Oregonpapa---There was no Topanga Canyon store. You're probably thinking of the Sherman Oaks store, located at the corner of Van Nuys and Ventura Boulevards (Ventura Blvd. immortalized in Tom Petty's song "Free Falling"). The reason the Sherman Oaks store was not as good as the Sunset/Hollywood store (absolutely true) was that I had a much smaller buying budget than the two buyers at Sunset. The Tower budget system is too complicated to go into here, but the abbreviated explanation is that how many pieces of product a given store sells a month, and how many total pieces are in stock at the end of every month, determines how many pieces that store can buy the following month. The more pieces the store sells one month, the more it can buy the following one. The Sunset store sold about twice as many pieces a month as did the Sherman Oaks store, so it's buying budget was twice as large as mine. I would have to pass on product that the Sunset store could buy, as I was out of budget for the month. So they could sell those titles which they were able to buy but which I wasn't, leading to more total monthly sales, which in turn lead to a bigger budget for the following month! I had been a customer at the Sherman Oaks store (living not far away), and often would not find the indi titles I was looking to buy, but would find them at the Sunset store. My priority when I started buying for Sherman Oaks was to increase the number of individual titles the store had in stock. It took a while, but little by little the store's number improved, until we were second only to the Sunset store in all of Southern California.
You're also right about Amoeba. Within a year of the opening of their Sunset Blvd. store, the Sunset Tower's monthly sales dropped off by about 50%! Amoeba's priority is having as many titles in stock as possible, for hard-core music lovers and buyers. Tower's management was starting to be a little too concerned with the aesthetics of the stores fixtures, etc. Who cares about that?! When Tower's bank took ever management and instigated central buying, it was just a matter of time until Tower would fail. I was actually surprised it took as long as it did.
You're also right about Amoeba. Within a year of the opening of their Sunset Blvd. store, the Sunset Tower's monthly sales dropped off by about 50%! Amoeba's priority is having as many titles in stock as possible, for hard-core music lovers and buyers. Tower's management was starting to be a little too concerned with the aesthetics of the stores fixtures, etc. Who cares about that?! When Tower's bank took ever management and instigated central buying, it was just a matter of time until Tower would fail. I was actually surprised it took as long as it did.
