After walking up the wooden steps into Hitt Records, you’ll see a room full of new and old vinyl alike and hear records playing from the in-store stereo. The record shop opened up hardly three weeks ago in a cozy room above Ninth Street Video.
“There’s always been conversation that there’s not a good record store in town,” co-owner Kyle Cook says of the reason he and Taylor Bacon started up the shop.
“We know there’s a demand for it,” says Bacon, who works as a programmer at KOPN with Cook, who is a show host. “We showcase this thing at (Uprise Bakery) called Monday Night Vinyl. DJs who are just regular people bring their record collections, and they play music all night. We just began to understand that there was a lot of people who were interested in vinyl and had no place to go. They’d go to Lawrence, Kansas City, Jefferson City — anywhere but Columbia.”
When asked about their own first experiences with vinyl, Bacon mentioned _Cucumber Castle_ by the Bee Gees. “It was just the realization that I could listen to the oldies and I could hear an album that sounded like The Beatles that isn’t The Beatles,” he says.
“I figured out early on that I could get a ton of records for a dime a dozen,” Cook says. “And I began just shopping by covers, just really cool looking records that I knew nothing about and couldn’t wait to listen to and see what they sounded like.”
Thanks to Bacon and Taylor’s full-time KOPN gigs, Hitt Records is only open Saturdays through Mondays. That also holds some benefits for customers, though. “We’re not in it for the corporate profit motive,” Cook says. “We don’t have to compensate for a corporate structure or really high rent.”
And even so, Cook says that sales have exceeded expectations, and the shop is sustaining itself easily. For customers, that translates into major deals. There is a $1 section in the store as well as a $3 section, and most of the records (even the new ones) don’t exceed $20. For records, that’s fairly cheap, and sometimes even cheaper than purchasing an album online or buying a CD.
“For me, it’s a treasure hunt,” Bacon says of vinyl hunting. “It’s an ability to share sounds that aren’t heard. I love oldies music a lot, and oldies radio is fantastic but they only play .5 percent of oldies music ever recorded, and there’s so much good stuff to showcase.”
But it isn’t just oldies in Hitt Records. There’s a great mix of old and new stuff alike from every genre, from country to jazz to alternative rock. And the best part about the small, personable record store might just be the customer service.
“We will call you on your cellphone to let you know a record came in,” Taylor says.
Sounds like Hitt Records has your back.