i took every 2 or 3 dollar record i had and threw them in the dollar boxes. you got to move it move it you got to move it move it...

and another thing! don't make me go through 400 boxes of dollar shit if all it is unplayable wrecked shit or 4000 logginsmessina records. it's called GARBAGE. take out the trash!

yeah srsly this is just people not understanding the concept of sunk costs

The chain "indie" record stores around Boston–Newbury Comics—have been stocking a lot more vinyl over the past year or so. Still, I've never seen someone buy a record. At the same time they're discounting new CDs as low as $5.99 (the new Julian Casablancas). Whereas, say, in 2005 that CD would've probably been sold for $9.99. Their stores also seem to be less and less well-stocked than they were years ago. I'm having trouble finding things that would've been easy to find, say, when I was just starting college.

The last weird trend is that, while new CDs are usually always on sale, it's increasingly difficult to find anything released a year or two ago for less than full price! I don't think I've ever seen a single piece of vinyl on sale ever in any Newbury, though. Which I guess makes sense, considering they're only buying, at most, one copy of whatever record they want to stock. It seems like the stuff just sits around, but they must be making some profit off of it or otherwise they wouldn't keep expanding the amount of space they devote to all of this.

the Newbury Comics in my hometown would reduce prices on vinyl all the time--picked up a few wolf eyes things cheap back in the day and sold on ebay for a small profit.

and yeah, mark shit down if it doesn't move. $3 & $4 records marked down to fifty cents if they don't move in a few months, higher priced items get their prices cut in half. It's tough sometimes because we have a LOT of space in the bins, and it's a tough call to decide which looks worse--empty bins or bins fully of $3 crapola.

CDs get an even shorter shelf life.

in retail merchandising, this is called "stock aging", this is a decent article:

http://www.business.govt.nz/Managing-a-business/Your-office-systems/How-to-manage-inventory-or-stock.aspx

Identifying the stock that is not selling quickly, so new strategies can be put in place to move the stock:

Different distribution outlet
Sell it cheaper
Offer it up free as a bonus for buying other stock before the costs of holding the stock negate the margins you receive for selling the stock.

you know who understands this stuff? reckless records in chicago. not only do they price stuff to move (meaning if you come in often, or check their website, there are amazing finds/bargains to be had), but they regularly lower the price on things that have been sitting around. plus they know what their customers want the most, so stuff that, for them, is more "niche" (like classical or most country music) is priced extremely reasonably, while stuff like indie rock, etc. is priced more typically.

also, they used to (maybe still do?) have sales in which anything in the store that has been sitting out for > 6 months is 33% off, > a year 50% off, etc. (all their stock has a tag with the date when it was first put out for sale). it's a good way to get rid of stuff that's just taking up space. i've taken advantage of those sales and spent like $300 in a day, so i imagine it's good for business in other respects.

i mean, how hard is it to set up a business plan? the point about sunk costs is a good one, i do agree that many small business owners just don't get it. they develop weird attachments (not sentimental, just irrational/fiscal) to stuff they once paid for and don't want it to go out the door without making a handy profit.

i should say though that sometimes stores that don't generally understand the concept of sunk costs suffer some kind of fiscal crisis, they often go overboard and price, like, everything in the store 50% off -- this is the case with a bookstore in my town that has been sitting on probably 75% the same stock for over five years. suddenly they realize they ought to get rid of some of it and have a sale, but they're probably turned off so many people (including me) over the years with the sadness of their unsold stock that it's too little, too late. not sure i expect them to survive another year.

p.s. adding to pathos of original story, when the owner isn't in, the help is told to keep a running tab of all items sold on a piece of notebook paper. sometimes out of the corner of my eye i look to see how many items have been sold that day. often it's no more than five or six. one day (a sunday!) it was only three. and this was in the late afternoon. ouch.

i think an overload of cheap, crappy records can make a place with otherwise reasonable-to-good stock look like a must-to-avoid. i think a lot of record stores in particular pad their collection out with the aforementioned dollar bin fodder but overprice it by a couple of bucks. this is actually why i like amoeba's dollar bins, since they're usually filled with pretty solid stuff. they simple refuse to take anything that is in poor shape unless you give it to them for free, and even then i think they'd rather not take it off your hands.

dunno if you know this (or if they only do this at the SF amoeba), but if you go to other record stores and see busted records with orange spray paint along the top edge, that means that amoeba wouldn't even take it because of shitty quality. this is their way of not having to even look at it next time someone tries to bring it in.

