The Power of Tower
THE PASSING OF A ONCE-GREAT retail chain tends to evoke both pity and awe, like the sinking of the Andrea Doria. So it wasn’t surprising that the news Tower Records was being busted up for parts evoked elegies to the glory days of in-store entertainment marketing.
It is a shame that an enterprise almost 50 years old got lapped by competitors that were faster and more adapted to change. But that may not be the main lesson to be learned here.
I have fond memories of Tower, too. It moved to the Chicago neighborhood I was living in around 1988, with a bigger music selection in all genres than I’d seen in my life. As one of the biggest music stores in town, it also drew live performances by most of the touring bands coming through Chicago with an album to promote, or good local talent with a friend on the staff.
Best of all, the store was open until midnight on weekdays, later on weekends. I still remember standing on a dark, windy street corner, saying goodbye to some friends after a few drinks but not ready to go home yet, and realizing I didn’t have to: I could go buy some music.
Late nights at Tower were the times when I found stuff unlike everything else I listened to — usually at the subliminal suggestion of whatever was playing over the store’s sound system. I picked up some pretty good music in those after-hours shopping sessions: the first Nirvana album, King Sunny Ade, Steve Earle, and Ornette Coleman’s “Birds of America.”
Of course, some of those closing-time buying sprees resulted in true listener’s remorse. To this day I don’t really know what possessed me to buy Starship’s final album; it couldn’t have been celebration, because how would I have known it was to be their last? And I can only say that my copy of Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” is testimony to the value of a really good album cover and a really, really good video.
I remember too that when Tower began to expand beyond its California home turf in the ’80s, the cry went up that local independent music stores and regional chains were being driven out of business by the hard-charging retailer. In Chicago, longtime local favorite Rose Records put up a valiant fight but finally had to sell its locations to Tower.
Companies like Tower — or, for that matter, most large bookstore and video chains, and department stores of all kinds — built their offerings on three main elements: selection, convenience and expertise. The convenience was mainly a function of the wide inventory: You went to those stores because you were more likely to find what you wanted, or to encounter more choices you hadn’t seen before, if you were the curious type. And the stores tended to hire people who knew that huge stock backward.
Fast-forward 15 years, and those advantages are now all on the digital side. The Web is open 24/7, including (in fact especially, thanks to the gift-card industry) holidays. A warehouse holding sufficient stock of all the titles downloaded from iTunes would be about the size of Providence, RI. And when it comes to prices, people who once paid $12 for a CD are now voting with their dollars in favor of buying single songs for a buck apiece.
The wide selection at places like Tower, Borders and their ilk was an early manifestation of “long tail” marketing — the notion that aggregating enough low-demand SKUs would pay off in incremental sales at high margins. But in retail operations with a lot of fixed costs (real estate, payrolls, distribution, etc.) maintaining the long tail calls for a “short dog,” that group of blockbuster items that can move big numbers and pull people in the front door.
It’s that short-dog traffic that went away first for Tower. People looking for the chartbusters — say the latest from Kanye West or Kelly Clarkson — either grabbed it off the Web or picked it up while shopping for 20-pound bags of dog food at Sam’s Club.
As for the experts…well, they can be found on the Web too, thanks to customer-generated content. In some ways the experience is better, because I run a much smaller risk of encountering clerks who espouse patchouli and piercing as a way of life. But I can still tap into the kind of product knowledge they used to offer; it’s just that now it comes from other listeners like myself, in the form of stored ratings, reviews and recommendations.
From the Web operator’s perspective, loading in customer opinion is probably the stickiest thing you can do to your site; it’s a driver of repeat visits. I can start reading book or music reviews on Amazon.com or pursuing a chain of iMixes and come up for air an hour later, with 20 new titles to investigate and no idea where the time went. And I have to believe that other possession obsessions, from cameras and cookware to bicycles and baby strollers, also benefit from a dose of the common wisdom.
Yes, I suppose something is lost in taking these retail interactions out of real time and making them machine-searchable instead. I keep backup resources on hand for when I need to wander aisles and flip through CD bins. There’s a venerable jazz store two blocks from my office, and an eclectic independent around the corner from my home, complete with aggressively pierced clerks and a strict policy of no credit cards without photo ID. I know my world would shrink a bit if either of these couldn’t stay in business. They’re part of why I put up with the aggravations of urban life.
I read that in 2000, Tower founder Russ Solomon said that e-commerce companies were “giving stuff away to create sales” and that the Web was “certainly never going to take the place of stores.”
You have to give him credit for coming up with one of the biggest success stories in retail for its moment in time. But maybe the other lesson is that moments are fated to be exactly that unless you look two moves ahead and ask yourself what business you’re really in. Tower focused too much on pushing plastic and too little on delivering entertainment content, and it paid the price.
