the pathos of unsold stock

posted this on ILV, meant to do so here:

just got 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 times i've been tempted, out of pity, to buy a few of these -- but have usually 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.

There needs to be a separate thread for the pathos of unsold stock from when you ran a record label 10 years ago.

that's more wistful than pathetic, isn't it?

One of these days I'll build an extension on my walk-in closet made of unsold records by bands I've been in.