Vinyl ruins

As previously reported by the Reader, the mezzanine in the Hillcrest location of Thrift Trader collapsed early in the morning (around 4 a.m.) on June 22. The collapse was due to the weight of vinyl records and caused considerable damage to the building. The incident sent albums and other debris pouring onto the adjacent University Avenue sidewalk.

The store reopened to the public this Monday, July 27.

“We ended up having 14,000 broken or beyond-repair albums. There were about 60,000 records [involved in the collapse] and about a quarter of them are now unusable,” owner Jeff Clark explained to the Reader over the phone.

“A second floor in a retail commercial setting is required to hold 72 pounds per square foot,” Clark says, “which means in the 600-square-foot area we had the records in upstairs should have held over 40,000 pounds. Cumulatively, between the upstairs and the downstairs, there were 60,000 records involved in the collapse. [The records upstairs] weighed no more than 15,000 pounds, which would have been no more than 300 boxes at most, but we had even more than that downstairs. It was more like, at the most, 250 boxes (with 100 albums per box), so that would have been, at the most, 25,000 records upstairs.“

Record collectors willing to dig may be in luck, as the store is giving away a majority of the damaged albums. Those records up for grabs are in the parking lot at the back of the store.

“We put it on Craigslist a couple days ago,” Clark explained. “There’s probably still a good 8000 or 9000 left. There were around 14,000 to start. That’s as of last night [Wednesday, July 29]. They go fast when certain people show up.”

It should also be noted that the albums on the first floor (which were more valuable than those upstairs) received the most damage from the collapse, so there may still be some gold to be found among the ruins.

The total damage to the store came out to around $10,000. Clark is splitting the repair costs with the building owners, even though the building is technically at fault since the 15,000 pounds of vinyl was easily under the 40,000-pound floor-load capacity. The mezzanine will not be reopened though. Clark has already installed a railing around the affected area. Insurance has covered a bit of the cost of the damaged merchandise, but, along with Clark’s landlord, will not be reimbursing any money for business interruption.

“So we could definitely use some customers,” Clark added.

Even with this bump in the road, Clark is still adamant about his desire to continue buying albums. “If someone calls and tells me they want me to look at their record collection, even though we still have close to probably half a million records, we can never get enough.”

And speaking of insane amounts of vinyl, Clark says that for a period of about a year and a half, Thrift Trader had “a third of a million albums” upstairs at their old North Park location at University and Iowa.

“It was a larger space,” Clark said, “but it was obviously constructed well.”