Todd Stadler's blog

record store olympics

When I wasn't saying very rude things to a computer that was clearly ignoring me, I decided to head over to Ozone Records' going-out-of-business sale.

Sunday was the first day of the period in which everything in the store was 50% off. For those of you who skipped that day in economics class, that's what they call a good bargain, or, in Spanish, una ganga verdadera. ¡Qué buen negocio!

Of course, I wasn't the only person to recognize this, and accordingly, the store was packed to the gills with people looking for cheap music. No, not former Napster users, doofus, I mean CD and vinyl aficionados.

As last week was Ozone's 25%-off-everything sale, much of the good stuff had already been taken, and parts of the store were picked clean, much to my chagrin.

But I was not dissuaded by such apparent setbacks, and I set out to do something I had never done before - to sift through the entire contents of a store's CD collection.

Okay, I admit, I skipped the reggae section, but everything else - new and used - was flitted over by the fingers of yours truly.

In all honesty, I was rather unprepared for this challenge. Being unemployed, I had been rather lackadaisical about maintaining my list of CDs I might want to buy. Sure, I had a list of artists and albums I had heard samples of, or simply heard about, but I hadn't done much research. And anyhow, that list was on my dead computer. I had to do it solely by memory.

It was quite a rush, really. I didn't expect the crowd at the store to be so large, so when I saw large numbers of people waiting to purchase large numbers of CDs, my mind clicked into overdrive.

Adrenaline pumping through my veins, I methodically made my way through all the sections - electronic, hip-hop, new rock, used rock. My fingers nimbly flipped past every CD, my eyes scanning frantically and checking the large database in my brain for any sign that I should pause, considering whether to buy a CD.

Of course, at the speed I was flipping through the CDs, my conscious mind didn't really do a whole lot. It was too busy worrying about whether I was flipping through the CDs fast enough to keep ahead of the one guy to the left of me, or wondering when I would have to trade places with the girl flipping CDs in the opposite direction as I was.

My subconscious, on the other hand, was the one attempting to recognize albums, based mainly on album artwork. I didn't really have time to read the words on each CD cover.

At the end of it all, I walked out with seven CDs, six of them new, for less than $7 a CD.

And it only took an hour. Not bad, for a human (WAV format).