It just shows you how much I pay attention to big retail music chains. Musicland files chapter 11, and also closes a bunch of Sam Goodies and Suncoasts. Included in that is the Sam Goody in Lindale Mall in Cedar Rapids. Over lunch on Friday I was at Lindale and happened upon a store closing sale. Everything in the store was 40% off! I left with some things that I hadn’t gotten around to buying. I picked up the new Big Star In Space, the turntablism documentary “Scratch,” DJ Shadow’s “In Tune and On Time” DVD/CD, and Namco Museum Battle Collection for my PSP. I can see why this chain is in trouble. Everything in this store is overpriced! Most CD’s were between $16.99 and $18.99 before the 40% off. Musicland is attributing their poor performance to “big box retailer competition” and increased music downloading. If they can’t figure out how to charge less for CD’s, I doubt they will be successful. They state in the press release that in most cases, the local impact of the closing will be lessened by the fact that the consumer will usually be able to find another one of their chains close by. In Cedar Rapids, this isn’t the case. The nearest Sam Goody is Des Moines, and the nearest Suncoast is Waterloo. It looks like TransWorld Entertainment Corporation is making a move to purchase Musicland. Transworld seems to own most of the interesting record store chains: Strawberries, Coconuts, Wherehouse, CD World, fye, and Second Spin. It would be cool if we got one of those stores here.

I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed the numbers on the wall at Best Buy. They are black on yellow and typically are located by checkout. These numbers are statistics tracking things like theft or inventory discrepancies, Sports Illustrated subscriptions, and credit card applications. This is a really good article on it. There is a link in the article that ties to a website where workers from Best Buy talk about theft issues. Even though the employees are not paid bonuses on sales as they will repeatedly tell you, they are paid bonuses on other metrics.