Either today or tomorrow, "going out of business" sales commence at all outlets of Tower Records and Tower Video. And unlike some stores that seem to endure comfortably for years with "going out of business" plastered on their windows, it looks like Tower really is going out of business, at least in terms of retail outlets.
Obviously, this has a lot to do with the Internet availability of CDs and DVDs and such. Heck, the Tower empire took a big monetary hit just from me switching my business from them to Amazon. They certainly aren't the only giant company in those areas to discover they couldn't compete with the ease of online ordering. A gent I met recently who seemed to know a lot about this kind of thing told me that companies that didn't have "brick and mortar outlets" (i.e., physical stores) held a huge advantage in the marketplace because they didn't have to factor those "dinosaurs" into their corporate planning. He said every single company that had retail shops had been too slow to reconfigure for The Online Era. I'm wondering what more, if anything, there is to the demise of Tower Records than that.
I'm also wondering what will become of the Tower stores up on the Sunset Strip. The building that houses the video outlet at the corner of Sunset and Larrabee has a rich history that has always fascinated me. For a time, it was a history of failed restaurants — at least a dozen, including a Jerry Lewis Restaurant that was opened in seeming response to the success of Dino's down the block. A local disc jockey named Dick Whittinghill had a restaurant there after Jerry and though Whittinghill plugged the heck out of it on the radio, it also closed in a year or two, eventually to be replaced by a strip joint called The Classic Cat. Finally, Tower Video moved in for a few decades and seemed to have broken the jinx.
The main Tower Records building, which is across the street on Sunset, has probably been the site of more "event-type" signings and album premieres than any store in the world. It's a place where I used to always (well, twice) see Elton John going around with a shopping cart, buying records by the hundreds. Rock groups would demand in their contracts that their record company arrange to have their album blown up to six by six and displayed on the side of Tower Records and that they had to have a signing party there. The place has such a rich history that I'd love to see it either stay open in some form or converted into a rock music museum or something of the sort. It sure would be sad to see a Bed, Bath and Beyond at that location…though I wonder if some of the clientele would even notice the difference.