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  • From: grady <grady AT ibiblio.org>
  • To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: Did Ruckus Kill Schoolkids?
  • Date: Fri, 29 Feb 2008 09:43:50 -0500

Somebody on the show should ask somebody how anyone thought it would be possible for an indie record store to survive on East Franklin Street, E. Franklin rents being what they are, when the freaking Gap couldn't survive, and nobody else has been brave enough to want to rent out its space, or the space next to it.

Thanks to Teh Internets, in order to be competitive, anybody who sells shippable goods has to crank their profit margin down to the couplea-bucks per item range. Hard to pay $3k or $4k a month in rent when you're netting $2/CD.

Can't easily ship a latte or a draft beer or a sammich, a burrito, General Tso's Chicken, or the opportunity to shake yr booty in public, so profit margins for those can stay a bit higher. You *can* ship kleenex and pharmaceuticals, which might explain the demise of the drugstore, finally.

Note that long before we were bemoaning the death of Schoolkids, we were bemoaning the death of the Intimate Bookshop; was it killed by Borders, or by Amazon? If I'm a representative sample, it was Amazon.

There was some kvetching in the comment threads on the Indy article, and on Menconi's blog, about how E. Franklin was losing its freaky character, and my reaction (apart from "duh") was that this is a process that started in the 90s & clearly shows no sign of slowing down.

Will Hackney wrote:
Frank Stasio will be talking to Mac McCaughan about Schoolkids on NPR
today at noon.
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