CD Mania

Experiences of thrift stores vary a great deal. The nonprofit running it has a character all its own and the staff and customers can all have different styles. There's a lot of poor people looking for clothes and toys at all of them. In LA its mostly hispanic and black shoppers and the whiteys like me are bargain hunters or scrounchers and take great delight in their finds. I've run into three different friends at three different shops in LA over the years. There were regulars I got to know when I had more free time during the week days.

What I wanted to write about was the experience of CDs at the Goodwill stores in LA. Most just have the CDs stacked out on a shelf, empty cases piled with ones that have CDs in them, usually a pile of CDs without cases there as well. I wandered into a store on Venice and National and found that all the CDs were put in a glass case and when I asked to see them, I was told I had to wait for the 'CD Manager.'  He came, took them out and stood over me as I looked at them and when I decided to get a couple, he carried them to the cashier. He told me that people were stealing them. Ok. When I returned the next time, the 'CD Manager' wasn't available, so I couldn't see them. Mind you, these are priced 1.99 to 2.99 each. What seemed to be a wave of implementation, several of the stores developed the same policy or they took the actual CDs out of the cases and kept them in a book up front and left the empty cases out for people to look at. This was very confusing because all the stores have a stock of empty cases as well that were mixed in with the ones that contain CDs. And then you have to wait in line up front to find out if they really had the CD and buy it. Anyone ever wait in line at a thrift store? Such a fun thing. Then everything reverted back to way it was except for the store on Santa Monica Blvd just west of the 405. The new manager was apparently the 'CD Manager' from the other store .' All the CDs, probably 400, were stacked up behind the counter and you had to wait for the 'CD Manager' I had asked him at one point in our encounters, whether he sold many of them this way. He told me no. Then suddenly, two months later, the CDs were all stacked out on the shelves again. I hope they sent the guy to get help.
During the several months of the Goodwill process of retooling their merchandizing, I walked into another thrift store in Hollywood and found a guy with his portable player and headphones, sitting listening to each CD he was considering. The clerk said he had been there at least two hours. I wished I could of hooked him up to the 'CD Manager.'