This is a story about working in the warehouse of one of the biggest music retailers in the Netherlands during the 1990's.
After finishing secondary school in 1996 I found myself in need of money. I took on every and any job the work agency offered me.
Sometimes it was for a day, other times a week. Sometimes easy, other times dirty or real hard work.
One fine day after my last gig ended, they told me of a long term vacancy in the warehouse of a music store that they saved especially for me. My efforts paid off.
Music had always been my hobby and I bought lots of CD's in the actual store I was going to work, so I was excited.
The amount of CD's in the warehouse was overwhelming at first. CD's were not cheap so you needed to pick the right ones to buy. Seeing this many CD's at my new job filled me with joy.
When I entered the company in 1996 they operated 20 shops around the Netherlands. Everything was done manually, price stickers applied by hand and packed by humans.
The company quickly expanded and more than doubled the amount of stores in 5 years. Things were looking good.
In these golden years the yearly record store party was a highlight.
The decision was made to have a sorting machine build to keep up with the increasing demand. This was not a small machine, its conveyer belt streched 25 meters. It had a platform attached for a worker to feed it thousands of CD's per hour. It wasn't cheap either. We modded it with a speaker so you could hear the radio up there.
The emerging MP3 download sites really had a big impact on CD sales, they plummeted.
I left the company in 2001, just before the big fall
We didn't just work; we listened. The 25-meter machine was always accompanied by 3FM. From the morning Arbeidsvitaminen requests that kept our hands moving, to the afternoon energy of Stenders, the radio was the heartbeat of the building.
Any CD we had on stock could be played as well. Even unreleased titles that were under embargo. There was a constant genre war going on, not everyone like metal as I did. Just like Rotterdam Terror Corps was not appreciated by everyone.
2025