I was in London recently and while wandering down around Soho, I came upon a street full of second hand record shops. This was great because surprisingly even in the metropolis that is Dublin. Old 33 vinyls are quite hard to find, especially if what your looking for is hard to find on CD. For me anyway that street in London was as close to a utopia as I’ll ever find. I went into all of them and they cater to all tastes in music. In fact I think they have a mini- union of sorts because if one shop has it they can direct you to a shop that specialises in whatever genre you may be looking for.
Anyway while browsing around one shop called “Sister Ray” (my new favourite shop) I discovered “The Honeydippers” album for £3. “The Honeydippers” that are on amazon are the a different group. “The Honeydippers” that I found in sister ray, is Jimmy Page and Robert Plant blues album from post Led Zeppelin. I heard about them at a record fair. I thought that was a pretty good find, my dad however was completely amazed by the fact that I was buying records not cd’s. I explained it him but I don’t think that he quite understood where I was coming from. (I’ll try and explain it better in a later post) I picked up two other albums one was AC DC’s “Back in Black” and the other was a limited white vinyl of Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning”
Its not the stock in these record shops that I love though its the people working there. When you go to a Virgin and HMV everything fells very generic, from the greeting to the goodbye at the till its like its leaned from a script (as it probably is).
“Good day Sir/Madam, have you had a pleasant experience? Could you find everything ok?”
Then the infamous “Thank you come again”
In America this is taken to an extreme. I saw an employee handbook from an American retail chain that had scripted conversations about how to pressure customers to buy products they didn’t need or want. I’ll try to find the link again.
In these second hand stores though everything seem more chilled out. The staff actually know what they’re talking about. They can even tell you how difficult its going to be to find the different albums. I think that its almost an older kind of service. From before big retail chains almost like the days of family run businesses. Theres an element of personal service that isn’t available in the big retail chains.
So in summation the reason I like the smaller second hand shops is because the staff are more knowledgeable, they have stock that just isn’t available in the bigger retail stores and there is an element of personal service.
But on the contrary to the above the stock tends to be a lot cheaper in the big chains, but thats just simple economics isn’t it?
