With Kepler’s Books closing last week after 50 years in business and a spirited conversation at Readerville about the role of independent bookselling against the cold truths of capitalism, what it means to survive as an independent retailer in 2005 has been on my mind lately. So I was particularly annoyed when I saw this piece in SFGate about Mod Lang, an institution for record collectors and music geeks based in Berkeley. Mod Lang is an independent music retailer specializing in “European imports and indies, classic and rare re-issues, contemporary U.S. indies, the latest in electronica, and music memorabilia.” According to the story, their top selling artists this week are The New Pornographers and The Lovemakers. They have an entire section devoted to 80s vinyl. Gives you an idea how much they care about catering to mass tastes.
That said, Mod Lang must still survive in perhaps the most brutal climate for music retailing in history. Tower Records has already filed for bankruptcy. Record labels are hemorrhaging money for reasons everybody knows. Downloading is not only rampant but painfully easy. The days when you needed to go to the “record store” to get music are long over.
So how does the scrappy Mod Lang stay afloat? The article says nothing. Not a word. Doesn’t mention how they pay their bills in one of the most expensive regions in the country, doesn’t mention what the store and its owners are doing to adapt, doesn’t breathe the word “iPod” at all.
Instead we get how the store began and where it got its name, what cool jobs former employees have and what rock stars shop there. It overlooks how Mod Lang manages to stay in business because, obviously, that’s a lot less sexy than the import Richard Hell bought there once.
I’m really tired of this, tired of this cloying, ignorant attitude towards the years of toil independent business people put into operations that are essentially labors of love. Small, local businesses are not teddy bears, not cute collectible baubles that will always be there when we need them. Most hang by the thinnest of threads, in a region, in an era, when they can vanish in an instant and all our loyalty, memories or good intentions don’t make a bean’s worth of difference. This can happen because they are businesses and this is capitalism and those are the rules. Business people know the rules and do their best to serve their customers, their community and assure themselves and their families some kind of future. They don’t exist in a vaccuum of our misty-eyed sympathies.
Their work and their struggle deserves our respect. Writing about Mod Lang and leaving out how it stays open, how it exists it a world that says it shouldn’t, is not just poor journalism. It reduces Mod Lang to a curiousity instead of the result of dedicated professionals. Must nuts and bolts always be postmordem like it was in the coverage of Kepler’s closing? That’s a deminution we who believe in local business can ill afford.
