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Beyond Tiki, Bilge, and Test / Beyond Tiki / Is Your Favorite Music Store Extinct?

Post #136149 by donhonyc on Tue, Jan 18, 2005 10:21 AM

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Forgot to mention in my previous thread:

There was a small chain of record stores in the area where I grew up in in South Florida called Peaches. They gained some nationwide recognition, and were famous for their Peaches Crates for storing your records and tapes as well as their peach crate wood interiors in the stores. They were also famous for the giant album covers they would hang in front of the stores to advertise the latest sounds. Every time you walked into one of them the place hit you with the overwhelming smell of wood. The main one was actually located not far down the street from the Mai Kai in Ft. Lauderdale. That location was the equivalent of maybe a Tower location, and in the 70s and 80s was the epicenter for retail music. Everytime you went to the beach, you had to pass Peaches on the way down Sunrise Blvd. They opened one in the 'burbs near where I lived and I had to get a job there, which I did the summer after graduating high school. I went in there just about everyday bugging them until they gave me a job. Long story short I was there a little over two years and had a great time. We even had an in-store event where Billy Squier came to sign copies of his new record "Emotions In Motion'...ooooh. For some reason him and his manager kept ducking in and out of the bathroom for a few minutes at a time. Hmmm...wonder what that was all about. He was pretty unfriendly to the staff too. Total egomaniac.

I'll never forget the day we had a staff meeting around 1985 and the boss comes in with the new mini Peaches crate for storing something called Compact Discs. At the time we had one little section for CDs which, we thought, would be a specialized format for hardcore audiophiles, particularly people that listened to classical music, and the occasional head that wanted to listen to Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' at it's best audio quality. Man, were we wrong about that. At that staff meeting the boss standing in front of us in his Peaches t-shirt held the crate up in his hand and said in his southern drawl 'See this here...this is the future'.

Looks like for now CDs are here to stay, but Peaches closed all their stores somewhere in the early 90s. The last time I looked, the one near the Mai Kai was still vacant with a 'for rent' sign out front.

[ Edited by: donhonyc on 2005-01-18 10:31 ]