More from my first job at a CD Warehouse:
In the store we had what we called the “Crap Bin”. It was our 99¢ bin. It was full of CD’s that were from really bad artists, CD’s that we had too many of, or ones that were just in bad condition. There was a lot of Hootie and the Blowfish, Snow, Green Day, Soul Asylum and other stuff like that. The crap bin just filled up, always waiting for that moment of exhilarating joy when someone would want to hear Colour Me Badd again.
Now as the crap bin continually accumulated more CD’s we needed to find a way to reduce the size of the crap bin. We thought of implementing a buy one get one 99 cent CD free promotion, and we tried improving the appearance of the bin and more prominently displaying them but nothing worked. The CD’s in that bin kept growing. One day John was inspired as he remembered the store across town that also buys CD’s. It was a store called Hastings and they had a relatively small collection of used CD’s. They didn’t generally offer as much money as we did for used CD’s. They were known for giving 3 dollars for the good stuff and we usually gave 5 bucks a pop for good material. John and my friend, Rob, who worked there too, loaded up about 30 CD’s and headed over to Hastings. Rob went up to the counter and John went inconspicuously over to the magazines and hid himself, as the Hastings management knew who he was. Rob went over to the counter and offered his stack of crappy CD’s to the girl at the counter. The girl instantly turned around and asked the manager for help. The manager began grilling Rob about the origin of so many CD’s that were from such a wide range of genres. Rob explained that he was very eclectic in his musical taste and that some of the CD’s were his sisters. After filling out an information form Rob looked around for John and saw him hiding his face behind a magazine. The girl told Rob that she could only give him 30 dollars for the entire stack of CD’s. They left with the satisfaction of getting 1 dollar for each of those CD’s from the 99 cent bin. Upon their return they relayed the whole story to me and we all laughed our heads off. I said that I wished I could have been there, John said, “Oh, you’ll get your turn.”
One week later we picked out another stack of about 30 CD’s and carefully positioned them in the stack so as to have the recognizable artists in strategic places. I walked into Hastings with my stack of CD’s and John came in a minute after me. I went to the counter to find one girl behind it and I looked around for a manager only to not find one in sight. I began commenting to the girl on how cool her job was and trying to make small talk. I had to fill out an information slip to make sure they could find me if it turned out that the CD’s were stolen. After I did that the girl handed me 60 bucks. I almost started laughing out loud. I kept my composure until I got outside and met John at his car. After that we just referred to our trips as “The Hastings Scandal”.
Isn’t it a real shame that no one will probably ever know the excitement of selling CD’s to a competitor?