Tower Records shuts its doors

DOWNTOWN GLENDALE — The entire stock of Tower Records on Brand Boulevard was marked down 90% on Sunday for the final selling day of its shutdown.

The music-and-entertainment retail chain is closing its 89 stores after an acquisition by Great America Group.

Patrons were lined up about six deep for each of the three open registers with baskets swelling with CDs, DVDs and posters.

Since October, when the close-out sale began, there has been an influx of purchasing, a steady amount of theft and a somber feeling of loss on the part of Tower Records’ tight-knit staff, said Kelly Watson, operational manager of the store.

“We’re all unemployed as of Monday afternoon,” Kelly Watson said.

None of the clerks, managers or loss-prevention workers at Tower have new jobs lined up for after the store closes. A Walgreens drugstore is set to take the place of Tower in the coming year, Kelly Watson said.

“It’s like a sad end,” she said, “from a Tower Records to a Walgreens.”

The only things left on the few sparsely stocked shelves in the store were CDs by little-known musicians, the occasional movie soundtrack and some B-movie DVDs.

Even though the CDs were sold for 10% of their original asking price, making some CDs only 8 cents, customers remained to haggle and steal in the last days of the store’s demise.

Sara Manchego, of Glendale, was at Tower buying about 20 DVDs, CDs and VHS tapes altogether.

She said she only shopped at the record store occasionally and didn’t even know about the closing.

“I was coming in to look for a movie,” Manchego said. “I didn’t even know this was going on.”

But many others did. Since the chain announced its closing, the Glendale store has seen a boom in business brought on by the prices marked for clearance, Watson said.

People like Mike and Alex Contreras, 26 and 13 respectively, of Los Angeles, came into the store specifically to take advantage of the discount prices on the leftover inventory.

“It’s at 90% clearance so we thought we’d take a look,” Mike Contreras said. His brother Alex stood with him in line, looking over the dozen or so CDs he had picked out for purchase.

“We would have gotten DVDs but they weren’t there,” he said.

Mike Contreras said he doesn’t get to the record store often and downloads most of his music from the Internet to record onto CDs.

Legal and illegal music downloading is the reason given to the employees for why the chain has gone under, said Steve Watson, husband of Kelly Watson and also a manager at Tower Records.

But he thinks the reason people didn’t shop at Tower Records had less to do with the Internet and more to do with the pocketbook, citing Tower’s uncommonly high prices for it’s merchandise as the main reason for closing.

The CompUSA store that shares space with Tower Records will remain in it’s current location, but the floor space will have a new partition to keep Walgreens and the computer supplier separate, Kelly Watson said.

With all the racks being emptied and everything in the store from the large decorative posters on the walls to the month-old magazines being sold, the employees joked and reminisced in the empty walkways.

They talked about the bond between employees in different stores and expressed their grateful thanks to the regulars they saw on new-release Tuesdays.

“We all knew each other in some way,” said Gabriel Mercado, a manager at Tower Records.

“What I am going to miss about Tower the most is the stories,” Kelly Watson said.