^ smart idea.. but they had to buy it in the first place to spray paint it. so i take it these are the burnt ends of collections they had to buy in full to get the stuff they wanted?

Yeah, this looks like "priced to nowt to get rid"..

Otherwise scenario runs:

Storeman: "Not interested in these ones, there you go"
Hopeful seller: "OK, cool. Hang on, these have all got orange marks on now!"
Storeman: "Yeah, sorry about that, was spraying my garage and they got in the way, or something"

holy shit went to nuggets records in boston yesterday - encapsulates basically everything about this pathos. used cds of basically ubiquitous stuff for $15, beat-up used vinyl for $10. copy of "in a silent way" for like $12 that was about to fall apart. anything by anyone remotely famous was ranged from like $10-$50

bunch of totally worn bob dylan vinyl - $30-40 each

Serious question: how does a store like that stay in business?

what the hell

as someone mentioned upthread a lot of these places must own their building xp

Yeah, seriously.

yea i don't know wtf was up w/ this place. naive BU students dropping by? i don't know. not sure if any of this stuff was original pressing or whatever, but like, for bob dylan does that even matter? dude sold a lot of records and it's not like that stuff is rare at all. even if OP does matter tho this shit was beat up as hell

if they were mono I could maybe see it. maybe.

yea it was kind of too bad, i haven't bought records in a while and yesterday i was in a record-buying mood - if that shit was priced reasonably i probably would've spent like $80. instead i bought a single wynton marsalis record ( black codes - it's really good imo) that was like $4 - still overpriced.

just out curiosity mark, have you ever checked out Stereo Jacks? I've bought stuff from him on ebay a few times. He's had good jazz & blues records in my experience. On Mass ave. http://www.stereojacks.com/

about the orange spraypaint, i'm pretty sure people will bring in their collection, dudes at amoeba say "uh, no thanks" and person says "oh, well, i don't want this anyways, so just keep it"

i know people here who always go to stereo jacks when in boston. seems like the go-to joint for blues and jazz at reasonable prices. i've never been. i do appreciate that their price stickers are relatively easy to take off of records.

the WORST price stickers in he world are available at the princeton record exchange imo.

My favorite stickers are the ones that have been on for so long that when you take them off they leave behind wayyyyyyy too much residue. Any residue is too much!

who peels the stickers off their records???

(I'm talking about any product; I've only bought one piece of vinyl in my life, but stickers are stickers.)

xpost

stickers typically don't affect the quality of the music

they affect the look and resale value of the records.

^^

right, so you don't peel them off. problem solved

yea i don't really care about stickers, i just leave em on. actually it's a nice reminder of where i bought the record

ian i've never been to stereo jack's - thanks dude! will definitely check it out. i just moved to boston recently so i haven't been to too many places.

and scott i'm sad i never made it out to check your store when i was living in noho. wife & i want to visit western MA again soon so i'll be sure to make it up there

reposting this from another thread, talking about a horrid record shop near me:

So I see a few posts up there about Vintage Vinyl in Evanston. Had to drop off a package at the post office just down the block, so I thought I'd pop in to see what damage the economy has done to this horrible, horrible shop. The verdict? Nothing. Absolutely nothing has changed. Everything is still ridiculously overpriced, I don't think I saw a single piece of vinyl priced under $30. What kills me is the way the owners justify it, a fairly weathered copy of Neil Young's After the Goldrush was priced at $35. Why? Because, "ORIGINAL 1970 PRESSING!!!!". Which would be one thing, if it was just all crazy overpriced thrift store fodder, but the store actually carries an impressive selection of kraut and psych stuff. Just about every Can album and related side-project, Kraftwerk's first two albums, but not a single one of those priced under $50. Just insanity. I'm shocked that this place is still going in 2009. Oh yeah, saw a sizable section of Steely Dan CDs, every single one of them were $40 burnt copies of bootlegs with shoddy artwork. Stunning really that this place is still going.

"the WORST price stickers in he world are available at the princeton record exchange imo."

OTM!

worse was the store in nyc with the huge pink/red dollar stickers. ummm, it will come to me. on st marks? they had good dollar stuff years and years ago.

