#882: The Day KK Came Back
RECORD STORE TALES #882: The Day KK Came Back Working retail means you can’t control who you see on a day-to-day basis. Faces from the past are part of the job. Teachers, old neighbours, bullies, and...
View Article#890: Top Ten Most Annoying Things About Listening Stations
A sequel to #444: “Can I Listen to This?” RECORD STORE TALES #890: Top Ten Most Annoying Things About Listening Stations Although it seems like dystopian fiction now, there was once a time when if you...
View Article#918: Drinkin’ Thinkin’
RECORD STORE TALES #918: Drinkin’ Thinkin’ A buddy of mine said the other day, “I saw your clips from the first live show. I was killin’ myself laughing, that was great”. The part a lot of people...
View Article#943: Irate With a Beeper!
RECORD STORE TALES #943: Irate With a Beeper! There was once a time before we had our infamous “no questions asked” return policy. In 1996, we were able to…shall we say, “express ourselves” more...
View Article#961: Christmas in the Hamster Wheel
RECORD STORE TALES #961: Christmas in the Hamster Wheel I always wanted a hamster when I was a kid. I used to love looking at the neat setups that other kids had in their homes. Hamster wheels,...
View Article#966: Crossing the Line
As hinted in the past, there are many Record Store Tales that have gone untold. Some I have been asked not to share. Some I’ve waited years to write, in hope that the past two decades will put some...
View Article#967: Dilemmas of Buying
RECORD STORE TALES #967: Dilemmas of Buying Mixing friends with work is always a tough balancing act. When you work retail, it’s even harder. The friends come to you, and they’d like to do business...
View Article#990: Cleaning the Door
RECORD STORE TALES #990: Cleaning the Door In 2005, near the end of my sad reign as Record Store Manager, I was working at the head office branch. There was a door in the back of the store that lead...
View Article#1006: Too Many Cooks
RECORD STORE TAILS #1006: Too Many Cooks Every so often, a thought or a memory has casting my mind back onto the old Record Store Days. You probably don’t often think about a job that you quit almost...
View Article#1033: Boxing Daze
RECORD STORE TALES #1033: Boxing Daze Boxing Day (December 26) is for relaxing. After all this activity, we need a break. That’s my opinion. For others, including my wife, it’s for shopping for...
View Article#1039: Catalogue
RECORD STORE TALES #1039: Catalogue There was one chain back in the Record Store days that was considered our chief rival. They weren’t really; they were actually much bigger than us, but the Boss Man...
View Article#1040: The Tag Jar
RECORD STORE TALES #1040: The Tag Jar As your typical mall music store in the 1990s, we had the usual magnetic tag security system. The idea was fairly simple. At the store entrance there was a...
View Article#1047: A Pretty Good Day
RECORD STORE TALES #1047: A Pretty Good Day The worst and most tiring kind of days at the Record Store were the ones with customers bringing in endless boxes of discs for us to buy. These took up a...
View Article#1109: “Marillion Sucks”
RECORD STORE TALES #1109: “Marillion Sucks” Friends, what would you do if you ordered a used CD from a small chain, only to find somebody defaced the artwork with black magic marker before sending to...
View Article#1115: The Winds of Change
RECORD STORE TALES #1115: The Winds of Change My time in music retail was relatively long, considering how taxing on the soul it can be buying used music from the public on the wrong side of town. I...
View Article#1118: I Wonder…
RECORD STORE TALES #1118: I Wonder… I recently enjoyed a trip to Burlington Ontario, a place I have not been since the early 2000s working at the Record Store. Driving down Highway 6, I wondered, is...
View Article#1119: The Olde Toys R Us Store Sure Has Changed…
RECORD STORE TALES #1119: The Olde Toys R Us Store Sure Has Changed… Where Toys R Us stands today in Kitchener Ontario, there once was a drive-in movie theater. That was torn down in the early 1980s,...
View Article#1136: Prophets of Disaster
RECORD STORE TALES #1136: Prophets of Disaster A teaser for the 30th Anniversary story & video of my hiring at The Beat Goes On From day one at the Record Store, there were always the doomsayers....
View Article#1157: The Lone Classic Hard Rocker
RECORD STORE TALES #1157: The Lone Classic Hard Rocker For almost my entire tenure at the Beat Goes On, I was pretty much the only “classic hard rocker”. By that I mean, the guy who not only liked...
View Article#450: REDUX – Mascot Suit Beat Down – improved video
Almost 10 years ago, when I first uploaded a version of this video, I was still “in the closet” about where I worked whilst writing the original Record Store Tales. I had to butcher the video pretty...
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