Owning a music store was one of the most fun periods of my life.
If you’ve ever been inside a small neighborhood music shop, you know the vibe. Guitars hanging everywhere, the smell of wood and strings, a drum kit in the corner someone isn’t supposed to touch but always does. For a while, I lived inside that world.
But the truth is, small music stores live in the shadow of the big ones.
In Montreal there was one dominant store. Everybody knew it. Their slogan said everything:
“If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.”
And unfortunately, most of the time, they were right.
The big shops had the exclusive lines. Gibson. Fender. Marshall. The brands everybody wanted. Those companies often locked their products into the biggest dealers in the city. If you were a small independent shop, you simply didn’t get access unless you could buy huge quantities.
And when you’re running a little 700-square-foot store in a suburban mall, buying hundreds of Gibsons simply isn’t an option.
So people would come into my shop and ask the question.
They always asked the question.
“Do you carry Gibson?”
“Got any Fenders?”
“Where are your Strats?”
“I don’t see any Les Pauls.”
Most of the time they already knew the answer.
Sometimes it felt like curiosity. Other times it felt like they were just reminding me where I sat in the food chain.
One day I had enough.
A guy walked in, looked around the wall of guitars, and asked the usual question.
“Where are your Les Pauls?”
Something in me snapped.
I looked at him and said calmly,
“Oh, I have Les Pauls.”
He looked surprised.
“Actually,” I continued, “I have two models that nobody else in Canada has.”
His eyes widened.
“The thing is,” I said quietly, “Gibson made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone. They’re in the back room. If someone wants to see them, they have to pay. It’s part of the contract.”
I expected him to laugh and walk out.
Instead he reached into his wallet, pulled out a ten-dollar bill, and said,
“Okay. I’ll see them.”
I burst out laughing and handed the money back.
“Keep it,” I said. “I’m kidding. I don’t have any Gibsons.”
But it was worth it.
That first year in the store we sold 900 guitars.
It was the last big guitar boom I remember. Everybody wanted to play. Guitar was the coolest thing in the world.
If you ask me, you can credit Green Day. American Idiot was everywhere. “Wake Me Up When September Ends” was playing in every store and on every radio. Kids wanted guitars again.
Around that time one of my distributors introduced something new, the first “guitar in a box” starter kits.
For $299 customers got an acoustic guitar, a soft case, a book, picks, straps, accessories, everything you needed to start playing.
It was perfect for Christmas.
My distributor told me if I wanted the best price, I had to buy an entire container.
“How many in a container?” I asked.
“Three hundred.”
Three hundred guitars.
For a small store, that was insane.
But I had already sold a few at the higher price and they were moving fast. So I did what a dumb genius does.
I said yes.
I committed to the whole container.
And somehow, unbelievably, I sold them.
Not only did I sell them, I sold all of them before they arrived.
Customers paid deposits and reserved them as Christmas gifts.
The distributor told me the shipment would arrive about ten days before Christmas so people could pick them up in time.
Perfect.
Then the emails started.
First delay.
Then another.
Then another.
Finally on December 22nd I got the news.
The container had arrived in Canada.
But the guitars were stuck in Toronto.
My store was in the suburbs of Montreal.
And the guitars wouldn’t arrive until after Christmas.
Which meant three hundred people were about to discover that the Christmas gifts they bought from my store did not exist.
So I panicked.
My father had been vice-president of a courier company before he passed away when I was fifteen. I was still close with the owner, so I called him.
“Paul,” I said, “I have a problem.”
He listened.
Then he said, “Call this guy.”
“Who is this guy?”
“Trust me,” he said. “He’ll get it done.”
So I called.
The guy said he’d drive to Toronto, pick up the guitars, and bring them back.
Price?
Five hundred dollars.
I didn’t hesitate.
Deal.
That night the store closed and my usual crew, Nick, Matt, and Scott, came over to my place.
We were sitting in my garage playing poker, drinking beer, waiting.
Waiting for a stranger to drive five hours to Toronto, load three hundred guitars, and come back through the winter night.
Around two in the morning there was a knock on the garage door.
We opened it.
There stood a guy who honestly looked like he had stepped out of the movie Smokey and the Bandit, beside a truck full of guitars.
“You Chris?” he asked.
“I got your stuff.”
We unloaded everything into my garage.
Just like that.
The next morning we packed the guitars into the store.
Remember, the shop was only 700 square feet.
Three hundred guitars took up every inch of space. Customers could barely squeeze through the door to reach the counter.
But we had emailed everyone to come pick them up on Christmas Eve.
And they all showed up.
When we opened the door that morning we heard a crowd outside.
We figured a few people had arrived early.
Instead there was a line around the corner of the mall.
You would have thought Green Day themselves were inside signing autographs.
Mall security came over asking if we had planned some kind of event.
“No,” I told them.
“We’re just handing out guitars.”
Three hundred people came through that door that day to pick up their Christmas presents.
And somehow it all worked.
It was a great Christmas.
And every time I run into Nick, Matt, or Scott, which sadly isn’t as often as it used to be, we still laugh about that night.
The night we sat in my garage playing poker.
Waiting for the Bandit.