The Madison record store appears to have taken only a modest hit from the pandemic – but threats facing the U.S. Postal Service could “debilitate.”
In October 1988 Angie Roloff and her husband Ron opened Strictly Discs in Madison, Wisconsin, after Ron left a career in the biomedical research field to pursue his love of music full-time. Nearly 31 years later, the couple made the difficult decision to close in-store operations due to COVID-19, roughly a week before Governor Tony Evers forced a mandatory shutdown of all non-essential businesses. Now that the Wisconsin Supreme Court has overturned Evers’ stay-at-home order – judging it “illegal” and “unpredictable” – the Roloffs and their staff have reopened Strictly Discs in a limited capacity.
As part of BillboardAs we try to best cover the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on the music industry, we will speak regularly with Roloff ‘to chronicle their experience through the crisis. (Read the latest installation here and watch the full series here.)
Has anything important to you changed since we last spoke?
For as far as how [the coronavirus is] trend in our area, not particularly, except that things in our province have looked favorable. And I think we all have just some eye for the return of the student population and something the University [of Wisconsin-Madison] does that as likely to have the next major impact on how our local community fares.
I heard about it. I think 30 percent of classes will be personal and the rest online, is that right?
As much online as I think is possible, and smaller readings in person in large rooms. But there will be a large influx of the student population over the next two to three weeks. That is the age group where we have seen the largest increase in cases, so we are hopeful that this will not continue as we have more of that population here.
I think on the one hand, it’s probably good for companies to have those students back in town, and on the other hand, you obviously want people to be safe. It’s kind of a double – edged sword.
There are times like these where you feel old and very alienated from the population, but not so far removed that you do not remember feeling inexcusable. I can relate to how some of those students want to get on with their social lives and stay out and about from time to time. So I know this is going to be a factor. Fortunately at this point the bars are still closed in Madison, which can be beneficial. But I still think there will be a lot of meetings of students during the college years.
Is there anything new on the Record Store Day front?
We are still moving forward with our “RSD To-Go” model. We will be unpacking all the details for our customers this week as they explore how we will handle it and how we will keep everyone safe. We will still do the service against all titles for everyone. And once we put these things in the hands of the people and there are no people waiting, we would reopen the store for regular Saturday business.
It’s spread over three days this year, right? So I imagine that’s good for you.
I think it’s a good decision to make. I just want to make sure that we can still manage the traffic flows these days. The first date, the date of August [Aug. 29], with exactly the way the releases fell, is the biggest date. There are 200 releases for the first drop date, and then just about 100 for the second two [Sept. 26 and Oct. 24]. That we’ll have a little baptism by fire to see how this goes.
We are past the midpoint of 2020. How would you say business has been in the first half of the year compared to 2019?
We closed on March 16th, so we lost the second half of that month. But we maintained a lot more business while we were close than we were afraid of. That was a very positive side effect of closing, is just the amount of support we received during that time. So if you take out the Record Store Day piece – which is always difficult because it differs from year to year – we are probably about 10% less for the year. So we’ll see what happens with these Drop Store Day drop dates. I know they have a strong list of releases scheduled for Black Friday and, you know, fingers crossed that things are going in the direction we are right now and we can finish the year strong.
Is there anything else you want to call it?
It’s kind of a topic on a broader, higher level at the moment, but one thing that’s really important for independent record stores is the US Postal Service. Some of the discussions about the future of that organization are really important to us as a group for our survival, and they seem to be kind of in a political quagmire that we do not normally associate with the post.
[Note: The U.S. Postal Service, which had been in financial trouble even before the pandemic, is facing an existential threat due to COVID-19. Recent efforts by the USPS to receive billions in aid from Congress has been thwarted by President Donald Trump, who is pushing to privatize the agency.]
How would that affect your business?
If something were to change drastically with the organization, it would be debilitating. We ship anywhere between 60 and 100 packages a day, and most are media mail. There is no alternative to an affordable way to move records within this country, so it would be devastating.
