Wil Andruschak
So what got our interest is that not only do you have records at your Bridgeland location but some pretty sweet collectable ones…. You don’t normally associate drug stores with vinyl — what’s the deal?
Basically what happened is my friend [Aaron Schubert] and I used to do all-ages show promotion in Calgary — he used to be a booking agent. About three years ago he was working at the Bitlmore in Vancouver as their talent buyer and he was thinking “Well I’d like to do something else.” At that time I was running the store and everything and I was like “Okay we should do something together.” We started this management-promotions company called Night Heat — the first band we signed was The Pack A.D.
It’s been a bit of a roller-coaster for the last few years but what happened was in the last year we brought Aaron on as consultant for the store because he kept pitching all these ridiculous ideas and I was like “Okay let’s try some of these things.”
One of the things he kept talking about was how there’s really not enough vinyl stores in Calgary and there’s really nothing in the Bridgeland area. I was reasonably hesitant at first but I warmed up to the idea. We ordered just a couple of boxes of records and threw them out on the shelf thinking that this was probably not going to take off — and they just started selling like crazy! So then we really started to expand our selection. We’ve only been doing this since April and a couple of months ago a contact he had who basically buys huge record collections and sells them wholesale… we started dealing with him. We’d go to his warehouse and spend five or six hours at a time sifting through boxes and boxes of records picking out what we thought were the best — that’s basically where all our used stuff comes from.
Yeah I saw some sweet stuff — Charles Watts and the 103rd Street Band. What other nuggets do you have?
We’ve got an Elvis For President album I think there’re only 500 copies of that and we’ve got a lot of Beatles a lot of old 1950s Elvis originals…. We went a little heavy on the funk and jazz just because Aaron is a huge fan — Coltrane a few original James Brown pressings…. It’s all over the place.
How about for the new titles — is it mostly reissues or do you have contemporary bands?
It’s about 70 per cent contemporary 30 per cent reissues. We’re trying to be reasonably selective — our big thing is that we don’t want to have a giant clearance section. If we’re going to buy a record it has to be good or have a group of people that are obviously big fans of the band that it’s obviously going to sell. Right now we have a couple of thousand titles in.
It sounds like the records might have taken over the drug store — do you still do reasonable sales of cough syrup and whatnot?
Yeah the drug store is still going. It’s weird though — we’re looking at putting in record store shelving and stuff. Right now we’re just selling out of boxes.
You think this might just spin off into a straight-up record store or are you going to keep marrying the two?
I like having the two. We’re also right next to a post office so people come in and at night there’s always a lineup so people kill time looking at records while the line dies down a bit. It’s a good marriage — same thing with prescriptions: it’s a good thing to kill time with while you wait for it to get filled.
