Ever since I can remember, my mother has had a massive, multi-family & friends garage sale 2x a year. If a neighbor or friend wanted to put some items on the sale she never refused. The more the merrier. It created a massive sale. One that any hardcore garage saler would be insane to pass up. Having the sale religiously on the same 2 annual weekends also assured that the folks who loved and counted on our sale, could easily mark their calenders for next year in anticipation. I’ll come back to this in a minute…

For the past 2 years my good friend Joseph Belk and I have compiled and distributed the Twin Cities Independent Record Store Guide or “TCIRSG”. If you live in the Twin Cities area and have popped into any of the record stores or trendy coffee shops, you may have seen our guide. It’s FREE and quite useful for out-of-towners who are visiting and handy for locals looking to discover or be reminded of when/where the record shops are open. As we were distributing the guides we noticed that a couple of the larger independent stores were apprehensive about displaying the guide in fear that it would tell potential customers about the other existing record stores and that they’d lose business to them. They couldn’t be more wrong. In a world when music formats are going digital and the classic, brick-and-mortar record stores are disappearing so quickly, wouldn’t you think the remaining record stores would want to band together and embrace their loyal community of (physical) record buying customers?

What those couple of stores don’t get is that it goes both ways. I’ve personally popped into a larger record store thinking that there was no way they wouldn’t have a particular release that week, and when they didn’t carry it I then went and checked with one of the smaller stores (and vice-versa). One of the places usually carried the release and both were always eager to order it for me if I still couldn’t find it. My point is that this is the same loyal customer frequenting both stores. I don’t care which particular (independent) record store has my release, I just want one of them to have it. I want them all to still exist. For any of these independent stores to try and dissuade a customer from shopping (or even knowing) about another store is just wasted time and effort. Look at the growing success of Record Store Day.

…Back to the garage sale thing. Like my mother’s massive garage sale tactic of attracting a buzz by teaming up with like-minded individuals looking to sell their wares, she created a spectacle that wasn’t to be missed yearly.  The tighter the community of record stores – the more likely it is to not only retain and satisfy your loyal customers but it will attract new customers to the community as well.

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