Tower is closing — and that's all right by me
I’m not going to miss Tower Records when it closes. Ever since I came to Chico, I’ve been hearing about how great Tower is. My first memory of it is of a predatory company. In the early 1970s, it set up shop right next to a locally owned record store in Berkeley, off Telegraph Avenue. It was acting then the way Starbucks does now.
In a typically Berkeleyish fashion, a line of protesters promptly formed in front of Tower and urged people to boycott it. But the rest of the world is not Berkeley and so Tower prospered. I confess I did not join the boycott. Later, when I lived in Southern California, I loved to visit Tower’s huge store on Sunset Boulevard. I was one of the music lovers who helped make the company successful.
Tower’s rude Berkeley incursion happened more than 30 years ago. A lot of people who go to record stores don’t remember a time before Tower was around. Why should I even bring it up now if I didn’t mind it then? Let me tell you the second part of my story, then you can decide whether I’m making a big deal out of nothing. Earlier this year I went to the Chico store to look for a CD for my wife’s birthday. The store didn’t have it, so I decided to have them order it. My wife’s birthday was about a week away. I was told it wouldn’t be in by then, but I wasn’t worried about that. I had bought her other gifts, so I had the occasion covered.
Two weeks came and went, then four weeks. I called a couple of times to check on my order and was told it hadn’t come in. Finally, after six weeks I gave up. I canceled my order and turned to Amazon.com to get the CD. I couldn’t find it in any store in Chico.
It doesn’t bother me that Tower wasn’t able to get the CD. What bothers me is that the employees I dealt with didn’t care. Nobody I talked to expressed sympathy on my behalf or outrage toward the company about the delay. For all I know the problem was related to Tower’s moribund condition. Somebody could have said “This company is so screwed. We’re so sorry this happened to you,” but the attitude of people at the store was somewhere between “whatever” and “oh, well.”
About a year ago, I ordered a book from Lyon Books that proved hard to track down. Owner Heather Lyon was extremely apologetic about my having waited a couple of weeks. She offered to return my money. But I was impressed by how concerned she was about finding this $10 book for me and told her to press on. It wasn’t long before she found it. Customers never forget a business that goes out of its way to serve them.
I guess my point is that it’s not necessarily the size of the company or its aggressive growth strategies that makes it bad. My final experience with Tower convinced me that its tenure as one of the giants among record stores had made it complacent and uncaring. To me, Tower’s demise means justice has been served.