The news that Tower Records is closing makes me so, so sad. Depressed, even. I worked for Tower for seven years; it was my first real job (outside of teaching swimming lessons and babysitting). I started working there when I was 16, at the Broadway store (across the street from the original location), and they even let me transfer to the Santa Monica store when I went to school in L.A., so I worked there throughout college as well. It was only when I moved to New York that I had to cut the cord and find a real job.
Tower, especially the store I worked at, was known for attracting the most piereced, mohawked, disaffected types in Sacramento. In fact, the not-so-funny joke amongst my friends and family was “Why’d they hire you? You don’t have any tattoos.” Once I moved on to clerking in Santa Monica, I didn’t get as much floor time as I did in Sacramento, as my manager was especially impressed with the speed with which I handled a pricing gun, and I could usually be found surrounded by boxes of new CDs going onto the floor, and returned CD’s going back to the warehouse in West Sacramento. On weekends I handled deposits. I was always part-time during my entire seven years, always in school, so the crappy hourly pay never really bothered me.
I’ve never felt nostalgic for the work: dealing with customers, for the most part, was pretty annoying, save the few regulars. There was one elderly couple who came in every Sunday morning after church, to buy a new jazz CD. The wife would chat with me while I hung out at the register—Sunday mornings were excruciatingly slow—the register while her husband made his selection. They were such sweet, sweet people—I actually looked forward to seeing them. When I told her I wasn’t going to work there anymore because I was going to college, she honestly seemed a little crestfallen. I miss customers like her.
Customers I miss less are the ones who made working there miserable. Like the ones who expected my minimum-wage-earning ass to immediately intuit exactly what they’re looking for once they walk in, and get pissy when I couldn’t figure out what they were looking for. Or the ones who tried to return CDs that were completely scratched up, or—in once case, covered with peanut butter—claiming they didn’t work.
Of course the absolute best part about working for Tower was my coworkers. There was the tattoo-covered, shaved head near-midget (she’s 4’10″) who is still one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. The day she shaved her head, and I asked her why she did it, she just shrugged her shoulders and said, “It’s hair. It’ll grow back.” (I remember this everytime I’m getting a haircut and I’m secretly dreading that I’ll hate it.) There were three super-conservative Republicans amidst a sea of leftists, but they still managed to be sweet and still argumentative at the same time. You had to admire their stamina—when 95% of the staff is ready to argue with you, convictions are important. There was an undercover loss-prevention agent who was stealing and selling CDs out of the back of his car. And there were more hilarious, sarcastic bitches than you could shake a stick at.
This is scratching the surface, of course, because over the course of seven years, I probably worked with more than 100 different people between both stores. (Being a record store clerk isn’t exactly a long-term career…at least for most people.)
After I moved to New York and did get a real job in 2000…just when all the Napster stuff was blowing up, I still shopped at Tower for those CDs that I had to have immediately–which was admittedly rare. The rest of the time, I just downloaded songs from iTunes instead of buying whole albums, a practice that I’m sure contributed to the company’s demise. So in a way I feel a teeny, tiny bit culpable in their downfall. Without my employee discount, buying in volume there just didn’t seem smart. And small apartment + lots of CDs=lots of clutter=misery.
So maybe I’ll jump on the tower employee message board that a friend, who worked there up until a week before they shut down told me about, and reminisce just a little more.
