Mr Chuckles dot net

I stopped in to my local Best Buy last night to pick up the new Spoon (Spoooooon!) album, which of course they didn’t have. So I began to browse for a few other CD’s on my “buy me some day” list. I wandered over to the J’s to look for some guilty-pleasure music (as mentioned in a previous post), and came away with one of two (not the one I really wanted). Slightly frustrated, I headed over to the dance section not expecting to find what I was looking for, and didn’t. More frustrated now, I head over to the “new release” / “bestseller” section, thinking perhaps the aformentioned Spoon album would be there. No, just the same tired selection of shitty hip-hop and washed-up pop stars. Finally, on my way to the check-out line, I swing by the H’s looking for Dare!, an eighties classic. They didn’t even have a placeholder for The Human League; instead I ran into two rows of William Hung.

The reality is, my local Best Buy (and perhaps all Best Buy’s) exemplify the Walmart Effect. Large big-box moves in to an area. Big-box offers large and varied CD selection and prices them as loss-leaders to bring in the customers. Local and national record stores drop their prices to stop the hemoraging of customers, to little avail. Eventually, all real competition in the area is out of business (as was the case for my local Tower Records). Big-box then begins to cut-back on their CD selection, offering large quantities only on albums they’re paid an incentive to carry, as they’ve discovered (or perhaps knew all along) that it doesn’t make good financial sense to give over so much floor space to items they make little-to-no profit on. The end-result is that people like myself and many of my friends, who have a geniune love for good music, are left to do our CD shopping on Amazon or iTunes. The former makes me pay for shipping and wait for my CD, the later gives me DRM-laden poor-quality reproductions, and both options kill the actual phsyical experience of CD shopping, for which there’s something to be said.

So, where does all of this leave me? I ended up leaving with A Funk Odyssey, a groovy little album with a few low spots but generally a good purchase. It was, however, at the bottom of my list. I’ll probably pick up Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga locally when I find it (or kite it from Bradley), and I now see that Dare! is up on iTunes Plus for only $8. I’ve given up finding Towa Tei anywhere but Amazon, and I’ll leave Synkronized for a future guilty-pleasure shopping experience…