"who peels the stickers off their records???"

i always take price stickers off my records. just don't like them. and they get harder and harder to take off the longer they are on there.

some salvation army stores are putting these HUGE family store stickers on their records and they are IMPOSSIBLE to take off without damaging the record. arrrgghhh.

f.y.i. - i actually give people less money for records if they have the little color-coded thrift store stickers on them! same with books! crazy i know, but i can't help it.

xpost jinx - part of my record buying ritual is coming home and peeling off the price stickers while inspecting the haul, though I'll leave it on if the slightest bit of sleeve rips off. Much praise to Skot for, along with having the best selection and prices of any store anywhere, using the easiest non-stick price stickers. no fuss, no muss.

Soak a sticker in lighter fluid and it'll come off with no fuss. If there's any residue after the stickers gone then more lighter fluid and a bit of cloth will get rid of that too.

oh man i have lots of vintage vinyl in evanston stories.

stereo jack's was great when i lived in boston, ca. 2001. i'm glad they're still in business. i bought tons of country and jazz vinyl from them. maybe a tiny bit overpriced, but not so bad. the guys working there were nice too as i recall.

this thread is cousin to my thread about stores trying to sell $1 records for $7 or $8

if you ever can't get a sticker off after soaking it in lighter fluid, strike it with a match. works every time.

xp yea there were conversations on that thread that i thought were posted here & vice-versa

in santa barbara once i ended up in one of these records stores that's dusty as all fuck and has thousands and thousands of records, piled up everywhere and in boxes lining the floor and i started digging and pulled out a few decent records in passable shape that i was interested in (a couple of eno albums from the mid '70s, some bowie, nothing crazy...) no price tags on them, and i was figuring on paying maybe $5 apiece. the dude looked at these 4 or 5 records and said, "that'll be $120." i passed.

there's a store around here that has an entire basement full of vinyl. some junk, but lots of great stuff. the owner is constantly buying up people's collections so odd things turn up from time to time. the owner of the store tends to take out the stuff that's obviously valuable or will sell quickly and puts them upstairs, but the bulk of it is in the basement.

BUT here's the catch: there are no price tags on anything. i guess the owner doesn't want to take the time or money to go through everything he buys and put a price on it. so what happens is, you bring up the vinyl to the counter, and one of his employees takes it back to an office and determines the price. they basically seem to scan through eBay to see what the record -- or records like it -- have sold for, and they settle on a price that's pretty much the maximum they can charge without being utterly outrageous. so while the pricing is not necessarily brutal, you're almost never going to get a genuinely deal. something irks me about basically doing the work for this guy by finding the gems in his stash of vinyl and then being asked to pay through the nose.

BUT if you find something that's sufficiently obscure that the employee doesn't know how to price it, you can luck out. one day they had a small stash of EPs of music from ghana (e.t. mensah, etc.). evidently they had no idea what it was so they sold them for $8 each. not bad at all.

relevant postscript: just stopped in madison, wisconsin's truly shitty music superstore "the exclusive company." very depressing place. BUT i found two CDs that are worth big bucks, priced to sell. my guess is that the store managers had no idea what they worth. between the two, they'll basically pay for my recent vinyl shopping spree hurrah. sorry to make a digital intrusion on this analog thread.

see, i think i i mentioned it on the other dud store thread, but the crusty old man vinyl store is still the place where you can find crazy rare stuff for cheap. cuz of their inability to do their homework. so they sell every beatles record for 20+ but they throw private press stuff and metal stuff and everything they don't care about in dollar bins or whatever. it's rarer these days but it still happens. kinda like how some of the coolest rock finds i ever made was in black r&b/rap/etc record stores in philly. they just didn't give a shit about it. there was a store around here that closed and the ONLY cool stuff they had was in their dollar bins. and i found very cool private 70's rock, funk, and the like that sells for $$ in there every time i went there.

goes without saying though that a LOT of the weirdo rock stuff that me and chuck like to buy is still thought of as trash to most people! thank god!

Just popping in to say that I am OBSESSIVE about removing price stickers! I hate em!
I like to enjoy a long session of sitting, listening to the new records, with my pocket knife and a lighter. If any sticker shows resistance I just hold the lighter under (an inch or two away) for a few seconds and it loosens the glue right up and it comes off no prob. I take the record out of the sleeve first, natch.
And after that every record I own goes in a plastic sleeve, opening on the top. It makes my cheap records look expensive and I like it that way.

