Paul Simon was right, keep the customer satisfied - Kevin Buckle

​​Last Saturday was Avalanche’s busiest since Harry Styles was in town and yet it had nothing to do with it being National Album Day.

Monopoly Beatles

The day started off well with a girl picking out five T-shirts and saying that there would soon be a lot of happy people in New Zealand as they were gifts for friends and family as she was returning home.

The day ended in similar fashion with a man with his wife and daughter bringing another handful of shirts to the counter varying from One Direction to David Bowie. I imagined the varied selection was again somebody buying for several people until he explained they were for his daughter saying “You have made a young Swiss girl very happy.”

When I first moved to Waverley Market I was surprised at the number of people telling me they were buying gifts and while a good number would ask me to recommend a Scottish band in a particular genre or buy one of the shop’s T-shirts even more were content to have found something interesting for a gift that didn’t have any direct Scottish connection.

Iron Maiden Top Trumps

In between these two customers we did in fact also sell an awful lot of vinyl but amazingly only one thing from the National Album Day selection – a copy of Idlewild’s Captain to somebody who did not know it was a special release for the day.

This wasn’t totally unexpected as while there were some good releases being made available on coloured vinyl many had been available already on standard black vinyl and with people able to order online in advance the collectors who might buy extra copies of albums they already own would do just that rather than go to a shop and risk finding out a title had sold out.

Actually I saw many shops saying on social media that they still had all the titles available at the end of the day.

As I said they were good titles so have sold steadily during the week though most buyers did seem unaware of why they had been released.

Interestingly I had a guy in the shop this week who commented on how much he had enjoyed looking around explaining he had had a record shop in Canada himself. It turned out it had been in a fairly small town in the Rocky Mountains frequented by lots of visitors who again were always looking to buy mementos of their visit. In his case he had also branched out into musical instruments and buying a harmonica had proved popular in his shop.

It is understandable that record companies want to release music for these special promotional days but as I have said before the demand is there for related merchandise especially as there are now special and anniversary releases every week of the year.

While T-shirts and posters are the obvious choice to extend what is on offer Beatles monopoly and David Bowie and Pink Floyd playing cards have proved very popular this week in the shop and I have just ordered a good number of newly released Iron Maiden Top Trumps cards.

At the end of the day we are just glad to have such happy customers whether buying music or merchandise or often both.