Woove staff writer Eva Luton interviews Len Comaratta about the closing of Crossroads Music & Video in Blacksburg, VA.

Eva:  What is your title at Crossroads?

Len:  Technically, I’m the assistant manager.   I’ve been working there for about seven years—I got hired there in 2004 and I’ve been assistant manager there pretty much the entire time.  They’ve rotated a series of managers through the store.

Eva:  Could you clarify for our readers what Crossroads is exactly?

Len:  Well what it was, was a video rental and music shop where you could buy new and used DVDs and Blue-Rays, new and used CDs, vinyl, and as of the 31^st [the store will be closing].  Blockbuster and Movie Gallery [already] went out of business—and, I mean, albeit sales for sure have been slumping over the decade—and historically, that’s an industry trend.  There are ways to counter that that could’ve been done, but I don’t want to necessarily get into things that should’ve been done.  But I think as far as the rental thing goes, I wasn’t too concerned about Netflix, I wasn’t too concerned about Red Box—mostly because when you have a business like that, Red Box only caters to the people who want to see new stuff and Netflix most of the time, you’ve got to wait.  You have to plan ahead, so when you’re like, “I want a movie now,” we’ve got a good selection and a good catalogue.  The only place [that] ever really rivaled us as far as that was the library.  So I knew we had a few years left in that for a while.  We had a pretty loyal customer base.  Sometimes I was kind of surprised how many students didn’t know where we are.

Eva:  So that’s the situation, bad industry?

Len:  Well no, they would like to stay in the area if they could.  That would probably be Christiansburg and that’s because [of] rent.  Rent is too high in Blacksburg.  Blacksburg doesn’t want to admit it, but Blacksburg is not very friendly to business.  Not friendly to business at all.  And between outrageous taxes and outrageous rents, we just couldn’t afford to stay there.  I mean, I think we probably could have, but it would’ve been a tight shift.  The other three stores are staying open up north.

Eva:  Where are the other locations?

Len:  Well the main store is in Staunton.  Waynesboro and Lexington are the other two stores.

Eva:  What does this say about location and support for local businesses?

Len:  [Laughs] I have to say, the location on the corner where Moe’s is now, that’s where we used to be.  And that was a dank location.  I mean you were in the center of everything.  If something’s going down, chances are that somebody would run in and tell you about it.  Drunk people would be showing [up] all the time, which was kind of a downside too.  I mean but, it was a little bit more fun and we definitely had more walk-in and random traffic than we did at the new store.

Eva:  Why’d they move?

Len:  We moved because of rent.  The Lester Group, which is a realty group out of Martinsville, took over downtown, pretty much—there was some shadiness—they jacked our rent up almost to $7000 [a month].  It was just under $7000, but [before] it was just under $4000.  So we’re like, “What?” and we sued back and forth for a while, fought them for about a year and a half, then David, our owner, was just like, fuck it.  He knew the owner of the building we’re in now, cause that dude lives in Staunton too, but apparently they couldn’t work out a deal to get our rent any lower.  We’re paying about $4500 at this new spot.  David was saying we weren’t doing the business to justify that kind of loan.  I mean, I can kind of see that, I mean, relying on rentals when it’s not a super reliable business – I mean the sales thing: new stuff, you can easily blame the internet, easily.  Why not?  I do.  I use the Internet ‘cause our store doesn’t have everything.  Excuse me:  if I have to order it, that’s going to take longer than if you ordered it yourself, and you don’t get a special discount if I order it and then sell it.  And you know, there aren’t any advantages in that way . . . back in the pre-Internet days when if you wanted it, you had to wait.  I’d get it for you but you’d have to wait.  It just doesn’t work like that anymore.  Now where we’d have the advantage is the “used” market place.  And if we actually ran an online shop, you know, like had a “used” store on Amazon; that would go tremendously.  But there are things like that where they don’t want to invest the time or money, or they don’t understand the media.  I’m too old to mess with it.

Eva:  Is there any assurance that there’s going to be a store in Christiansburg?

Len:  No.  They say they’re looking for something but to be honest with you, I really don’t think they’re looking hard, and if they did I really don’t think they’d last in Christiansburg.  They may not want to believe it but . . . our business is a weird business in the sense that we count on students to survive essentially.  But you don’t want [to depend on] the students to survive because they’re not here all of the time.  You need a strong customer base.  The rentals definitely supplied that for us.  We had a good, strong, rental base and we had a good, strong, loyal customer base when the students were out of town—because you can’t rely on the students.  Most students are here for three to five years and a lot of them don’t even know the store is open ’til their last year.  Now when we were on the corner that was different.  Everybody knew about us because when you come into town or you’re doing your orientation, what’s the first thing you do?  You go downtown and check out the town and see if there’s anything you can do because you’re not 21 yet and boom, there’s a record shop.  And now it’s Moe’s. [Laughs]  I think there’s still a chance to do something in this town but it might take some time for it to happen.  I love music and I love a movie, that’s why I liked working there.  It wasn’t my life working there though.  If I had to choose, I’d say get rid of the music and keep the movies in order to keep the store open.  The reason I say that is that the sales don’t make the store so much [money] anymore.  What would sell [music wise] is that all of the hot shit you still love, we’d still have.  We would just get rid of all the crap.  Like, we don’t need to have The Allman Brothers back catalogue, we don’t need to have this classic rock catalogue, because that’s not really what’s hot and what’s happening right now.  We can keep collecting that stuff in the “used” bins and build that “used” collection up with classic material, but where the new material would be [we] would have the hot stuff coming through.  That way, you’d always know what’s going on, you’d always be on top of it, you wouldn’t invest a lot of money in it and you wouldn’t lose a lot of money in selling it because you can always return it within “x” amount of time.  That’s what I would do.  I would get rid of all the sports crap and I would definitely expand our rental because that’s what drives the base of the store.

Eva:  I know that when I had some extra money, I’d like to go up to Crossroads and get a few records—and a lot of people here do collect records—where are we going to go now?

Len:  Find somebody with a car and make friends with them because there’s a place in Roanoke and it’s amazing.  It’s called The Record Shop.  You’ll find this place called Happy’s which is a giant flea market [5411 Williamson Rd NW] and The Record Shop is in the middle of the entire thing and it’s freakin’ huge.  Now, you’ve got one side which is the “old school” side.  It’s been there forever.  It’s about $2 a record regardless of quality.  But across the hall from that he’s got this new room that’s got $5-$15 a record.  It’s like, dank jazz, all like, the hot soul and stuff, the cool 80s stuff that no one ever sells back—so that’s where you’d have to go right now.  New stuff—you could always go to Hot Topic for vinyl at least.  CDs, you can go to Target still, and Barnes and Noble; Best Buy and Wal-Mart are really kind of cut on music…

I’d love to start a store, everybody’s trying to get me to start a store but I’m just like, man you don’t really understand.  It’s not something that can just pop up.  Honestly it wouldn’t be worth opening a big music store in this town cause you’d never generate the business to cover the ridiculous rents.  The best space to be would be downtown.  $7000 a month… If I did anything, it’d be a “vinyl only” shop.

Eva Luton interviewed Len Comaratta on Thursday, 20 January 2011 at the WUVT Studios.  Hear more from Len on his radio show The Rare Groove every Thursday from 9 pm until midnight on WUVT-FM 90.7 Blacksburg; also check out The Local Zone, a program formerly produced by Comaratta and hosted by WUVT’s Heather Horton featuring local and regional live music, CDs, and interviews.