This was originally published at Saintsteven’s Elsewhere and is now transferred to this blog, date set to date of original post.
I had this “idea” when we opened the store: since it was such a tiny place, even the posters on the wall (which I preferred to be music-oriented) were for sale. One of the first lines we bought we a bunch of oversized European rock posters, which were incredibly cool in retrospect, and I wish I had some of that stuff to show, but I don’t think I do. I know I tore a giant McCartney one in my haste to open the giant tube, and that was my first experience with some poster for which I’d paid eight bucks wholesale or something like that.
Anyway, for the first three years or so, that was the decor around the store. Whatever we had for sale which fit on a wall or could be tacked someplace.
Around 1991 or so, and I need to run that down, some “stuff” happened. I felt really ambitious and wanted a second store in the town where I now reside. At the same time, a chain music store located itself in the new mall in our original town, ending an exclusive we had enjoyed for our first years. Also about that time, a marketing organization named Concrete Marketing located us, largely because we had become a Soundscan reporting store, and they had this “complete” program for marketing hard music and the stuff I think we STILL insist upon calling “alternative”.
The Concrete Corner program consisted of mailing retailers tons of Point Of Sale stuff like posters and other gimcracks and promoting releases which they selected every month with free cassette samplers, which ultimately became CD samplers. The consumer could just stop by the store every month and pick up all this nifty swag and we had only to take photos of our displays and send them in and we could win nifty swag too, which we sometimes did.
I didn’t personally commit to the Concrete Corner program, although I did do what I could to incorporate it into our fliers and onto the dial-up computer BBS which we already operated at that time.
Concrete was really generous with their “flats”, which we called “squares”. We were a tiny store on a list of very big stores, and we didn’t have the linear feet to cover that a lot of other places did, so some of the flats got themselves archived without being used. That’s not the end of the story though. The used ones got archived too, because Tom, who worked the “end of the day shift” and Saturdays really got into it. We let him build the displays, and when he was done with the display materials, he stored them in boxes under the record bins. Those boxes from the first four years are still unopened and unforaged.
What I’ve been trotting out at eBay have been the “late” flats, those which came in when I had no enthusiasm for building displays, and while Tom did continue to do that, we finally reached a point where nobody did. Those last few months’ worth, almost all entirely mint, are coming up for sale sometime this winter.
We offered the things after we were done with them for various low prices and kept them on a shelf with the magazines and other stuff like that, and once in a while did sell a couple, but it took a worldwide audience to really make them a viable business.
I’ll continue to offer flats at eBay, but will slowly begin to consolidate them at the Thingery store under the category The Rainy Day Music Collection. That oughta be quite a list someday, because even though I’ve sold hundreds of ’em already, I probably haven’t shown more than a quarter of them.
Who woulda thunk, when he was making all his plans, that selling cardboard by the square foot would turn out to be something he does a lot?
Please stay tuna’d for more about this then.
postscript: when the dust settles, we think we might still have about 230 varieties of these Things…………