Vintage Vinyl's Granite City, Illinois Location: Closed

As of last Monday, October 1, the Granite City, Illinois-based branch of Vintage Vinyl has closed – seventeen years to the day after it opened.

“Basically, it made money for fourteen of those years,” says VV co-owner Lew Prince. “And for the last three it really was not doing well. When it started losing as much as we were making here in Missouri, we decided to close it.”

Prince cites several factors which lead to the store’s decline.

“Granite is a city with a future, but it doesn't have much of a present, is the problem,” he says. “When the steel mills are down, there's only one shift, we always felt it in that store. We would cycle through those times. [But] when you add in the costof gasoline and the disastrous electricity crisis that hit our customers, music became a real luxury. And business fell off real seriously.”

Never fear, however: VV’s University City location (6610 Delmar Boulevard) is still alive and kicking – and absorbing the inventory from the Illinois outpost. For bargain hunters, this means more boxed sets, more used CDs – specifically in the genres of heavy metal, hip-hop and country – and more used movies; Prince says he just moved 1500 used DVDs over to the Delmar location himself.

-- Annie Zaleski