Avoiding the rookie mistakes in Record Store Day stock up

Jonny Heaver, who owns a tutoring business, was the candidate to get fired this week on The Apprentice

Many of the candidates each year claim to be fans of the show and yet regularly go on to make the same mistakes that have happened in the previous series. Even if they haven’t particularly watched the programme before you would think that once they knew they were going to be on they would swat up on the tasks which are generally the same in each series.

Jonny Heaver, who owns a tutoring business, was the candidate to get fired this week despite professing to be a huge fan of the programme. The reason for the downfall of his team was one of the most common mistakes made in the series. Organising a high-end corporate jolly in Turkey the team decided not to buy any alcohol! Every time this happens the outcome is the same in that the team may save a fair bit of money and normally win the task, but are then fined a large amount because of dissatisfaction from the clients that they lose.

Jonny to be fair did speak and say they should get at least a couple of bottles, but they ran out almost immediately. Quite why he didn’t say that this was a common failing more strongly I don’t know but I have noticed that candidates never refer directly to previous shows which I assume is the programme maker’s decision. He could however have more subtly made the same point I’m sure without directly quoting from earlier episodes.

I’m starting to get the same feeling as we are told the numbers we will receive for Record Store Day releases. There are always some cutbacks on some of the bigger titles and our aim is always to try to make sure that we at least have all the big releases for most if not all the day, as we don’t want to return to the bad old days when we would spend most of the day disappointing people that we didn’t have what they wanted.

So far things haven’t been ideal but hopefully from what we know so far we should survive the day without disappointing too many people. We only stock things we would normally stock anyway so as the day goes on we do get people asking for things we didn’t order as other shops that might be expected to have these things run out. That of course I can live with.

Sadly nearly all the time the shortfall in availability is an obvious one as the record companies and organisers alike misunderstand the idea behind a limited release for Record Store Day. As somebody who has been involved since the beginning I can assure you that the idea was never to have so little stock that it was all gone soon after opening. The laudable original idea was to have enough stock so that it was available all day on the day and if timed perfectly then ran out. I just have to hope that as all the Record Store Day stock numbers come in there is nothing as blindingly stupid as not having alcohol on a luxury corporate jolly.