It's time to get out!

With my promise to get out of retail when I was made redundant completely and utterly falling through as I mentioned in the first part of this story, I was now moving across to a bigger town.

A bigger town meant a MUCH bigger store. I was used to everything on one floor, now there would be THREE floors. The Music department was the largest, I had a measly 20 metres of total music before. Now just Rock n Pop was 22m. This was huge.

It was a lot of work and slowly others from the old store moved over. I almost cried seeing them, it wasn't going to be the same but it could still be pretty amazing here. It was a lot harder as I had to make sure we had the right stock in and that was a lot of work and it meant a real understanding of how music gets to a store. I could see that we couldn't buy some stock as we were not in credit with that record company/distributor. Cracks again started to show.

"I'm in love and always will be"

Reading about HMV and Blockbuster facing closure recently it reminded me of my own fears when I faced redundancy years ago. I worked for HMV's main competitor Virgin Megastores (my town didn't have a HMV) and it was the job I always wanted. Every time I went in there I used to imagine what it would be to work in there. Music was and still is a massive part of my life and to be able to go to work and really love what I did.

I ended up working for WHSmith for my first job, I was on the stationery department. I spent most of my wages on stationery! Our music department was so small and I'd see people come in with the yellow and red bag and want to be the one to give them that bag. Every time I looked there were no vacancies and then years passed. Just when I was ready to turn my back on retail I went into the store and saw the vacancies sign... applied, got an interview and started by the following week. I WAS IN!