The Record Store Years 52) The ‘Grand Experiment’: Bellevue Square

A memoir of 25 years (1975-2000) spent working in the world of records & music in Seattle, with occasional side trips into writings on Led Zeppelin and other adventures from my musical life.

Cellophane Square was a successful company with ambitions to continue growing in the early 1980s, and in between the Bellingham store’s move from Cornwall Avenue to the big Magnolia location in 1988, a third outlet was opened in the upscale Seattle suburb of Bellevue in 1986.

Part of my job as regional manager was to scout for new locations, and in ’84 and ’85 I spent a considerable amount of time in Bellevue and on the Eastside looking mostly at vacancies in strip malls, as well as a few free-standing buildings. The Eastside is a very car-oriented culture, with retail shopping districts spread around the region and very few areas where the ‘walk-by’ traffic and University clientele that we enjoyed in Seattle and Bellingham exists. Mall culture was on the rise in the early ‘80s – and in fact was about to decimate Bellingham’s downtown business district – and the Eastside boasted one of the biggest and most successful malls in the country at that time: Bellevue Square.

As I’ve stated before, Cellophane’s owner Jim had a tendency towards visions of grandeur, and after several unsuccessful attempts at landing a decent location on the Eastside he came up with the idea of locating a new store at Bellevue Square. To me this seemed unthinkable – in my mind being in a mall was anathema to everything Cellophane Square represented – ‘60s idealism, independence from the mainstream and a funky, good-vibes aesthetic. Bellevue Square was a classic monument to entitlement, conspicuous consumption and bad taste, but Jim could not be swayed and after several somewhat contentious meetings between the owners and Cellophane’s upper management, it was decided to pursue this avenue.

It also took several meetings with the mall honchos for Jim to convince them that Cellophane Square was mall material - used product in particular being a sticking point - but eventually he charmed them into leasing us an approximately 1500 square foot location at the end of a remote corridor on the back side of the mall, right next to an exterior entrance and close to the enormous parking garage - ideal for customers coming into the store to sell us used product.

The space had previously been occupied by the tailored-for-mall-culture outfit “Apples Etc. . .” (gee, wonder why they went out of business?) and was right next door to another mall stalwart, the caramel corn shop. That place steadily emitted a sickly-sweet odor as they cooked the stuff, which blanketed the entire corridor and nearby shops – and occasionally turned lethal when they burned a batch of corn. Needless to say, I was less than enthusiastic about the location.

Regardless, after the lease was signed I forged ahead with the process of remodeling the space; getting signage and racks made, moving a small wall or two, and handling the myriad of other details required in setting up a new location. Doing this within the confines of a mall was a new experience for me, in that it required jumping through a series of bureaucratic hoops I had never encountered before. There were restrictions on when I could use power tools (not during business hours), and Bellevue Square insisted that full architectural plans be drawn up by their own staff architect. Every last detail – from the paint color on the wall to the location of the counters and racks – had to be approved by the ‘front office.

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They were especially concerned with the exterior of the store, and Jim was hell-bent on making this new feather in his corporate cap as bling-y and upscale as possible. We had custom neon installed with our name and logo above the storefront and more neon ringing the front display windows, plus multiple plexiglass panels with our logo splashed across the front of the exterior. We also spent a small fortune on custom-built oak display racks for the store, all matching, to accommodate as much product as we could squeeze into the modestly-sized space.

This was all happening during the transition from LPs to compact discs, and the racks for the new store were ingeniously designed with movable divider slats that could be spaced at six-inch or twelve-inch intervals to accommodate either format. Each rack also had two rows of shelves in its lower section to accommodate overstock, with sliding doors to conceal them from view.

I commenced with the job of remodeling the space, this time without the help of Wayne though I did bring in subs for carpet and electrical plus a small crew to help with painting. Not surprisingly the rent on the place was outrageous, with a top dollar per-square-foot price plus additional ‘triple-net’ fees applied based on the store’s gross profits. Because of this, it was decreed that every square inch of the store be maximized for sales floor, and I remodeled the existing back room and bathroom space to be about the size of a closet – there was barely space to fit a desk, a small work counter and a few cubbies for the staff’s belongings. All the extra stock, incoming product and 30-day hold had to be stored underneath the display racks on the sales floor which proved to be very inconvenient, especially when the store was crowded.

