There are certain moments in life that are stressful when they happen, but years later they become the stories everyone laughs about.
This is one of those.
At the time I owned a music store in the regional shopping mall where I lived. It wasn’t a huge place, about 700 square feet, but to me it felt like an empire. That one store anchored a small ecosystem I had built around it. I had a couple of satellite music schools around town where students would take lessons, and the store supplied the instruments, the accessories, the sheet music, everything they needed.
For a while it worked beautifully.
Those were fun years. I had a couple of loyal sidekicks working with me, guys who were young like me and just as immersed in the music business as I was. Matt, Nick, Scott. We spent long days in that store surrounded by guitars, amplifiers, drum kits, and the constant background noise of people trying out instruments.
If you’ve ever spent time in a music shop, you know the sound. A kid in the corner playing the opening riff to “Smoke on the Water” for the hundredth time. Someone else testing a drum kit. A guitar squealing through a practice amp.
It was chaos, but it was a beautiful kind of chaos.
The first year in the mall actually went pretty well. Sales were strong enough that I felt like I had made the right decision. For someone who had come from pretty modest means, it felt like a big step.
Then came year two.
This was around the time the financial crisis of 2008 was beginning to build. You could feel it before the headlines fully caught up. Customers were more hesitant. Big purchases started getting postponed. At the same time the market was changing. Cheap instruments from China were flooding in at price points that made it harder and harder for independent stores to compete.
The pressure started building slowly, then all at once.
That little 700-square-foot store was costing me around $5,500 a month in rent. Today that number doesn’t sound extraordinary, but back then it felt enormous to me. I didn’t have deep pockets. I wasn’t backed by investors. Everything I had was tied up in that business.
And eventually I fell behind.
When you’re in that situation your mind starts going to dark places. I had visions of the mall simply locking the gate one morning and seizing everything inside. All the guitars, the amplifiers, the inventory I had worked so hard to build.
To me it wasn’t just inventory. It was everything I owned.
So one evening I called the guys.
Matt was there. Nick was there. Scott too. I’m not even sure now who else showed up. What I do remember is the energy of it. A little bit of panic, a little bit of adrenaline, and the strange excitement that comes when a group of young guys decides they’re about to do something slightly crazy.
The plan was simple.
We were going to empty the store.
That night we showed up at the mall after hours. The security guard stopped us, which of course he had to do.
“What are you doing here?”
I told him we needed to do some overnight renovation work in the store, clean it up a bit before the next day.
He nodded and let us in.
Once we got to the storefront, we pulled down the metal gate and hung a curtain across the inside so nobody could see what was going on through the plexiglass.
And then we got to work.
Every guitar came off the wall. Every amplifier, every cable, every box of strings, every drum stand. If it could be lifted, it went into a box. If it could be carried, it went into the truck.
We had a vehicle waiting at the service entrance behind the mall. Through the back corridors we made trip after trip, hauling equipment through those quiet concrete hallways that normally only saw delivery carts and maintenance crews.
It felt like we were robbing the place.
At one point the security guard came around again.
He had noticed the traffic.
“What’s going on back here?” he asked.
I told him we were transferring some inventory between my locations.
Which technically wasn’t entirely untrue.
He seemed satisfied and moved along.
So we kept going.
Box after box. Guitar after guitar. Amplifiers stacked like bricks.
By the time we were finished, that entire 700-square-foot music store had been emptied out.
Everything ended up in my garage.
Now if you can picture this, my garage was about 200 square feet. Somehow we had just stuffed the contents of a 700-square-foot retail store into it. There were guitars leaning against lawn tools, amplifiers stacked beside bicycles, drum hardware piled in corners.
It looked like a musical instrument avalanche had exploded inside my house.
We were exhausted, but also strangely proud of ourselves.
We had pulled it off.
The next morning the phone rang.
It was the mall.
“What happened to your store?”
Apparently when they opened the gates that morning they found an empty retail space.
I explained the situation honestly. I told him I had fallen behind on the rent and I was afraid everything would be seized. I said I didn’t want to abandon the store, but the inventory was all I had.
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
Then he said something that stopped me cold.
“We’re not allowed to take your stuff.”
“We’re not allowed to take your stuff.”
I remember just sitting there thinking, Oh.
All that panic.
All that effort.
The late-night operation that looked like a heist movie.
Completely unnecessary.
So later that day we loaded everything back up again.
The same guitars, the same amplifiers, the same boxes of strings. We reversed the entire process and rebuilt the store exactly as it had been.
I ended up working out a deal with the mall to stay until the end of the lease. The business didn’t last much longer after that, but at least it ended properly and not with a locked gate and empty hands.
For years afterward, whenever the guys and I talked about that time in our lives, that night always came up.
The night we stole my own music store.
There’s one last detail to the story that I didn’t learn until later.
The security guard who let us in that night?
Apparently he got fired.
The Night We Stole My Own Store