Union-Tribune
September 25, 2024
In Normal Heights, the owners of Nickelodeon Records marked the shop's 40 years not with a party or promotions, but memories and spunk. In an interview at the record boutique last week, the owners talked about how their business stayed the course despite challenges from technology, thieves and ageism. One of the owners is Ruthie Bible, age 82. "B-I-B-L-E, like the book," she said. The other owner, age 79, is Betsy Scarborough, "like Scarborough Fair”. Bible said shoppers sometimes underestimate them. They walk in looking for the owners, not grasping that the two women are in charge. "'They come in and say, 'Oh, are you the great grandparents?' No, you little, . . . .” She stopped short of using salty language. They opened the store in 1984 in a 200-square-foot space. Rent: $200. It later moved to a bigger space at 3335 Adams Ave, where the walls are now covered with vintage posters, photos, bumper stickers, memorabilia and LPs. It was a second act for both. Bible had been working for a bank and Scarborough was a high school English teacher. They loved music and had a lot of records, and they decided to make that into a business. “ We knew we weren't going to get rich off them (the records), but it was what we loved," Bible said. "We were in the minority, believe me," she added. Not long after they opened, CDs became popular and LPs were trending down. In 1988,CDs outsold vinyl LPs, "and by 1989 they outsold prerecorded music cassette tapes for the first time ever thus becoming the most popular audio format," according to Retro Manufacturing, an audio supply store.
People would walk by the record shop and say, "No wonder no one's in there, they don't have CDs," Bible said. Asked how she felt when people suggested that vinyl was old news, Bible laughed. "We're just little rebels,” she said. Their business survived, but other record shops have closed, including Off the Record, which had opened in 1978 and shut down in 2016. Given that closure, Nickelodeon Records is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, record store in San Diego. They named other challenges, including the pandemic and shoplifters. During the pandemic, Bible pivoted and wrote a book about records. One hundred copies were published, and she saved one for the shop. As for shoplifters, Scarborough shared a story about two customers who used to stroll in and change the price tags "and make their own sales.” She confronted them. Love is what sustained the business through those and other upheavals, including the eventual arrival of MP3s, Napster, then YouTube and Apple Music. Also: deaths of relatives, pets, and all the richness and complications of growing older and running a business well past the standard retirement age. It's not just their love of vinyl, but the fact that other people love it, too. Vinyl has staying power because the audio quality is unmatched, Scarborough said. These days record shoppers prefer original LPs, not reissues, because "I mean, even though they're brand new, they really don't seem to have the depth that the original vinyl did. A lot of the older vinyl may look whipped and still sound good.”
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My brother Richard M. Robinson ’70 passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack on September 10, 2024. He and his wife Paula had retired to Portland, Oregon five years ago — Julie Robinson Zurek, ’67
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