Hello ILV, my name is sleeve and I also obsessively remove stickers. a friend of mine who managed a record store here in town once told me that it took her years to find stickers that would come off right. the worst ones are the ones where the vinyl has that old school gloss on it and the sticker takes it right off, leaving a flat-sheen patch. i'll have to try that lighter trick the next time I encounter resistance.

<3 u guys

yeah I know and love the lighter trick now... too bad I didn't know about it when I was removing stickers from those Joy Division records back in college. ugh.

i hate record stores where they also put price tags on the LP label itself

i should say i hate it *when* record stores do that, some of my favorite record stores ever have habitually engaged in this practice.

ugh i hate when they put price tags on the liner notes -- of LPs or (more often) CDs. what the fuck guys? is it like dogs pissing on trees -- they want to make sure they've marked the albums as theirs, even after they are sold?

the WORST price stickers in he world are available at the princeton record exchange imo.

TRUTH! on the rare occasions i've tried to remove them, usually when it's something with a cool cover i'd just like to look at without a 1.5" circle obscuring the top left corner, it turns into an endless torment of lighter fluid or goo gone, scraping with a razor blade and very, very carefully trying not to tear pieces of the cover off. and it always fucks up the cover anyway. terrible, terrible stickers.

i hate record stores where they also put price tags on the LP label itself

― jØrdån (omar little), Monday, November 9, 2009 5:45 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark

aron's records (rip) in la used to do this, sometimes putting like 2 tags on each side of the lp.

yes! i'll never forget which records i got from aron's thanks to this policy...

ugh. i feel like sending the owner of the nearest record store to me an anonymous email with some basic tips:

1. if something hasn't sold in a few months, mark it down.
2. if it hasn't sold in years, for god's sake, price it to go. $2.99 CDs. fire sale. whatever. get that shit out the door.
3. don't buy shitty CDs that customers will never want to buy. you don't need five copies of vitalogy, i promise.
4. have a section of the store for recent-arrival vinyl, and separate LPs by genre. that way if i want to find the country vinyl that's come in since my last visit, i don't have to look through the whole damned section.

oh and

and another thing! don't make me go through 400 boxes of dollar shit if all it is unplayable wrecked shit or 4000 logginsmessina records. it's called GARBAGE. take out the trash!

for reals. dude, nobody is going to pay even $1 for that beat-up carly simon record with a split sleeve. just put it out on the sidewalk, make more room. for chrissakes.

maybe i should type this up, print it out, and paste it to the store's door when they're closed, so the owner gets it in the morning.

or, you know, maybe i'll just clean up in a year when he has to close because he isn't selling anything.

swear to god, madison record store owners are the worst businessmen ever.

Another good tip:
because it had a relatively small pressing does not mean a record is sought after, charging $20 for a 10 year old IDM single that most if not all people don't know about doesn't make any sense!

people selling online are just hoping that ONE person wants it bad enough to pay 20 bucks. and sometimes they are right. i just sold some books online and i started all my auctions at the somewhat arbitrary price of 29.95. i didn't look up the prices. i did no research. i just knew what i paid for them and what it was worth for me to sell them. and i sold some. and mostly it was just one person who wanted the book. no bidding wars. so, you never know.

as far as the overpriced singles goes, well, if it isn't urgent, then just keep looking and you are bound to find a cheaper one sooner or later.

Well, surely the problem is that the exhaustion of looking past the SAME overpriced thing you're not interested in ultimately deters you from going back to the store? Like the thrill of the hunt allows for a certain amount of rummaging through dross but if it's the same dross month in and month out, it's less and less fun to go there and you spend less dough. What baffles me is stores where this all applies AND they also have huge boxes under the shelves of things you can't really look through conveniently, but which are presumably basically the same shit. There's gotta be some way to get this stuff out the door...

i have eerie dreams in which i am at some record store (which is probably some amalgam of many record stores, but i always wake up wondering whether i've actually been there and it drives me nuts) and those under-the-shelves bins actually have like tons of amazing shit, albums that i never knew existed like scott walker demos from 1968 or something.

xxpost: But this wasn't online, this was in a used record store where that was 99.9% Rock, Jazz, Soul, etc. That was the only IDM record or anything close to it in the entire store (and the store was by no means a popular one either, it was pretty out of the way), and it didn't seem like it's customers/employees were much on early 00's IDM records either.

