Record Store Owners Finding Chosen Occupation To Be Remarkably Similar To A “Job”

If you’ve recently opened a record store, and you didn’t happen to pick up the assets of Tower Records in a bankruptcy auction, you probably ventured into the current big box/piracy-dominated music market not because of the financial security, but because your social and job-related skills don’t lend themselves to much else. Bad news: Your dreams of escaping a forty-hour-a-week cubicle existence are over. Indie music retailers are shutting their doors–and not only because of a shrinking customer base, but because owning a store and having to show up every day is, apparently, a total bummer.

Yet indie music fans not wanting to brave the Hollywood traffic to hit Amoeba had an outpost outside downtown in Sea Level Records, run by Silversun Pickups merch man Todd Clifford. The store arrived as the city’s Echo Park neighborhood was undergoing a revitalization, and stocked a heavily curated catalog (top sellers this month include Silversun Pickups, adventurous guitar rock act Electrelane and avant-folk duo CocoRosie). Yet come the end of this month, the 32-year-old Clifford will close up shop for good…

“Obviously, if I would have had tons more sales, I would have had employees and not have to be here all the time and wouldn’t be burned out,” Clifford says. “I wanted to close this a while ago, but I was torn because it should be here. And it should be here, but that doesn’t mean I have to do it.”

Clifford recently spent two months on the road with Silversun Pickups. He says he expected to come back feeling refreshed. Instead, within 15 minutes of walking back into his store, he says he “hated being here.”

Clifford says that when he opened up shop in 2001 he used to love customers. “Now when customers come in, I’m like, ‘Just buy it and leave,’ ” he says. “This isn’t a job where I should wake up and say, ‘I don’t want to go to work.’ ”

While it might be unreasonable to expect owning a small business, regardless of how “cool” it might be, to match up with a gig at Akron, Ohio’s The Lime Spider, it might be hard for Mr. Clifford to gain much sympathy from anyone who might have to wear a collared shirt (or possibly even shoes) to work on a daily basis.

The Indies: Burnout Behind The Counter [CNN Money] Sea Level Records