Record Stores: Coronavirus 'Could Be the Death Knell' For Indie Retailers
The day before Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker issued a stay-at-home order over the coronavirus, Reckless Records buyer Matt Jencik felt anxious. Over the previous week, Jencik’s chain of three Chicago music stores, which employ about 40 people, had been playing chicken with the inevitable: closing their doors. But Jencik was becoming increasingly worried about his customers and employees. “I would wash my hands every 10 minutes,” he says. “Every time we rang someone up, I would have to say, ‘Go wash your hands.’ It was getting to the point where I was just like, ‘This is just not comfortable for anybody.’”
Although his livelihood depended on the store staying open, Jencik started hoping the state would intervene and close small businesses so he wouldn’t have to. “If you would have asked me 10 days ago, ‘What would you say if you had to close all of your stores?’ My answer would never have been, ‘That’s what I would want to do,'” he says shortly before the stay-at-home order. “But on Wednesday, I really wanted to close the store.” Pritzker made the decision for him, shutting down all nonessential businesses across the state to promote social distancing, effectively forcing Reckless to quickly conceive a survival plan for the coronavirus era.
The paradox of killing your store to survive has been brutal for small businesses across America, and it has been especially vexing for record shops, many of which were already barely scraping by in their quest for survival. More than half a dozen store owners and buyers across the nation tell Rolling Stone that the coronavirus pandemic puts the world of record retail in peril.
For much of the past year, stores have been dealing with a frustrating problem, as major labels shifted their distribution operations to Direct Shot Distributing, a service they say has crippled their business by making it more difficult to get new releases. Many say they had recently pulled themselves back into the black when the pandemic hit, putting their profitability back in jeopardy. Now they’re navigating uncharted waters.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/record-stores-coronavirus-pandemic-973887/
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