Best Buy and Barnes & Noble

Or as I call them (sometimes), Breast Buy, or Buns & Nubile. 

I’ve already done a eulogy for Tower Records a few years ago.  Borders is also gone.   FYE is still around, but charges twice as much for CDs as you’d expect to pay on Amazon.  Unless you absolutely, positively have to have that CD NOW, don’t buy it at FYE.  Assuming you could even find it there.

When you think about it, Amazon is the optimal deal.  No brick & mortar store, even a Costco Warehouse, could possibly stock all the items which Amazon could list through its website – not merely its own inventory but all the sellers it associates with (that actually includes me).  I suppose you could forgive the genies and gurus who predicted the imminent demise of the brick & mortar store, which obviously can’t compete with Amazon.  My own quest for the more obscure Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein books – I’ve long since read Ubik and Starship Troopers – plus the more obscure author, Harry Harrison, who doesn’t seem to be carried at all in Barnes & Noble, has been possible thanks to Amazon and no thanks to Barnes & Noble.  By now the only printed materials I can expect to purchase from B&N is the new Classic Rock magazine and military surplus special edition gun magazines. 

Not only that, the advent of Spotify, streaming, and immediate digital downloads also make in-store music purchases somewhat obsolete.  Except that you can’t download vinyl.  I suppose you could say that the resurgence of the vinyl format is saving the brick & mortar music store.

Which brings me to my next topic:  where to buy CDs in a store, as of 2017.

A few weeks ago I was up in New Jersey – again.  And I paid a visit to our old friend, the Garden State Plaza, a mall in northern New Jersey at the intersection of 17 and 4.   The Adidas Store is still not open despite its promise to return “August 2017” (it was already September).   Despite that, there was a new addition: a “brick & mortar” Amazon Book Store.  It wasn’t particularly big, and not stocked nearly as well as a Barnes & Noble, but it was remarkable.  It had more of the look of a model store and not something to be taken seriously as a commercial establishment.  Anyhow.

GSP (as we call it) also has a Best Buy.   This one is… typically poorly stocked.  You would think, in theory, that all Best Buys are identically stocked.  And for the most part you’d be right.  However, the Best Buy in Paramus, up 17 North from GSP, is a bit different.  Every now and then I find stuff there I don’t see at other Best Buys.  This time it was two Jimi Hendrix CDs and Season 20 of South Park.   They also had the bundle packs of S1-5 and 6-10 of South Park.  Yet the Best Buy in Annandale, Virginia (Little River Turnpike & Pickett Street) had no South Park at all.   Score again for BB-Paramus.

I suppose you could say my preference is to walk into Best Buy and/or Barnes & Noble, find something really cool, bring it up to the register, pay for it, and walk out of the store with it IN MY HANDS.  Failing that, I just get back into the car, go home, and look online, click a few buttons, and a few days later the item I wanted is in my mailbox.  Best Buy and B&N also have websites, and these sites allow you to buy online and pick up at a local store, which is a nice compromise.

Best Buy also sells TVs, fridges, dishwashers, video game consoles, and other hardware which no one can download, but you can order it online and have it delivered.  Even so, most of us would prefer to “kick the tires” on a fridge on a showroom floor before spending $$$ to have it delivered.  Of my 5 guitars, though, one – a Gibson Les Paul Studio Pro in Black Cherry Pearl – I bought online without ever having seen it before it arrived on my doorstep.  To this day, I have never seen another one in a store, Sam Ash or Guitar Center, even the bigger flagship stores in Manhattan. 

I think we all can appreciate that convenience.  Of course the response to that is:  we could do all our shopping online in minutes, then sit back bored in our home and wonder what to do with the rest of the day.  

Is the business model that we stay home indefinitely and do all our shopping online, never venturing forth into the outside world to shop, see what’s out there, or just out of sheer boredom and stir craziness?   As enjoyable as I find it to come home from work and find a CD in my mailbox, I also get enjoyment out of finding something new or different at Best Buy or B&N and walking out of the store with it.  Fortunately, the continued existence of Best Buy and B&N suggests that I’m not the only one who thinks so.