5 Things I learned Working in Second-Hand Record Shops

From getting a part-time job emptying bins after school at long defunct Note For Note record shop in Walthamstow, to day-managing one of the branches of Reckless Records in Soho, between 1989 and 1999 I spent a decade working in second-hand record shops. It was pretty poorly paid, but some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life, and here are a few lessons from it that I’ve carried through into my media career.

1 — The Customer Is Not Always Right

I remember vividly a row I had in Reckless on Berwick Street. The customer wanted a copy of The Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album on vinyl, and the only one we had in stock was a New Zealand pressing. He was a bit uncertain, but I gave it my best salesperson patter of how rare it was to actually see New Zealand vinyl in the UK, and ultimately he bought it.

About two days later, he came back to return it, because there was, he said, a problem with the end of side one. Because it was a New Zealand copy, the album cut off abruptly and he wanted his money back.

I patiently explained that this is how “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” always finishes. It’s an epic signature Beatles track. It’s the same mix everywhere. If the New Zealand edition of “Abbey Road” alone had a different mix of the song, it would make it one of the most valuable vinyl pressings in the world.

The customer absolutely would not have it, and insisted that this copy of “Abbey Road” was faulty because it didn’t have all of side one on it.

I didn’t have another copy of the album on any format to hand to prove my point, so eventually relented and gave him his money back.

And I told him something along the lines of: “You will end up buying another copy of ‘Abbey Road’ somewhere else at some point, and you will never be able to play it without thinking about what a dick you have been today.”

It’s an extreme example, but it reminds me of some of the limitations of just using labs to test a product or feature, or just using metrics alone to make an editorial decision.

Sometimes the user, or a very vocal subset of your users, is not right about a piece of functionality or an editorial decision.

Sometimes you’ll have an entire comment thread of people telling you “This isn’t news” and “Nobody wants to read this” but you can see from the numbers that it is, and they do.

Or the hardcore users of an entire community telling you “This is going to be ruined by the feature you just changed” when you can see from the numbers that it isn’t.

Also sometimes you are the dick arguing about The Beatles album. Try to work out when.

2 — Pay it down the line

Working on the fringes of the music industry meant there was plenty of chances for swag and exclusive access to events.

I remember one night in Summer 1991 a rep from EMI took me to a listening party where I got to meet Martin Fry and Mark White from ABC. Then he drove us to Brixton to guest-list me into a Kraftwerk gig, and along the way played a preview tape of Blur’s forthcoming debut album. I almost certainly didn’t appreciate what a stunning series of events that was at the time.

But here’s the thing.

When people were offering free t-shirts or tickets or free records or guest-list spots or party access, it would usually be offered to the person in charge of the shop.

If you are a manager, or you are in a senior position, pay those opportunities down the line. If you really need to get into that gig, you can probably pay for it or call in a favour. The staff you are working with on near minimum wages probably can’t afford to splash out on it.

In my current line of work I get invited to talk at conferences all the time. But I’m very conscious that my first opportunity to speak in public about my work at the BBC, back in the early 2000s, was because my manager, without telling me, passed on an invite and said “Contact Martin and invite him instead.”

I probably gave a less informative talk than she would have done, but I was thrilled to get the chance, and it opened up new opportunities for me. Pay it down the line.

3 — Don’t be a dick to “the little people” if you are a minor celebrity

I’m going to be discreet, but “the little people” remember clearly every time they are mistreated by somebody on “the circuit”.

I once had one of the main musicians from one of the most critically acclaimed and successful bands of the 90s haggle with me for ages about the price of a really rare record.

I mean, sure, haggle a bit. But don’t do it to the point where everybody in the shop is looking around in horror that famous person X is getting a bit grumpy that they can’t have a £50 LP for £45.

Likewise I got into a spat with a famous radio DJ, whose CDs I would not buy. I say their CDs, but lots of people in the music industry — at least back in the days where formats were mostly physical — made spare cash by selling in to second-hand record shops the vinyl and CDs that got posted to them at work as freebies.

I’d just told someone else in the room they could not sell their meagre bunch of CDs because they didn’t have ID, and then Mr Celebrity swanned up expecting preferential treatment along the “Don’t you know who I am?” lines.

Yes. I did know who you were. But that guy probably needed the £20 much more than you, and if I wouldn’t buy from him without ID, it’s not fair to do it with you in front of him.

The general moral of this bit of the story: Don’t be a dick if you get a bit of success.

4 — An environment that tolerates racist or sexist “banter” is not a healthy environment

If you accidentally left yourself logged in on one of the computer terminals in the shop, it was the done thing for people to send out a spoof message in your name. The aim was to send out the most outrageous thing you could think of, to embarrass the person who had left their computer unguarded.

That frequently meant writing messages full of racial slurs about other members of staff, or writing something that racially slurred the person who had let their account be compromised.

Of course it was all well-intentioned banter, hilarious, and nobody minded.

Or did they?

In retrospect it reminds me of the situation in my school. Where in our class we used to freely use racial slurs about our classmates in front of the teaching staff, and none of the adults intervened, because it was “funny” and “well-intentioned” and not meant in a racist way.

But as someone white, straight and a bloke I never recall getting mocked or picked on because of my skin colour or gender or sexual orientation.

At school or in record shops people mocked me for my terrible taste in clothes, haircuts, music, choice of girlfriend and habit of spending the afternoon down the pub when I was supposed to be running the shop.

Those are all things about me. Not about tropes or stereotypes about people like me.

I can’t go back and change the way I and my colleagues behaved in the 90s, or what school was like in the 80s, but it has informed how I feel about running teams now.

Humour has to punch up, not down. I’ve got zero tolerance for the idea that you can be having “banter” that is at the expense of a minority group in your team.

And I try to be conscious that the things I thought were OK in the workplace twenty years ago don’t seem to be OK now, which presumably means that some of the things I thought were OK in the workplace ten years ago won’t be acceptable in ten years time. And so on. So be aware.

Long story short: If you can’t find something funny to say about a colleague that isn’t based on their skin colour, gender or sexual orientation, it’s just possible that you simply aren’t as funny as you think you are. And managers shouldn’t tolerate that shit in their teams, ever.

5 — The side activities in your current job might end up being the main activities of your next job

I went from working in a second-hand shop to working in digital media. Part of that happened because the side activities at my job turned into my main job.

We had a network of computers running the tills and stock control. I ended up learning how to wire them and set them up and do basic network trouble-shooting.

And we had a website, and I convinced someone in the business that I could redo it. I made a terrible website I’m hideously embarrassed about now, but I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now if the computer-based bits of my job then hadn’t gradually become my main focus.

There’s an apparently amazing career manual called “What colour is your parachute?” which people rate very highly. I never finished it. I got a few pages in and it had the one diagram I needed to see. The diagram basically says “I am a cheese salesman in London but I want to be an ice cream producer in New York” and shows you how to get there. Go and be a cheese salesman in New York, then an ice cream salesman in New York, then an ice cream producer in New York. Or a cheese producer in London then an ice cream producer in London then an ice cream producer in New York.

Identify the stepping stones to the career you want to be in.

I don’t think it’s always that easy to plan out. I could not have planned out my career. But now I look at it I can see all those side-steps. When I was working in product I ended up enjoying the design aspect more. When I was working in user experience design I began to enjoy the content strategy part more. Once I was thinking about content strategy more, I realised I wanted to be an editor.

If you are in your twenties or thirties, there’s a good chance that what you are doing in your job now is at a tangent to what you might be doing in your forties and fifties. Spot what you enjoy in your work. Focus on that where you can and embrace those tangents.