WHAT THE HELL...AND DAMMIT...AND A FEW OTHER CHOICE WORDS!

Buying CDs is becoming harder and freakin' harder these days. I understand the world of downloading music is where it is at these days and yes I partake in it myself, BUT, not much compares to buying that new CD, opening it up, popping it in the player and jamming while perusing thru the liner notes. Can't do that with a download.

Now in a world where Turtles and Coconuts and Peaches are long gone the only places with CDs seem to be places like Wal Mart, Target and Borders to name a few. If you are looking for 100 copies of the next crap fad music they are great, but anything else you are out of luck.

Yes I dig the indie stores like Criminal Records and I order from stores such as Newbury Comics but going to Criminal has to be planned out due to not living downtown, and ordering over the net has the whole wait time that really sucks. Although my son does dig going down to Criminal.

The whole reason I am bringing this up is due to my frustration in finding one CD today. It is not even a CD from a hard to find band, from a small unheard of band or a band no one has heard of. It is a new CD from a band that has established hits, that has a decent following.

I went looking for the new Cracker CD today. I figure I would pull into Target and Wal Mart since they were on the path I was traveling, I knew Wal Mart would not have it, but sometimes, sometimes Target has a decent selection of new releases. Of course, no luck at Wal Mart, and Target would have been a good choice if I were looking for the new Prince (they had like 12 rows of that), Ciara, or some other country artists I have never heard of. OK, time to hit Borders, they usually have a good selection of hard to find CDs (who'd a thought Cracker would be hard to find).

So I go into borders and BAM....the music section has been shrunk down to an 8th of it's previous size. Where music was almost a quarter of the store it is now down to like 3-4 rows encompassing all the same genres. No Cracker, so I asked someone who worked there, they said it may be on this cart, we have not put out new releases yet. Nope..not there, so he looked it up. "Sorry we do not have it, but I can order it for you", uhhh no thanks.

Well it was time to call around before I ordered it or made the trek down to 5 points. I called Barnes n Nobles, FYE, CD Warehouse and a couple of Best Buys....finally I found a Best Buy hat had 1 copy....1 copy.

Well, I finally got my Cracker CD....but I am still ticked off about the whole record store industry.