I've lived in Richmond my whole life and been collecting records purchased from various Richmond Independent record stores for the majority of my time here...so just a warning, this review might be a little lengthy. What I like about Crossroads is that it is not too far away from where I live. It is located in a large space in a dying mall. (Side note- there is an easy way to get to Crossroads so you don't have to walk ALL THE WAY through the dead mall. You park next to Lenscrafters and walk past that store and take a right and you are there.) The owner is amicable and helpful if not extremely knowledgable about the various genres they sell. The rest of the staff rarely bothers you, but also usually doesn't usually ask if you need help. They have a lot of T-shirts. They have a lot of bad t-shirts that could be replaced with merchandise they could sell. They have limited sizes of the good ones. They have candles and posters too.
...and now the vinyl situation. Yes, they have a classical section of used vinyl. It is the section of used vinyl that is priced appropriately in the store. There is a small and mediocre collection of new vinyl in the middle of the store. Occasionally you will find something that might surprise you, but mostly not. New vinyl at Crossroads is on par with the pricing at other stores.
Now we will get to my real complaint about Crossroads as a used record store. The prices assigned to the used popular rock, jazz, country, reggae, and blues titles, seem to be about twice the amount you might pay in most used record stores. The idea of the used record store is that the store makes an offer to someone for records (they buy records ) and then resells them for about twice the amount of what the offer is. That is the way used record stores keep the prices down on bringing in new vinyl so that they can make a profit, but that is not what i see happening here. Quite a few of the records in their used bins are actually priced higher than new re-issues of the same record. I could understand this if these records were out of print, or original pressings. This is not the case. Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" should on no planet be a $21 used LP. That is price gouging the customer in the worst way possible. It is also forcing the customers to only shop at your store 1 day a week, on Wednesday. On that day Crossroads offers Buy1Get1 Half-Off on used vinyl. The math of this = If you buy 2 used records from them on Wednesday, then you can get your used records for about the same price that you would if you went to any other used record store in the city.??
So my final complaint about Crossroads is that..oh wait, there is another thing- What is with the weirdo shrink-wrap on the used records? Does wrapping a piece of saran wrap around the cover help protect the middle of the cover... I guess?
My final complaint about Crossroads is that they actually are selling copies of used records in their bin that are knowingly damaged and unplayable records and those records are priced in line with their skibidi pricing system. No cap.
But still, like I said in the beginning, its close to my house. read more