Urban Bullshitters and 'vintage vinyl'

DocMcCoyDocMcCoy "Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,917 Posts
edited September 2013 in Strut Central
So I was shopping for birthday gifts for the missus over the weekend and found myself, as I occasionally do, in a branch of Urban Outfitters. Now, I dunno how many of you ever visit these places with any regularity, but UO has been carrying new vinyl for a minute. What's different about their stores now is that, in Berlin anyway, they've supplemented the new product with entire racks full of crap, all at 9 euro a pop. Didn't matter if it was a Gene Loves Jezebel 12" single, a Bryan Adams album or a skated copy of Roy Harper's Folkjokeopus on Liberty - everything was the same ridiculous price. It was as if they'd scooped up a random charity shop/thrift store's entire "ALL RECORDS A ??1" vinyl stock and, with neither rhyme nor reason, slapped a massive mark-up on it before sticking it out in the store.

Then I saw this article, the last swallow of a summer of "Vinyl Is Making A Comeback" articles, and I remembered something Mrs. Jonny Paycheck said during a convo we had when Los Paychecks were visiting Berlin last week, about how Whole Foods was now moving into the vinyl game. It reminded me a little of that moment in the 90s when UK record companies decided to sell their product into supermarkets at a massively discounted rate, setting in motion the long, slow death of the High Street record store. This is not exactly the same, of course, but there are similarities - in this case, dilletante-ish non-specialists using the extra muscle their market share gives them within the "youth lifestyle" niche to further fuck up the game in a city where second-hand vinyl is already seriously overpriced.

Personally, my feeling is that if you'll pony up nine sovs for, say, a VG- copy of Audrey Hall's One Dance Won't Do, then you deserve to get your pocket picked. Nevertheless, everything about this Urban Outiftters move looks and feels wrong on every level. I doubt it'll make any difference to store-owners who are serious about their shit, but if it's time for vinyl to return to main street, it deserves something a bit better than a sloppy, half-arsed rackjobbing effort like this.
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