A local community radio station, which is located just down the road, has an event every year they call "Hotcakes", in which the lounge of a nearby pub becomes a temporary clearing house for CD's - and a few vinyl LPs - that the station doesn't want anymore. This year's was on this morning, and entry is free so i thought what the heck, might pick up something, nothing to lose.
Well what a waste of time that was. There might have been tons of stuff that I wanted, but I had almost no hope of finding it. There was no attempt to organise the stuff, by genre or alphabetically by artist, CDs were stuffed into cardboard boxes in such a way that you often had to remove a handful to see the others. the orientation was random - no matter which way you stood, half of the titles were upside down. Some were stackied vertically (i.e. CDs on top of one another), so you couldn't examine the front of one without gingerly removing a stack from the top of the pile.
I think they could have done better. Obviously this was a clearance sale; I wouldn't expect them to be set up like a proper record store with standing racks ordered by genre and precisely ordered alphabetically by artist within the genre, and a computer database to instantly find whether they have something you ask for. What they could have done though was put everything the same way up, and at least have anough boxes so that they did not overfill the boxes. Also I suspect that the albums were mostly acquired on behalf of a particular presenter. they have a number of presenters who present quite different shows; there is one who does 90's rock, one that does the Woodstock era, one who plays "Nostalgia" from the 1950s or earlier, one that does folk, and so on. I think it would have been easy for each DJ to dump their CDs in their own area of the room, and that would have given the punters some idea of where to start looking for what interrested them.
I walked away with nothing. I doubt I'll bother next year.
Bookmarks