SALES and THE BEATLES

A little anecdote re. the previous two postings. When The Beatles White Album was released in 1968 I set off for Derby one Saturday afternoon to buy it. The biggest music store - whose name has long since dropped out of my main memory banks - had a massive upstairs room filled with thousands upon thousands of albums. At the far end was the sales area: a long pub-style bar with a dozen or so tills. Behind the sales staff was a wall of White Albums. They were in stacks up to the height of a human and side-by-side. Each till point had a long queue. Once I had gone far enough towards the sale point I watched in amazement as the sales assistants appeared to have morphed into an octopus, with arms rapidly stretching back, picking up White Album, handing over to customer, taking money and repeating at a speed I have never seen since. It was, as so many people love to say, a seminal experience. Guess what? Granted there must have been Beatles pictures in the windows but there was no need to keep the album anywhere but piled high behind the tills. We all knew what we wanted. Some of us might even have bought something from the shelves on the way to the till.