I might as well add that the Discogs prices for this (it's Kit Clayton - Lateral Forces, by the way) range from $3 to 10 Euros, with 13 sellers in all. i.e. not a "rare!" $20 record.

oh, okay, then they are just dumb.

i have eerie dreams in which i am at some record store (which is probably some amalgam of many record stores, but i always wake up wondering whether i've actually been there and it drives me nuts) and those under-the-shelves bins actually have like tons of amazing shit, albums that i never knew existed like scott walker demos from 1968 or something.

Yes.

Actually, this sort of happened in real life: Me and some friends entered a second hand record shop, and I found a bunch of stuff by my friend's favourite group. Legit USA albums! One recorded "at home"! Nothing I'd even heard of before.

We made this guy buy them all. Even though he wasn't that bothered! "You HAVE to be bothered! COME ON!"

dream fulfilment by proxy, I guess.

Oh man, the lower shelves record dream, I've totally had a bunch of those before (actually had one like 5 days ago, actually).

Except with me it's never interesting stuff, just good stuff for really cheap.

I have these dreams fairly regularly, usually unheard-of but possible records. The one which sticks in my head was an early one (like I had the dream in the '80s) during which I found a copy of a Vic Godard live LP for 50p in WHSmiths in Exmouth. I remember being really excited to hear the record when I woke up. I still wonder what that record sounded like.

ANYWAY due to personal circs I have had time to go around some record shops in London I've neve visited before. Some are genuinely disgusting (morte of this later, maybe) but this thread has me thinking about how their business survives. I went to one the other day which had stacks of dirty vinyl, mostly hopeless (copies of "Mud Slide Slim or whatever for six pounds? Really?) but I got the impression that it was the kind of shop where they might have an interesting country section. After a bit of searching I found the country section - all the records were laid flat on top of each other, on top of a set of shelves, so it started at about my eye level and went upwards. It looked like there were some interesting bits and pieces but I couldn't wrench them out from under. I gave up. This is particularly unforgivable since I know the place has moved premises in the last year. Seriously, if I, as an amateur, can tell he's no chance of selling big chunks of the stock using up the most important space in his premises (at any price, let alone the inflated sums he's charging), what does he think he's up to? I guess he must be turning over enough new-in stock to make him not care about the skiploads of rubbish he likes to live around?

Record Dreams

There used to be a record shop like that on Rupert St in Soho, with piles of records all over the place, just a real mess. I kept meaning to really go through it one day because I occasionally dug out some good stuff for dirt cheap but never really spent very long there because I used to just go on my lunchbreak. Sure enough it's now closed down.

Cheapo Cheapos! I made sense of it, over the years. I was gutted when it closed because I was just about to go in and buy the small pile of Henry Gross LPs they had had forever. Oh well...

Yeah, Cheapos was there *forever*, was always worth a skim...

"Vinyl Goodies" and "Vinyl Baddies" sections, it's all coming back to me...

There's a small TV & electronics retailer near me, a independent chain of about 4 stores, that sells and repairs video gear. It's the only place around here that sells parts for DIYers to repair their DVD player or whatnot, like little belts. I feel like I'm in a time warp whenever I go there, like I'm traveling back in time and walking into a 1960s or '70s hi-fi shop. I swear the parts shelves have stuff that's been sitting there for decades, obsolete stuff that will collect dust until the day they go out of business, taking up a good 20% of the floor space neatly displayed in little bags on pegboard racks. Same price stickers that were stamped on in 1976. Many of them are pre-UPC code; I like the ones that have the manufacturer's address and phone numbers that are only 7 digits, or worse, 5 digits preceded by two letters.

Only place in town that still has a walk-up tube tester though! I remember when the local drugstore had one - those were the days.

there's a tv-repair place like that on the NW side of chicago, near a bank i used to go to. everything in the store is old, and even (especially) the signage out front dates to the 1970s. the hours have dwindled to about six hours a day, four days a week. no idea how they stay in business. i imagine the proprietor sitting alone on a stool in near-darkness while an old zenith television plays a staticky rerun of 'family ties' off in another corner.

honestly if it wasn't for our culture of instant obsolescence places like this would be more popular/less poignant. in poorer countries, people have to hold onto things (tvs, radios, cars) longer and so there's a more vibrant market for folks who can repair old stuff and have a supply of old parts with which to do so. but in america you see a guy who repairs 1980s televisions and the pathos is just too much.

ok i guess there are those who specialize in repairing "vintage" items (those with collector credibility). but lots of stuff falls into a gap in between the new and the "vintage."