I was busy Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, but managed to get there on Sunday afternoon. Of course, by then the store had been thoroughly picked apart. Not a single Fender/Squier or Gibson/Epiphone left in the store. Even the strings and cables were all gone. The drums/cymbals were similarly cleaned out. A lone Moog Sub25 (at 25% off) was the only remaining synth in a sea of unwanted electric pianos. Unless you wanted oboe reeds, marching band drumsticks, a used AC-2 Acoustic Simulator, or enough fog juice to fill a hot tub, you were pretty much out of luck.
Even the non-retail stuff was being sold. Rotating display stands, office furniture, desks, clocks, file cabinets, those mirror-backed glass display cases, giant pieces of slatted wall with buckets full of guitar hangars and cymbal mounts, lighting rigs, the actual STAGE, banners, neon signs, employee shirts, tech aprons -- everything must go!
An exhausted-looking liquidator told me she'd been sent there in February to inventory the store, but they had piles of random junk just stuffed into little storage rooms that were eventually walled off and forgotten about. Every time they'd take down another wall, they'd find more crap. She was so over it.
Long story short, everything I actually needed was long gone, but I did manage to score one of the random junk pieces they'd just found -- one of those in-store display/demo stands for Boss pedals. It was 10 minutes before closing, and she said I could have it for $100 if I could get it in my car.
It's in pretty good shape, other than a small hole in the lower display panel. I removed the rear panel and the little anti-theft brackets for cleaning. I could hear something rattling around inside, and it turned out to be a lost knob. Power and plugs all work, and it came with three PSA-120 with the with the x7 daisy-chain power adapters (one for each row).
Certainly not what I went there for, but it was fun to grab a little (actually big, and heavy) souvenir from another fallen flag of retail music. And I'm kind of a Boss shill, so it'll be a neat way to display my modest collection of Boss pedals.
Meanwhile, my buddy was digging through another junk pile and ended up buying a mystery box full of stuff they'd just discovered the day before and hadn't priced or inventoried yet. He paid a few hundred bucks for it, but it ended up being an old 80s Elka OMB 5 organ/synth, along with a pair of Wilgamat III sound/rhythm modules, an Elka-branded amp with spring reverb and a rotary speaker, and a couple other unmarked black boxes full of circuitry that we're still trying to figure out what the hell it is -- but the OMB sounds amazing. The synth strings in particular have nice ARP/Crumar vibe.
Did anybody else manage to get to their local Sam Ash for some liquidation swag?
