Miscellayneous

If you've been here for a minute, you'll know Record Store Day is one of my favorite days of the year. The weather is usually perfect. I spend the day in Wicker Park waltzing up and down every block shopping, listening to live music, and spending more money than I should be.

Last year was a little bit different. I wasn't planning on going out and ran out around 5-6pm to see if I could score Glass Animals I Don't Want to Talk exclusive (which I couldn't, but I did end up scoring about two weeks later at Rolling Stone Records.) To compensate, this year I was in full swing to have a great RSD. What would make this year the best? I had my eye on something. This would involve seeing if stores were dropping their stock early, waking up before dawn, lining up OUTSIDE of a store before they opened. This year, I was a woman on a mission and not a casual shopper.

The items? Post Malone's Hateful/Waiting for Never single & the Bluey soundtrack.

Before we go forward, this is my blog where I talk about my thoughts and I want to be honest with you all about my experiences, for you and for me to look back on. I'm not trying to tarnish anybody's name or put a bad taste in your mouth for an experience or for a shop, but I do want to talk about how my day went.

It's 5am and I'm outside of Rolling Stone Records. The aforementioned Rolling Stone Records that I scored Glass Animals from last year. As a shop, I love them. I have been up there once or twice on a casual visit and their atmosphere and organization is top tier for me. But, unless they change the way they do things next year, I'd advise y'all to find a different store for your RSD products.

We chose Rolling Stone because they had confirmed to me on Instagram they'd have all of our wishlist items in stock, but they didn't know how many of each. Before I go ahead, I KNOW I was taking the chance of them not having what I wanted. I also figured as a smaller shop, there would be less of a chance of a mass group of people (accounting for the Swifties.) Them being a smaller store (compared to those in the city), I also knew they'd have less stock than some of my regular RSD spots, but we chanced it and made it to 15 in line, not too bad.

I have two big issues with how Rolling Stone ran RSD:

1. People were coming earlier, leaving chairs in their spots, and going home until the store opened and I don't think that's fair. 

I came at 5 and stayed outside of the store for all four hours and lost the Post album to a couple (what, are you both going to listen to the same album at the same time? get real) who planted their lawn chairs and came back just before 9. Or, if you are going to plant a chair, you have to be in your car nearby. One of the Swifties did that and at least she was out here just like everyone else the entire time.

2. They had all of the albums on the floor for people to shop/browse, which allowed resellers to take more inventory than they planned.

The most effective way I've seen RSD done is menu style. I'll talk more about that when I get to the best part of the day. I also want to throw it into the universe that I don't agree with people who resell anything. People under the reseller umbrella include waiting outside of Goodwill and digging through the bins to resell on Depop and the group that has a special place in Hell, ticket resellers. 

Do I have bias to both of these because both of these rules were the reasons I lost my two purchases? Looking at you, the couple who took the last two copies of Post while I stood two people behind you in my PM tee-shirt and when I asked "Is that the last one?" the girl said, "Yeah," and smiled AND to the old men who bought the last two Bluey albums to resell them. Name all four Heelers, you CAN'T.

The store opened at 9:00 and by 9:45 I was leaving empty-handed. It took us so long because they had the RSD titles set up at the back of the store and we needed to wait for everyone else to browse. Did I cry? A little bit. Was it mostly out of exhaustion? Yes. Did we almost go home? Yes. 

But, we ended up at Shuga Records, my holy grail. (Shuga friends, if you see this, I love you.)

I have never left empty-handed at Shuga, whether it was a casual trip or on RSD. Even the year I didn't get the Glass Animals one from them, I left with a cassette. We got in line outside of Shuga where they had coffee and donuts. The line moved surprisingly fast, but my hopes were low because it was now 10:30am and we had just started in line and we were pretty far back.

Patience pays off, friends, we made it inside around noon.

Now this is where I was talking about menu style. They brought in between 10-20 people at a time and you lined up in the aisle leading up to the counter. There wasn't a lot of room to browse, but not a lot of people were browsing because we were all on missions.

The first person you see asks you what you're looking for. I told him Post, Bluey, Orville Peck (which they didn't have), and Taylor for my cousin. He nodded, grabbed all but Peck, and handed them over to me and checked out. There was no casual browsing of RSD titles, it was so simple and they had SO MUCH STOCK. To get a Taylor album at noon on RSD? Immaculate.

Oh, and it hailed on us limiting our shopping time to into Shuga Records and then back home.