History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
"OK, I have to admit this is a strange collection. In the late
1980's and early 1990's, I worked for Kmart behind the service desk and
the store played specific pre-recorded cassettes issued by corporate.
This was background music, or perhaps you could call it elevator music.
Anyways, I saved these tapes from the trash during this period and this
video shows you my extensive, odd collection.
Until around 1992, the cassettes were rotated monthly. Then, they were
replaced weekly. Finally sometime around 1993, satellite programming was
introduced which eliminated the need for these tapes altogether.
The older tapes contain canned elevator music with instrumental
renditions of songs. Then, the songs became completely mainstream around
1991. All of them have advertisements every few songs.
The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That's because they
ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the
math assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that's over 800
passes over a tape head each month.
Finally, one tape in the collection was from the Kmart 30th anniversary
celebration on 3/1/92. This was a special day at the store where
employees spent all night setting up for special promotions and extra
excitement. It was a real fun day, the store was packed wall to wall,
and I recall that the stores were asked to play the music at a much
higher volume. The tape contains oldies and all sorts of fun facts from
1962. This may have been one of the last days where Kmart was in their
heyday - really!
One last thing for you techies, the stores built in the early 1970's
(such as Naperville, IL Ogden Mall Kmart #3066, Harwood Heights, IL
#3503 and Bridgeview, IL #4381) orignally had Altec-Lansing amplifiers
with high quality speakers throughout the store. When you applied a
higher quality sounding source, the audio was extremely good. Later
stores had cheaper speakers and eventually the amps were switched out
with different ones usually lacking bass and treble controls." - Mark Davis
Sorry for the lack of action, I'm caring for a terminally ill kitty right now. Mr. Smokey Gato has feline cancer and it's advanced. He is getting weaker and thinner. And this kitty has been my buddy, always there for me. So I'm paying a lot more attention to him. Because I don't know how long I will have him.
I recently made a list of vanished retail chains, mostly in Puget Sound, I had a few requests to post about some chains. But it's not easy to find information on most of them. There are a few chains that have simply no hard information I could research on them and others I have memories of shopping at, but little else overall to go on.
One of those is Six Star Factory Retail Outlets (best known as Six Star) Six Star was a discount store from 1987 to 2009 that also specialized in craft supply merchandise. Six Star was once a rising chain in the Western America, mostly in suburban areas as far east as Colorado. My local Six Star was in Lynnwood, WA
Six
Star was mostly a dollar store, with some items going as high as $6.
But no higher for most merchandise. Some products, such as an aluminium cookware set were available for $6, plus the balance in "Bonus Bucks" coupons, which for each $5 of things you buy, you got one Bonus Buck coupon.
Six Star also expanded full tilt into craft merchandise in the early '90s by opening Super Star locations (there was one in Lynnwood across the parking lot from the Six Star), which offered craft supplies only. These were meant to offer all craft supplies and an employee there once told me they were planning to transition the craft supplies out of the Six Star stores and into the nearby Super Star locations, freeing up shelves for even more general merchandise in Six Star locations.
But there was one thing I looked for specifically at Six Star and it were these.
On the cashier counter, there sat a rack of compilation cassettes, mostly of the cornball country/religious crud that Gusto Records specializes in as well as warmed over mini-compilation cassettes from any given major label's special products division. But amongst them were Canadian compilations from Quality Records. They sold for $4.00 each
They were K-Tel like and offered a pretty good mix of pop tunes. Including at least 3 Canadian tracks. OK, so Zappacosta, Frozen Ghost and The Parachute Club aren't exactly the first names that jump off American tongues when you bring up '80s pop music. But they were a pretty good deal for the money. And I could only find them at Six Star.
Some locations had a separate drive-in burger restaurant called Kmart Chef. I never lived near one, but some of my older friends remember them as some of the very best cheeseburgers they ever had.....
You probably don't recognize the name Stanley Arnold. That's a shame. Because he was the mastermind behind the best selling yearly Christmas music compilation album series in history; The Great Songs Of Christmas
You know it was best selling because your parents, grandparents or great-grandparents probably owned a few copies, if not the entire set. And to this very day, you can't thumb through any vinyl LP bin of your local thrift shop without finding at least one of the 1961-1970 Vol.1-10 run.
