Tower Records Documentary

The movie is fine as far as it goes, but doesn’t tell the whole story, for whatever reason. Tower borrowed it’s operating capitol every quarter, repaying the loan at the end of that quarter. That worked fine for a long time, but after owner Russ Solomon retired and his son took over, for the first time in Tower’s history the company’s net income one quarter was less than the amount of the loan---the company couldn’t repay the loan. The contract with the loaning bank stipulated that if two quarterly loans in a row were missed, the bank could take over the operation of the company. When that transpired, that’s just what it did.

Employee hours were cut from 40 hours a week to 35, but most importantly, central buying was implemented. Tower had been unique amongst chain record stores in that each store had it’s own buyers, doing the buying for their individual store. Tower then demanded from the record label distributors 365 days dating for it’s purchases from them---you send us the product, we’ll pay you for it in a year! Perhaps the majors could afford to do that, but the indi distributors refused. How could they stay in business if having to wait to be paid for a year?! The indi buyers then were forbidden from buying product from the indi distributors who refused that shakedown arrangement. Without indi label music to differentiate it from Target, Walmart, etc., who sold major-label product for less than Tower stores paid for it wholesale, the writing was on the, uh, wall. With Amazon selling indi label product, who needed Tower?