Nestled between businesses on Grand River Avenue, The Grand Wazoo has been a fixture in East Lansing for 30 years.
The store, located at 619 E. Grand River Ave., is a home away from home for music enthusiasts, but might be closing its doors by the end of July because of declining profits, manager John Novak said. The lease runs out at the end of this month, he said.
Lansing resident Ted Munn, 39, said he has been coming to Wazoo for about 20 years, and browses through the store every few months.
"It's just kind of the old school store," he said. "It's kind of sad because it has a very intimate feel, where you recognize the guy who's selling stuff to you. It's one of the last places like it around."
A number of reasons contribute to the store's decrease in sales, Novak said. Along with ongoing construction near the store, Novak said the shop is on "the lost block" of Grand River Avenue — an area past Bailey Street where the number of passers-by begins to dwindle, he said. The advent of technology hasn't helped either.
"The way people get music nowadays is different than how people did in the heyday of music and records," he said. "People download now. The general economy is not too great and then all this construction hasn't helped. … It's gotten to the point where I don't have enough customers."
Novak became manager of the store after the original owner, Jim Lindsey, died in 2003, he said.
The Grand Wazoo, formerly Wazoo Records, draws its name from the 1972 Frank Zappa record "The Grand Wazoo."
The store had a partnership with a Wazoo Records store in Ann Arbor for a few years after it opened, but Lindsey decided to take the store in his own direction, Novak said.
Wazoo sells new and used CDs, movies and memorabilia. The walls are covered with vintage posters, and Novak said everyone's welcome to purchase a part of Wazoo for their home.
"I have a lot of stuff on the walls and I can't get it all in my house," he said.
This week, everything in the store is 20 percent off, and prices will continue to drop until the store closes, capping at about 50 percent off, Novak said.
Tim Dempsey, East Lansing community and economic development administrator, said the ever-changing business climate hasn't been kind to independent businesses like Wazoo.
"It's increasingly challenging for independent stores to survive," he said. "The corporate nature of retail today is just so different. They've been open for 30 years. The retail marketplace has changed dramatically in 30 years."
He said since the 1970s, 5 billion square feet of retail space has been developed in the United States — a size comparable to about 5,000 Meijer stores. It's growing at a rate much faster than U.S. population rates, he said.
"We're obviously always disappointed to see the independent stores go," he said. "We will continue to support our independent stores and do what we can to help them and that won't change."
Novak said although the Internet has become the new hot spot for music scavengers, it doesn't offer the environment many independent music stores have.
"We're here for the music and the browsers," he said. "People can spend hours in here just browsing. I just like the physical part of it, just the physicality of records."
