Thoughts at the Passing of a Local Audio Store

[JamesN]

I live in a moderately small town in the US. When I moved here 27 years ago,the population was around 25,000. Today it's almost 30,000. There was one "boutique" audio store in town. I don't know how long they had been in business before I arrived, but they had always been the place to go for anything mid to high end. I bought my first CD player from them. And my first subwoofer. Actually quite a bit of gear over the years.

My wife phoned me last night and said that she was driving by the store and saw a Going Out of Business sign on their door. So I stopped in the next morning. Sure enough, it was true. There were two employees left, trying to move the last few items left in inventory, and conducting themselves with more grace and dignity than I would have thought possible under the circumstances. The walls were bare, save for empty holes that used to host arrays of in-wall speakers. Racks once stacked full of gear sat empty, with cables and interconnects dangling lifelessly at their backs. I felt very, very sad.

It used to be the place to go if you wanted anything remotely mid to high end. I didn't know what a subwoofer was until they showed me. They educated me in the visual superiority of LaserDisc over VHS. Guided me though multiple speaker upgrades. I will sorely miss them.

Frankly, I am surprised that they were able to last as long as they did. 27+ years is a long, long time in any business, not to mention one whose dynamics have changed so much in that time. I imagine the current economy is what finally did them in, but I also suspect that their demise has actually been a long and slow process. 27 years ago there were no big-box stores in our town. If you wanted a piece of audio gear, you went to the audio store. Now we have 3 WalMarts and a BestBuy within just a few blocks of each other. Even our grocery stores sell blu-ray players.

But I have to believe it was the Internet that dealt the knock-out blow. One-click access to anything you want, delivered from anywhere in the world to anywhere else in the world. Kind of hard to compete with that. And yes, I was guilty of buying quite a bit of gear through the Internet over the years, gear that our audio store would have been more than happy to sell me. I was lulled by the convenience and the prices. Sure I saved a few dollars over the years. But now I no longer have my local audio store as a buying choice anymore.

As I was driving home, I passed the last remaining locally-owned bookstore in our town. They were closed, but I couldn't tell whether or not it was permanent. I stopped going there awhile ago, even though the owner was warm and friendly and always told he he could order me any book that I wanted. Instead it became more convenient to click a button on my computer and have an anonymous cardboard box show up on my doorstep a few days later. Or have the bits and bytes stream silently and soullessly to my e-reader.

Next week, if they are still open, I am going to buy a few books. Real books from a real person. I know it won't save the bookstore, and it certainly won't being back the audio store. But it's something.