![]() ![]() “Yeah, I know, but this isn’t Europe and I have a really hard time selling stuff like this.” “But this guy here is really big in Europe right now.” “The ones back in the box I can’t take - they are just too damaged, too obscure, or both.” I called the kid over and went through his discs stack by stack. ![]() The last thing I wanted was to get in shit for buying shit! I played it on the safe side and decided to take a small token number. The thing about buying discs like that was that I was always second-guessing myself. I looked the artists up, disc by disc, and passed on the majority simply because I could not find out a single thing about them. But this was not a busy store, and we really had no idea what was going to sell or sit for years. Mississauga was definitely more into dance music than the more…eh…white trash of Kitchener-Waterloo. I had no idea who many of these artists were. I was sure that would be easy to explain to him…not. So the kid wasn’t going to be getting full value. Plus a lot of these were older titles, and that meant the fad was often over on them. We had already nickle-and-dimed the third party CD fixers to death, but we generally deducted $2 from the offer for discs that were scratched. We always offered less for scratched discs because we had to pay a third party company to buff the scratches out. I sorted through the discs, and most of them were in pretty bad shape. There was absolutely nowhere to grab a coffee nearby, I just needed him our of my hair. If you want to go and grab a coffee, I’ll need about an hour to sort through these.” “No, I haven’t even started looking at them yet. “OK, give me an hour or so and I’ll have these all priced out for you.” As promised, mostly dance music from Europe with a couple American and Canadian titles sprinkled in there. Eventually he was all questioned out, and returned a few hours later with a big box of CDs. The kid did indeed have a lot of questions. It’ll depend on what kind of shape they’re in, what they retail for, and if we have any in stock already. “Well we offer between $1 and $7 cash each for CDs, and 20% more for credit. Dance music that was “big in Europe” usually sat for months on our shelves because, well, Canada is not in Europe. That was never something I wanted to hear. These are all artists that are really big in Europe.”Įgads. “How much can he get for them? He has really great dance music that’s hard to find, he bought them on import from Europe. “Well I’ll have to have a look first, but you can bring in as many as you want and I’ll sort through them and let you know.” “Right on, yeah, bring it in and I’ll have a look.” “Yes we do, get him to bring them in and I will go through them and see what we can use.” “Do you buy CDs? My cousin is a DJ and he has a lot.” He was into dance music and had lots of questions. He was related to someone who worked at the hair dresser. This one Mississauga kid came in to check us out. I think there was a barbershop or something in the plaza, or hair dresser if you will. Dentists, pharmacies, that sort of thing. This store sat in the middle of a medical strip plaza. Kind of a nightmare, as many store openings were back them. There were always staffing problems like people not showing up for their first shifts, and I don’t think the manager lasted a long time either. It was deader than dead, but many of the managers had to take turns running the ship until we had a trained staff. I was working for a stretch at our newly opened Mississauga location. RECORD STORE TALES #996: “These are really big in Europe” ![]()
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