Mod Lang

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Nonplussed, Bradshaw questioned him only to discover that the “new release” had already been uploaded to the server in the Berkeley dorm and now, not only did the student employee have it, but so did the other 400 dorm residents with access to that server. According to the partners, this type of file sharing resulted in “no more follow-through sales” unless there was special packaging involved. They started to see a steady decline in traffic and sales.

“And that was a liberating moment,” Bradshaw recalls, somewhat happily. “It made me realize we could change. I love vinyl. I have a passion for music history. (The advent of free digital file sharing and internet sales) forced me to sit back and take stock. They were dictating to us and suddenly it made me want to go back to the mail-order approach with a warehouse space. Go back all the way to the beginning when it was fun.”

Attack of the Franchises

Add to this harsh wake-up call, skyrocketing rents in downtown Berkeley. For the 800-sq.-ft. shop with a bit of upstairs storage, Bradshaw and Diamond initially had a fair rent, but over the years they had watched their overhead bloat to include a payroll of seven employees and a landlord who was asking for market value: $3 per square foot. “The comic book store next door left, which was a great source of customers for us, very compatible. The landlord kept raising the rent due to a general feeling that he was not getting market value,” Bradshaw says, adding that for the last year and half, they were experiencing month-to-month rent hikes, and the parking remained terrible.

When they first started to look, the husband-and-wife team had totally different views — he wanted storage and mail order, whereas her deepest fear was the isolation and “going days without seeing any other people.” So they made a list of must-haves: East Bay Area, low overhead, a warehouse that could function as a store, close to BART, easy public transportation. They used Craigslist, word of mouth, and worked hard to keep it a secret, and they found a whole lot of nothing.

Despairing of ever finding the right fit, Bradshaw decided he was “just going to lock everything up and wait five years, and then Naomi saw a listing on Craigslist.” It was just the right size, off the beaten track (6328 Fairmount Ave.), free parking, near a post office (mandatory) and 100 yards from El Cerrito Plaza and the BART station. Diamond says the new rent is “what you’d expect typical office space might cost in the East Bay.” A quick search shows that to be closer to $1 per square foot.

But the move off the beaten track has created some fall out. A former walk-in regular for more than a decade, who prefers not to be named, acknowledges that, aside from the store’s opening day in El Cerrito, he has not stepped foot in the new Mod Lang. But, the 46-year-old still checks the weekly emails to keep current on new releases. “I learned about Beth Orton at the shop and I’m a huge Richard Thompson fan (Fairport Convention) so Paul told me about the new band The Eighteenth Day of May,” he recalls.

Diamond estimates there are a “couple of thousand” people on the weekly mailing list which goes out on Tuesdays. Mail order has remained constant in both locations, but she estimates there has been a one-third drop in walk-in traffic. Now the store has “1.5 employees,” not counting the two partners and they estimate 60 percent of sales are in collectible vinyl, closely followed by lots of import CDs.

When not focused on store sales, Bradshaw works with his eBay account, the store’s Myspace page and the email lists. Both admit Mod Lang’s website is woeful, but Diamond claims, “We will update it at some point, but it has always felt wrong to give someone $10,000, and then I still have to do all the work uploading the Excel file.”

So are there any drawbacks to El Cerrito retail? “Yeah, not great lunch,” Diamond notes ruefully, “If I want to have something really great, and cheap, I have to get in the car, otherwise all we’ve got access to within walking distance is mall food. I need a bike.”

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