Keeping the groove going
As Record Store Day approaches, Bay Area shops adapt, improvise to survive pandemic
For most of the Bay Area’s independent record stores, Record Store Day typically means long lines at the door and tight aisles packed with rabid music fans. Everything is different this year. As many Bay Area businesses remain shuttered due to the coronavirus pandemic, local record stores are struggling to stay afloat.
Even Record Store Day, the annual promotional event that started in 2008 to draw attention to independent music retailers by providing them with exclusive vinylonly releases, has changed. What used to take place on one day in April is now divided across three monthly events starting Saturday, Aug. 29. The staggered dates are an effort to help stores ease back into the market when it is safe to once again tap their fan base.
1234 Go Records in Oakland is one of the few Bay Area shops that will open its doors for the first event, called
RSD Drops 2020.
But to do so, owner Steve Stevenson had to devise a system that requires customers to sign up for 20minute time slots for the price of a $10 deposit (all of which are sold out), giving his staff time to clean the shop after each appointment.
He’s hoping it will help the store recoup some of the losses it accumulated over the past few months, but by capping the number of people who can shop, Stevenson realizes it will only bring in a fraction of the profits a typical Record Store Day event does.
“We’ll see how it goes,” he said. “Under different circumstances, it would be a boon.”
Many other Bay Area record retailers, such as Amoeba Music, are passing up on the event altogether, at least during this first round.
“We were hoping to be open in time for the first one, but that is not realistic anymore,” said Marc Weinstein, coowner of Amoeba Music on Haight
Street.
He lamented the loss of the store’s busiest day of the year as the area remains on the California Department of Public Health’s watch list for counties that are experiencing negative trends in key COVID19 indicators.
Amoeba is scraping by, surviving off a mix of mail orders, savings and contributions raised by a $275,000 GoFundMe campaign, as it tries to maintain its employee benefits.
“We’re weighing how much are we losing per month versus what are the benefits of opening,” he said. “It’s a hard decision for small business owners.”
Down the street in the Lower Haight, smaller shops like Groove Merchant and Rooky Ricardo’s Records, which deal primarily in secondhand goods, are equally perplexed.
“I don’t feel comfortable enough to open the doors just yet,” said Chris Veltri, who owns the 700squarefoot Haight Street soul and jazz vinyl boutique Groove Merchant.
Never a big fan of mail order, he bought a home postage system in March and found surprising success selling merchandise through the store’s Instagram account. A few weeks ago, he also started allowing one customer at a time into the store by appointment.
But that’s not enough to run a business in the Bay Area.
Veltri recently gave up his storage space and said he was barely able to pay his bills last month. He applied for a small business loan but didn’t get anything.
“My landlord cut my rent by 40%, but even trying to pay 60% is a real struggle,” Veltri said. “What I make now is a trickle in comparison to what I was doing before. But I’ll take it.”
Dick Vivian, who has owned the cozy little vinyl emporium Rooky Ricardo’s Records for more than 30 years, has fully opened his store with limited hours. But the customers have thinned out, and so has the communal atmosphere that is so essential to record store culture.
“It’s not a hangout spot anymore,” Vivian said. “There’s no more Friday afternoon cocktail hour. The customers come in, shop and then they leave.”
Rooky Ricardo’s has also ventured into mail order via Instagram, with Vivian clearing out collectible gems from his personal collection.
“It’s my nest egg,” he said. “I thought, ‘When more am I going to need my nest egg?’ ”
Other shops, such as Econo Jam and Originals Vinyl, are also cautiously open, while a handful of others — Pyramid Records, Grooves, Mod Lang, Noise, Thrillhouse, Vinyl Dreams, Jack’s Record Cellar, Strictly Vinyl, Playhouse Records, to name a few — are temporarily closed.
Rasputin Music’s Berkeley location shuttered while its stores in Modesto, Fresno, Pleasant Hill and Campbell remain open with limited hours. All require masks and temperature checks before entering.
1234 Go Records permanently closed its San Francisco brickandmortar store on Valencia Street this month. After five years in business, the store could not endure the heavy revenue losses it experienced as the pandemic dragged on, Stevenson said.
“The amount of money we would make would be almost entirely wiped out from the rent we pay to make it,” he said.
Instead, Stevenson moved all his inventory to the store’s Oakland outlet, which is below his apartment, and started pushing out his wares on the collector website Discogs.
“It’s not a disaster, but there are a lot of caveats,” he said, of the mailorder business. “I’m working three times as hard to be down $20,000 a month.”
He’s also allowing a limited number of walkup customers into the East Bay store, with mask requirements, social distancing markers, hand sanitizer and gloves in place for safe browsing.
“I’ve been very unfriendly about this the entire time,” Stevenson admitted. “This is for real. We are not messing around. You have to be serious when you come in here.”
If anything, the Bay Area’s independent record stores have proved themselves to be resilient. They survived the era of bigbox retailers, illegal downloads and the rise of streaming.
“I’ve been here for 25 years, and I have no plans of leaving,” Veltri said. “Everybody that comes through reassures me that they’re really, really happy I’m still here. As long as I hear that, I’m going to keep fighting the good fight.”