Alan Smithee

Dimple Records began in Roseville in 1974, slowly expanding across the area. After Tower Records closed, Dimple moved into many of their locations so they could continue functioning as record stores. Today the owners announced that they are retiring and will be closing all four locations- low sales of course being a main reason. There is no word on whether they tried to sell the business to someone who will keep it going, but the same liquidation firm that bought Tower just to sell it all off will be handling their closing sales. That will leave us with no place besides Best Buy, Target, Walmart, and Fry's, all of which have shrunk their selections already, to even shop for this stuff, and basically forcing us to buy the smaller-label releases and such online. Dimple was far from a perfect store (they didn't always have what I went in for, and they did foolish stuff like use "spiders" that damaged box sets ensuring nobody would pay full price for them) but leaving us with no more dedicated media stores makes the retail environment even worse than it was before. I'll be making a lot more trips to the San Francisco area now, unless somebody steps in. (Yes, I know, media is dying, better get used to it.)

Mondo Kane

Alan Smithee

I don't know of any FYE stores closer than Yuba City or Modesto. They were going to move into the Tower Broadway and Watt locations after those closed, but had some sort of problem with the lease terms there. There was one in the Arden mall and another at Roseville Galleria but both of those closed a long time ago. (The Arden store last had all CDs priced at $9.99 which was decent.)

News says the Dimple closing has more to do with the owners wanting to retire than poor sales. They didn't want to sell the business because they have a ton of inventory and want to sell that all off and keep the money from that; potential buyers wouldn't have paid them as much as they're likely to make from this. There should be a market for at least one new store here after they're gone, but obviously it'll be harder for them to start out from scratch. I'm hoping we get Rasputin here, as their stores magically find still-sealed laserdiscs and sell them for nothing.

asianxcore

This news bummed me out

Although I live 90 miles from Sacramento, I always stopped by a few of the Dimple Records stores for my purchases. The area I live in does not have a non-chain B&M store that sells Blu-Rays & DVDs, so I loved going to Dimples

PhantomStranger

Physical media at retail is dying in all but a few of the country's wealthiest areas. Barnes & Noble just cut their CD sections largely in half.

It's kind of a sick irony that FYE is still hanging around in a few places since they quickly moved years ago to selling t-shirts and nerd items.

Alan Smithee

Dimple added a lot of that junk a few years ago also. I rarely go into Barnes and Noble, their stuff is usually at list price. Dimple's prices were a bit more competitive, I bought many Shout titles actually lower than what Amazon had them for. I buy far fewer CDs than I used to but that's mainly because there's less good music coming out; I'm not replacing any of it with mp3s and such.

asianxcore

It was also great to see how large Dimple's used sections were for Blu-Rays & DVDs.

I always looked forward to visiting each of their stores whenever I was in the Sacramento area and slowly going through all of their used Blu-Rays & DVDs.

I was at the Broadway store not too long ago, picked up a whole lot of new Blu-Rays and a few used DVDs.

With Dimples closing down and Rasputin closing all of their smaller mall stores, I wonder how long is left for these independent stores in the Bay Area.

JeffTheAlpaca

Unfortunately the demand probably won't be there for Tower Records pop up stores or it would have happened by now.

rjh_54

I'm also shocked that FYE is still around. Their prices are far from competitive and their trade-in values - which were ridiculous to begin with - have gone way down. All of those tacky shirts, candy and toys they're more focused now on selling is ridiculously overpriced too.

zyzzle

Sad... The death of physical media is a devolution in the history of audio and video systems. Fewer rights to the consumer, lesser quality of content (bitrates are shitty on 99.9% of streamed content), fewer rights as to more-restricted content. It's a trifecta of "success" for the studios, and a catalogue of horrors for the consumer. Sad, sad times. But, at least physical media seems to not be dead from online sources quite yet. But, we're paying $30+ from niche vendors instead of $10-15 from the studios themselves for physical discs now.

Alan Smithee

asianxcore

We'll see how that goes. Rasputin Music has been opening up and closing stores throughout the past few years.

In Sacramento at least, they won't have much direct competition, so they'll probably do well.