Happy Hannukah

The Weekly Journal



I dug this out of the scrap book. They used to call me Bob in those days, but the guitar still came out of the case on occasion.


December 18, 2006

It’s Hanukkah. I was a raised Jewish, sort of. I never got bar mitzvahed, but I did go to Hebrew School. We celebrated Christmas and always had a tree, but we burned candles on a menorah too.

I don’t even own a menorah now. I won’t get a tree this year, but in '05 when my mom and step dad came up, I had one. He’s a non-practicing catholic, so there were no wise men or a manger at the house, just tinsel and flashing colored lights.

For years the holidays had nothing do with religion anyway. When I worked in record retailing, this was our busiest time of year. We put in long hours. We got zero time off. But if it was a good year, we’d make a big bonus, and even Santa couldn’t top that.

The first year HMV was in New York, we spent a fortune on Christmas decorations. We had two huge stores on the upper east and west sides of Manhattan. We hired a big-time designer. The stores rivaled Macy’s Xmas look, but the Jewish customers demanded to know where the Hanukkah decorations were. Rabbis wrote letters. Others boycotted. Articles appeared in the local papers. Our chairman in London was contacted by an irate shopper.

I wasn’t officially part of the US team that first season. The board was all Brits. HMV was owned by EMI, a UK company. There weren’t enough Jews in all of England to make the fuss those Manhattan Jews did that year. The executive team was nonplussed. They scrambled to dig up dradles, menorahs, and blue and silver stars. Apologies were made and discounts given. HMV never made that mistake again.

I had one of the best jobs at Christmas – I got to be a DJ in the Manhattan stores -- spinning discs, talking up product, engaging customers. We had these fabulous DJ booths in our Manhattan stores. The sound systems at that time were state of the art.

With Tower Records folding up, this will be the last Christmas for large record retailers in the United States. The digital world accelerated the superstore demise, but it was the discounters like Best Buy and Wal Mart that made record retailing unprofitable. When a competitor sells product below cost, you can’t make it up in volume.

I don’t miss that work, but I did enjoy the camaraderie of the team. We had a lot of great employees. And I do miss the buzz of the stores. Don’t get me wrong, I love the digital age and the convenience of downloading. What’s not to like about Amazon and iTunes? But as a kid, there was nothing like an afternoon in a Tower, walking down aisles of product, rifling through the browsers, checking out girls. Kids today will never know how cool that really was, and that's too bad.