I wok in a CD/Home/Car audio retailer of mid-size in Canada,
called A & B Sound. While I do not work in the CD dept.( I work in Car Audio) I see my fair share of boners...

Picture a 30-something year old Chinese dude with a stormrider jacket over his shoulder, hard hat at hip-side.
Wandering around the CD section at a half hour til closing.
Not just wandering, but walking around talking on a cel phone so that every person within earshot could hear that this guy,obviuosly, had a celphone and he knew how to use it.
Now, this guy wasn't little, he looked like he did some time in the gym...
As he walked around parading his expertise in personal comm. devices,
myself and the CD staff noticed he was drinking a can of Barq's Root Beer. No sooner did we notice him, did he proceed to throw his head back,
look t the aformentioned can and then proceed to smash the can on his head. The can did not cooperate however, and the guy, in his macho, cel-strengthened voice, yelled "OWWWWW!".....
Fuck, it wasn't even a Beer!
It was just a harsh Root Beer.
It was the funniest thing ive ever seen...
Then he came up to a girl that was in charge of classical CD's and asked if we had any real metal...like Metallica, Guns And Roses...
When I overheard this I yelled "Judas Priest!" from my Car Audio corner..
It was met with a grunt..and then a disbelieving - "Judas Priest...sssss,yeah right."

More laughter...

Defeatist wrote:I wok in a CD/Home/Car audio retailer of mid-size in Canada...I see my fair share of boners...

This sounds like a great store!

Defeatist wrote:Chinese dude

WTF? The typo, she is made funnier (to me, probably not to anyone else...).

Actually,
although it may sound as though we are a bit of a conumer electronics stew, we actually stock and order more CD and vinyl imoprts than Zulu Records, the only other good music shoppe in Vancouver.
I was able to order all of the old Daemon records Rock A Teen Cd's.
Nobody else, as far as I know could do the same in Canada.

Actually,
with all due respect, Scratch Records is also decent.
That's downtown. They are a distributor.
But they don't get as much traffic, so they are less likely to have hilarious customer stories.

Last week, a total skid from the Surrey area tried to make one of our cashiers read the song titles off the back of his CD. He was insistent.
He was also very loud.
They were obviously explicit titles, so she felt uncomfortable. She looked across the room at me and I walked over; when he saw me approaching,
he bolted, and on his way out the door he said, " Someone in this town is gonna play this CD tonite....This town will never be the same again!"
I saw the CD in his hand, it was Jackyl.

Dr. Ew wrote:From the ages of 17 to 20, I had a job working at CD/Record store located between Boston University and Boston College. As you can imagine, each and every Tuesday that the Dave Matthews Band released another album became the new worst day of my life.

Oh, goddamn Dave Matthews and those fuckin' hippy frat-boys. Did it piss you off to no end everytime someone came in and asked, "do you guys have the new Dave?" I was a big fan of, "Dave who?" Or else I'd give them, "Dave Grubbs? No, but I can special order it". Then they would, in a snotty I'm smarter than you voice say, "Nnnnnooooooo, Dave Matthews" like I was really that fucking clueless. Actually I wish I could be that clueless to not know...whatever.

Also, when those stupid hippies would here some shitty Dave Matthews or Phish bootleg that their roommate had and come in asking for the "new one". I would give them the latest which was probably 2 years old (3 months in Dave Matthew's case as the fucker doesn't know how to NOT put out too many records) and they'd be like, "duh, that's the old one". I would explain that while it may be the old one, it is also the newest one. "Well, my roommate has it..." Fuck.

Oh the thugs, I loved the thugs. Stealing shit, not believing me that there is no new Ying Yang Twins record because, "well, my boy cousin down in Memphis, he gots it". "Why you following us around 'cause we black?" "I'm not following you around 'cause you're black, I'm following you around because everytime you're in here, you steal something." I got that one all the time from guys we knew shoplifted and just hadn't been able to catch them "legally". It was always funny to me that we had to keep the rap section of CDs in clear view of the counter and all the Jet Li etc. DVDs had to be taped up and kept behind the counter.

It's actually harder than it may seem as record store and their managers in general are for the most part are "pretentious assholes".
It's really if you know somebody, word of mouth, etc...
I actuallt applied for a CD job and ended up being hired to sell car audio gear.

Oh, goddamn Dave Matthews and those fuckin' hippy frat-boys. Did it piss you off to no end everytime someone came in and asked, "do you guys have the new Dave?" I was a big fan of, "Dave who?" Or else I'd give them, "Dave Grubbs? No, but I can special order it". Then they would, in a snotty I'm smarter than you voice say, "Nnnnnooooooo, Dave Matthews" like I was really that fucking clueless. Actually I wish I could be that clueless to not know...whatever.

It was a nearly constant blur of khakis and white caps. And the occasional "pooka-shell" necklace. My "release day" survival tactic was to expediate their shopping process as much as possible, minimizing my own involvement, and getting them out of store ASAP. As soon as a likely DMB shopper entered, I would grab a copy of the new record from the pile behind the counter and announce...

"It's right here, $15.74"

This usually was met with expressions of astonishment that I had predicted their reason for entering the store. Something like...

"No way, bro! How'd you know what I was looking for?"

And repeat. Over and over. All day.

I used to work at a record store in romford when I was at school and for a while afterwards.

It was a friends store and money was a problem so I used to get paid in cd's. Which is where the money would have gone anyway.

My first wage was Teenage Fanclub - Bandwagonesque and James - Gold Mother.

Worked in a little indie store in Birmingham for a while after university, like everyone else I've got plenty of stories about idiot customers, rabid European Prince/Cliff Richard/Samantha Fox fans and impossible-to-shift cds and so on. Maximum R'n'R reading indie-kids were a particular bane, although the proximity of the shop to a big hospital led to some hair-raising encounters with people from the soft, white underbelly of the Midlands. We'd one guy who used to come in the odd time, poor bastard was often partly swathed in filthy strip bandages and looked like someone had tried to mummify a tramp. His trick was to gather up a huge pile of cds and plonk them on the counter and, after failing to purchase them with *empty wallet* he'd flail about with his bandages trailing like a demented ribbon gymnast, expelling a fug of stale urine and turds. Guiding him out of the shop was a "two pool cues" effort.

However, the biggest menace lay within, a youth training scheme girl whose intellect was inversely proportional to the size of her army boots. I remember the horror unfolding as she was extraordinarily rude and unhelpful to a phone customer who was after a rare Beefheart bootleg, which we had in stock. When she finished the call I asked her who it was..."Some dick asking about old-man records...his name was Joe Peel or something".

My suspicions were confirmed when, that night, "Joe" Peel commented on the rudeness of a Brummie shop-girl during his radio programme, precipitating a panicked phone call from me to the BBC. Happily they put me right through to the man himself and he was utterly charming, hatchet was buried.

But record shops, Jeez.