I Shopped at FYE

I know it’s unthink­able, but last Sat­ur­day when I was at the Cher­ry Hill Mall get­ting my dear Mac­book repaired for the umpteenth time, I found myself alone with my son, need­ing to occu­py some time while Helen replen­ished her sum­mer wardrobe. There aren’t many inter­est­ing options when you’re at the mall, so I took a walk down mem­o­ry lane and stepped inside the sort of store that intro­duced me to music in the first place: an FYE.

(For the record, my first expe­ri­ence with a chain music store that was­n’t a big box pro­to­type was Sam Goody. I tried to order Fugaz­i’s ‘In on the Kill Tak­er.’ What a mess that was.)

I expect­ed to be chat­ted up by the ado­les­cent clerk and I was. I told him I did­n’t need any help, although I prob­a­bly should’ve asked him to turn the lights on as the shop was as dark as a cave. I guess long shad­ows are the only way to make an FYE seem remote­ly “edgy.” That said, my over­all shop­ping expe­ri­ence was­n’t bad! Sure, it’s not the trea­sure trove you remem­ber from youth: the bands are all much more famil­iar; I spend way less time try­ing to con­vince myself to buy things I might not like in the name of “music dis­cov­ery”; and the selec­tion remains woe­ful­ly dull.

What drew me into the store, apart from the need to keep myself and an angsty tod­dler busy for about 30 min­utes while Mom bought some new tops? $9.99. The mag­i­cal pri­ce­point! Every­thing in the store was marked at $9.99, mean­ing that yet anoth­er brick-and-mor­tar retail­er is mov­ing toward Apple’s pric­ing, with the dis­tinct dis­ad­van­tage of, um, over­heard. Pesky, that.

$9.99 got me in the store and I was try­ing to remem­ber what stuff I want­ed to pick up. I grabbed copies of the new Janelle Mon­ae and LCD Soundsys­tem records. (I know I said in my last post that I’m not all about Pitch­fork-hyped bands, but I’m a con­tra­dic­tion.) Outstanding.

When I arrived at the check­out, the dis­tract­ed clerk was wait­ing for me, but lit­tle did I know what await­ed me there. The dread­ed upsell! And not just one! No, when I got to the counter, baby in one arm, I was made sev­er­al offers, all of which I could eas­i­ly refuse.

First, I was asked if I want­ed to join some sort of FYE Club or anoth­er. I polite­ly declined. Sec­ond, I was asked if I want­ed to pre-order the new Jack John­son album, which was due to hit store shelves a mere three days lat­er. When I said I’d pass, the clerk not­ed that he saw me singing along to it. True enough, but it did­n’t mean I want­ed to pre-order the sil­ly thing. Some­times you need to invent ways to keep a baby busy, right? After the hard sell, he asked me if I was inter­est­ed in sub­scrip­tions to any of the sev­er­al mag­a­zines includ­ed on a blot­ter right on the check­out counter. After the third “no” of the check­out, the trans­ac­tion was complete!

Now that I’ve writ­ten this all down, I’m not sure if $9.99 is real­ly worth the aggra­va­tion, espe­cial­ly when you con­sid­er that I was able to scoot into AKA Music, grab a copy of Erykah Badu’s lat­est LP, and get back out again in no time at all. No pre-orders or shop­per’s club offers at all! Wish more peo­ple felt that way, since I passed a for­lorn rack of Record Store Day exclu­sives (includ­ing the Arthur Rus­sell one from ’09) as I walked in the store.

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