We got through the design and set-up process with relatively little hassle from the mall and opened to a generally positive response from Eastside customers. Many seemed confused or put off by the used product, but we also stocked a full line of new titles and plenty of customers – especially the younger ones – were pleased to discover our tried-and-true business practices being offered in such an incongruous environment.

Above: Interior of the Bellevue Square store shortly after opening; we hadn’t gotten to the new black and yellow color scheme yet.

Cellophane Square’s Bellevue location lasted for about ten years in the mall before moving to a free-standing store nearby, and in that decade the “Grand Experiment” was profitable enough to more or less justify the overhead, though the rent did go up and eventually priced us out of the location. Business was kind of a roller coaster in the mall; there would be long stretches of absolutely dead time with nobody in the store, and then on Saturdays and especially around the holidays it would be super busy and the store completely packed with customers. As far as I was concerned the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays in the mall were an absolute fucking nightmare – big profits but very stressful workdays for all involved – which unfortunately soured me on The Most Wonderful Time of The Year for quite a while.

The mall also had a requirement in every store’s lease that when the mall was open, your store had to be open, and a few years into our time there they decided that rather than close on holidays like July fourth and Thanksgiving as most civilized businesses usually do, Bellevue Square would remain open so more money could be spent by people who had nothing better to do than shop. This unfortunately brought an end to our annual fourth of July company picnics and required some poor souls on our Bellevue staff to draw the short straw and end up working a shift on Thanksgiving day.

Though we built up a good base of loyal customers in our years there, I personally found dealing with the Bellevue Square store to be a soul-crushing experience. The mall’s powers that be made it clear that they didn’t take us seriously, and we had occasional run-ins with them. At one point we had a Kiss window display up and some suburban zealot complained to the mall about it, claiming that the band’s name stood for “Knights In Satan’s Service” or some such nonsense, and that we were corrupting their precious teenage offspring. The mall officials responded to this by insisting that we remove the display, which I initially refused to do until I was forced to by the store’s owners. Four decades later I can find some humor in this, but I was pretty pissed off at the time.

Above: Pushing the envelope with window displays in Bellevue Square. Fear of a black planet, indeed.

The other thing that really got to me was the palpable sense of entitlement evident in so many customers. I don’t like to generalize too much, but I had multiple experiences with customers by whom I and our employees were treated like servants at best, and at worst like a piece of shit that won’t flush. There was another record store (Musicland) in the mall a floor up from us, and on more than one occasion when we were out of stock on a hot title, a Gucci-toting Mercedes lady would insist that I call the other store to find out if they had it. I didn’t object to this on principal, but the attitude behind it – and the rude delivery of the demand – really got under my skin. It was all I could do to keep from saying, “Why don’t you walk up there and see for yourself!” But I never did.

Many of our teen-aged customers were cool, but they were often hounded by helicopter moms following them around like the brain police. I recall one incident where a girl chose a cassette of The Cure album The Walk and brought it up to the counter with her mom to pay for it. The mother grabbed the tape and started inspecting it, noting the song “Let’s Go To Bed” and stating, “I don’t like the sound of that!” Her daughter looked at me imploringly and I said something benign about it being a good album, and fortunately she backed down and let the girl purchase it. Of course what I wanted to say was, “The more you say you don’t like the sound of it the more she’s going to want it!” But I never did.

I was very relieved when the ‘Grand Experiment’ was abandoned in 1996 or so, and we moved to a funky, free-standing location with its own parking lot on Bellevue Way. That one was another remodel job and this time I was able to include Wayne in the project again, creating an excellent new store with considerably more space at considerably less rent than the dreaded mall.

After leaving Bellevue Square I never once set foot in it again, and have no intention of ever doing so. On the rare occasions that I’ve had to be in similar mall environments in recent years - Alderwood comes to mind - I swear it brings on mild PTSD. I get tense and feel an overwhelming urge to get the hell out of there. Which I do.

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