"Simply put, Stanley Arnold was an idea man. He originally worked for
the ad agency Young & Rubicam, then struck out on his own. He
didn’t want to start an ad agency, he started an idea agency, coming up
with marketing ideas for companies but letting them (or their ad
agencies) handle the details themselves. One of those ideas was
getting Goodyear to put out an album of Christmas songs. His logic was
simple: “Santa Claus never used a tire, but it occurred to me that
Christmas had two deep connections with Goodyear. First, everyone is
interested in Christmas; second, Goodyear sells many, many tires during
the pre-Christmas season. That would be the million dollar idea for
Goodyear, I decided: an album of Christmas music.” He was adamant that
the album not be one of “cutie” songs like “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa
Claus” or “Rudolph”, but rather of classic tunes done by quality artists
– a collection worthy to be called “The GREAT Songs of Christmas.”
Arnold
was savvy business-wise, not just in the idea department. He had
Goodyear act as the outlet for the album, but did not require them to
actually invest anything in it; that way, Goodyear couldn’t lose a penny
on the deal even if no one actually bought the record. But he did have
to convince Goodyear to think big: they initially thought 30,000 copies
nationwide would be sufficient for Columbia to make; Arnold was
thinking 3 million. They eventually compromised at 900,000. The
success was proven by a simple act: by December 1, Goodyear ordered its
advertising agency to stop all advertising for the record –because there
weren’t any left! The print order for the 1962 album was 1.5 million,
and almost 2 million for the 1963 album. History repeated itself, and
those albums sold out well before Christmas also." - The Great Songs of Christmas from Goodyear
Beginning in 1961 and well into the '70s, for one dollar and a trip to your Goodyear guy, you could pick up this record and one every year. No need to stick around and kick a tire or two (unless the smell of brand new vulcanized rubber is your thing.) Nothing else to buy.
It was a loss-leader gimmick that worked out so amazingly well, it spawned some imitators (Goodyear rival Firestone had it's own custom line of yearly holiday albums custom made by Columbia's rival RCA Records for "FTP Productions" beginning in 1962.)
The Firestone album series, while a worthy nod had one problem. They initially offered a couple stars across the records and that strategy backfired against Columbia/Goodyear's wider selection. (Firestone's 1966 album was ALL Julie Andrews!)
The Goodyear records also, like K-Tel & Ronco's a decade later, had smaller grooves and selections were edited to fit. (Coincidentally, Columbia would go on to press K-Tel's early '70s albums.)
Look familiar?
Some Goodyear albums also contained exclusive recordings that to this day cannot be found anywhere else.
The Goodyear Series
(1961)
(1962)
(1963)
(1964)
(1965)
(1966)
(1967)
(1968)
(1969)
(1970) Vol. 10 was a "Best of" compilation of the most popular tracks of the
previous nine albums, leading most collectors to believe Goodyear was
discontinuing the series (they weren't just yet.)
In 1971, the series did continue...but under different names.
(1972)
(1973)
(1974)
(1975) Distribution switched from Columbia to RCA and featuring mostly RCA artists. And Goodyear's rival Firestone affiliated with Columbia.
(1976) An all Henry Mancini LP
(1977) Perry Como and Eugene Ormandy
However, other retailers were also interested in releasing their own tie-in
packaged compilation albums. JCPenney, Sears, A&P Grocery, Safeway
and several others also offered holiday music compilations of their own
through the major labels and now Goodyear and Firestone were two of many and sales slumped.
The labels also offered non tie-in compilation albums (sometimes with the same track listing and order as the Goodyear/Firestone albums) available through any
retailer through their "Special Product" or "Special Market" divisions.
The Christmas album loss leader remained popular through the 1980s. By the '90s, production had switched exclusively to cassettes and CDs.
One of the last attempts at a Christmas loss leader series, these cassettes were produced by RCA in 1991 and marketed by Winston cigarettes. They were given away free with the purchase of specially marked 2 pack boxes.
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