Tower Records stores closing....great closeout sales!

Souka

Diamond Member
Sep 25, 2000
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News link: LINK

Tower Records website: LINK (to find a store near you)

Tower Records is closing all of its stores....something like 89 of them. So..... they're having "close out sales".

Right now the sales are OK....but expect them to get really good as time goes on and they want/need to move their inventory.


Enjoy!!!!

 

Parasitic

Diamond Member
Aug 17, 2002
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This is sad....I remember the glory days of Tower.
With that said I'm sure to pay them a visit this weekend.
 

mrrman

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2004
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I hope that they gave the great deals online to...will pick up alot of the concert DVD's then
 

grappa

Senior member
Apr 10, 2000
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Wow... I always complained that their prices were too high, but this feels like one of those end-of-era kind of things.

 

Craig234

Lifer
May 1, 2006
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I hate to see it too for the reason that they had a nice book section with eclectic choices.
 

DefRef

Diamond Member
Nov 9, 2000
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When the local store closed a few years ago, my g/f and I took a look and even with huge markdowns, it was still way to expensive. S1 of ST: Voyager was tagged at like $149 or something crazy.

EDIT: I just went to the Tower.com site and every item on the home page leads to:

Sorry, this title is not currently available.
We do not know when this title will be available to order.


Well, that's helpful. Deal = Ice Cold.
 

Captante

Lifer
Oct 20, 2003
30,354
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Theres one a few miles from me here in Ct ... think I'll check it out tomorrow.

Edit: After reading the Reuters article, it looks like the sell-off starts Saturday 10/14.
 

mikeford

Diamond Member
Jan 27, 2001
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When CD first came out I used to haunt a couple Tower stores and NONE of them were close either, it was like a 30 minute drive. Flip through the bins, see whats out that month. They were great stores, but when CD made the big transition from mostly very high quality classical to unwashed mainstream, Tower started to struggle. Borders, Virgin, etc just drove the nail in the coffin and Tower lost its focus, then came MP3 and people stopped buying CDs.

My guess is that the sales are going to suck. Typically everybody gets fired and a liquidation company comes in and offers a few old employees a job at a low wage. The store closes for a day or so and all the prices get marked up to full list price, and a bunch of cheap junk items get brought in, then the store opens with some fixed discount that drops each week until inventory is small enough to consolidate a couple stores, which stay open a couple more weeks. Final deals are wholesale lots, then whatever is left goes to the next place that gets liquidated just like the load of junk they brought in. Never a deal for anybody saavy, but this is where your weird aunt will buy your presents.
 

mikeford

Diamond Member
Jan 27, 2001
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Just checked the news thing, and they were sold to a big liquidator, Great American Group which did one of the office supply chains "extra" stores a few years ago, totally sucked, but the fired employee had ZERO company loyalty so some good prices did happen.
 

palis

Member
Dec 7, 2004
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This is sad. I always go to Tower Records to rent movies. When I went there last Sunday, they closed down the rental section and had 10% off everything in the store. The employees were very upset as I spoke to one of them. They came in that morning and found out that they were going to lose their jobs.
 

mikeford

Diamond Member
Jan 27, 2001
5,671
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Tower was also one of the few places that local bands could sell there CDs at.

The business model at Tower was not to compete directly with the top 40 type stores, but to have some level of discount on new releases, and to depend on a deep catalog for full prices sales of hard to find selections. Internet shopping just killed that deep catalog market, except for computer illiterates.
 

Devil2U

Senior member
Nov 11, 2004
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Yea, kinda sad to see tower go. Suppose it was inevediable with the rise of Online CD and iTunes though.

Perhaps they will have some good prices on DVD-As. I would like to build my library up on those. 192khz 24bit, FTW!!!
 

Stifko

Diamond Member
Dec 8, 1999
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I am saddened by the passing of Tower Records too.
They go the way of Korvette's, Two Guy's & Gimbles.
 
Dec 20, 2005
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Deal is cold right now.

Clearance sale is a whopping 10% off now. Still more expensive than their competitors. No wonder they're going under.
Perhaps the sales will be better, but the good stuff will be sold off to liquidators.

-Ed