At 11:38 PM 5/31/2004 EDT, DanAbnrml9@aol.com wrote:
>This dimwitted sales assistant would like to note that sales are up fairly  
>substantially this year, and while we've closed a pair of stores (in both
cases 
> because of lease issues), we also just opened a brand new one. We're also 
>faring  far better than our music retail competition, both in terms of the 
>"giants" (the  irrelevent Tower and HMV, with 1 and 2 Boston-area stores, 
>respectively) and the  bread-and-butter music retailers (the equally
irrelevent FYE and 
>Strawberries,  who nevertheless do rope in the VERY casual, base-level 
>consumers). The problem  with all of those stores? THEY'RE NOT FUN. No one
wants to 
>spend time in them!  Why would anyone bother to go to a store if it doesn't 
>have some surprises, if  it isn't sort of an exciting place to dig through
the 
>bins and look for stuff?

Young Jason speaks the truth.  The reason why the vast majority of my
music-spending budget ends up in his company's bank account isn't that I
like Mike Dreese better than Richard Branson or Russ Solomon, it's that
Newbury Comics stores are much more fun to shop in than most places in
Boston.  I'll go in on a Wednesday afternoon or a Friday evening for no
reason other than a quick look-see at the new release rack, and first off,
it's "Oh, they're playing a song I like on the store system, cool" (btw,
Jason, the "no-dirty-words-on-the-PA" rule is consistently being flouted at
store #1, where they're well fond of the BAADASSSS!!!! soundtrack), and
then it's "Oh, the Loretta Lynn album is only $9.99, what the hell" --
kick-ass, by the way, worth full retail -- and then it's "Oh, Charity
wanted the new Magnetic Fields album, I'll get that for her," and then it's
"Holy CRAP, who put out this compilation of all of DNA's recordings?,"
followed by "Ooh, sweet, new Dipsomaniacs...this IS the Swedish band and
not the Jersey one, right? Yes, it is, cool..." and then it's "Well, I'm
spending all this money anyway, $7.99 for the Jamie Cullum record seems
reasonable."  That's like $60 of new CDs, in something like 15 minutes.
And I swear I'd only gone in to browse!  Even at the counter, there's stuff
to spend money on!  (Verdict: I love liquorice.  I love Altoids.  Liquorice
Altoids, however, are a baaaaaaaaaaaaad idea.  Big thumbs up on the ginger
ones, though.)

And at that counter, there'll be three registers open, and a line at each
one.  If the music retail industry is tanking, someone forgot to tell the
people who shop at Newbury Comics.

The thing is, the independent shops can get it all wrong too.  A store
right across Newbury Street from the original Newbury Comics, an
independent bookstore called Avenue Victor Hugo, went out of business
today.  The guy who owns the place wrote this long manifesto sort of thing
that was published in the Phoenix and is also available as flyers at the
checkouts, and he basically blames the customers for failing his precious
store, and he honestly seems to feel that as soon as they're done packing
up, Boston reverts back to the savages and we'll all be drooling on
ourselves and farting in public within 24 hours.  

Now, I like AVH, and I've certainly bought some very good things there (I
just bought two first editions by the '50s hipster novelist Bernard Wolfe
there last month), but they have a lot of genuine flaws that are a huge
part of the reason why they closed.  The thing is, if you're just kinda
browsing and you're in a receptive mood and you just want to buy a book,
Avenue Victor Hugo is great.  Books for days.  But if you go in there
LOOKING for a book?  Tough shit.  When I bought the Wolfes, I'd gone in
because there was a story about P.G. Wodehouse in the New Yorker, and I
thought, "You know, I hear the Jeeves and Wooster books are hilarious, I've
never read those, and they sound like a perfect light summer read."  Now,
British novels from the '30s and '40s that every Anglophile in America
adores, that's just the sort of thing a huge secondhand bookstore is gonna
stock, right?  P.G. Wodehouse wrote dozens of books, but they didn't have a
single old Scotch-taped paperback!  And the other thing is, their stock
just kind of stops right about 1988.  Most used book stores, you'll
generally find a lot of books that were big, say, three or four years ago.
I mean, how many copies of INFINITE JEST do you suppose the store nearest
your local college campus has?  I swear, I have never seen a single book
published in the '90s in that store.

Avenue Victor Hugo is a very nice bookstore.  It's not the best bookstore
in the world.  It's not even in the Top 5 bookstores in the
Boston-Cambridge metro area!  I mean, even if I only had Brookline
Booksmith and the Harvard Bookstore, I think I could cope.  If I lost The
Strand, down in Greenwich Village -- the place with 8 linear miles of
bookshelves -- okay, then I would be wailing and gnashing my teeth and
rending my garments.  The closing of Avenue Victor Hugo doesn't mean much
to me.  Certainly not as much as the owner seems to think it should, and
only slightly more than the closing of HMV.

S