Playing Through a Pandemic: How Eugene Music Stores Rebounded from COVID Challenges
Walking through the doors to the sight of many musical instruments. Taking a guitar off the wall, tuning it up and strumming a couple chords. Listening and interacting with all of the local musicians around you.
As a musician, I’m always taking every chance I can get to stop by local music stores in Eugene. However, the recent impacts of COVID-19 have forced many of these businesses to rethink their shop formats. I visited three different stores to see how they’re offering a safe customer experience.
Facing the Music
“You have to understand why your customers come to you and not violate that,” said Dan Kaplan of the Buy and Sell Music Center. “We’ve tried to be as normal as possible. We try to be the kind of store that we would like to go to.”
The Buy and Sell Music Center has been in Eugene since the 1970s and has been a fixture for local musicians. During the pandemic, the shop always met the state mandates to stay open and has never needed to shut down.
Kaplan, the owner of the business since 1993, initially kept the doors locked and sold instruments to customers on an appointment only basis after a stay at home order was issued on March 24, 2020. The store struggled initially. “We were actually doing some business, not much, and March and April [of 2020] were pretty terrible months,” said Kaplan.
McKenzie River Music took a different approach than Kaplan and embraced the online portion of their business to keep them afloat. Artie Leider has been the owner of this store since 2000, specializing in high end American and vintage guitar sales.
When the pandemic first hit, the store had to close its doors, but still operated remotely. “We closed for a short period of time, but we didn’t really close. I didn’t lay off my employees or anything,” explained Leider. “We did the same thing we normally do, we just worked on posting things online and when people would come to the door, we would do the transaction outside the door.
Beacock Music, a corporation with multiple stores that rent and sell many different types of instruments, went through a similar experience. The Eugene location also started March of 2020 by offering curbside appointments to their customers.
“The first two weeks we shut down completely and then we opened for curbside only,” Flandorffer described. “That went on for a little while until phase two kicked in and then we were able to open again.”
Online Marketplace
“I’ve always had an online marketplace,” said Leider of McKenzie River Music. “Because I sell high end things and I have a worldwide market, we still had business [in the pandemic].” The shop has an easy-to-access website featuring a wide array of different instruments for customers to browse.
Leider has been selling instruments online in various ways since around 2005. He describes online sales as a “moving target,” detailing how they can vary from being 10% to 80% of his business depending on the month.
Beacock Music also has an extensive website outlining all of their products. Additionally, the store in Eugene began to offer lessons for newcomer musicians over Zoom as another way to expand the online portion of their business.
Kaplan of Buy and Sell Music Center is adamant about keeping his business strictly in-person. He values the presence of his customers and thinks that there is less room for error when making transactions behind a desk, rather than behind a computer.
“We want to conduct business in the store,” Kaplan firmly stated. “You and me, my merchandise and your money are all in the same physical time and place. You can agree that my merchandise is everything you want it to be. I can agree that your form of payment is everything I want that to be.”
Opening the Doors
On May 15, 2020, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and the Oregon Health Authority issued clear guidelines for retail businesses to reopen amidst the pandemic. All three of these companies took this opportunity to open to the public, making customers social distance, wear masks and use hand sanitizer while in their stores. Their social distancing guidelines have largely remained the same since May.
“We didn’t think it made sense to have our customers make appointments. We tell them if you’re sick, don’t come here.” said Kaplan. “We don’t want to make it difficult for someone to come here and shop. You throw roadblocks in the way of your customers, and they’ll just shop online.”
The company’s revenue seems to be gradually coming back since reverting back to a socially distanced version of its original format.
The online marketplace is still important for McKenzie River Music, but once protocol was established, Leider did not hesitate to let customers explore his guitar collection. “For the most part, we limit the amount of people in the store. We don’t do the big time hang outs anymore,” Leider detailed. “It’s not as normal.”
Beacock decided to take a stricter approach when implementing COVID-19 precautions in their store.
“[COVID precautions have] been pretty consistently the same since the state law mask mandates have been put into place. As the cases grew, so did our sanitization,” Flandorffer of Beacock explained. Employees consistently wear masks, and sanitize touched surfaces and instruments every hour. The store still offers appointments and online music lessons for customers weary of entering.
Unlike other providers of musical equipment in Eugene, Beacock has a large amount of their revenues come from instrument rentals. This changed drastically once local grade school band and orchestra classes were forced to take place over Zoom.
“When it comes to our rental season, that usually runs in the beginning of fall. It gets so overwhelmingly busy that we hire temporary work to help with that,” said Flandorffer. “It didn’t happen nearly as much as we expected [in 2020], but it happened more than we had thought it would.”
Luckily, the shop was able to attract different forms of customers over that same season. Beacock does not only sell and rent musical instruments. The business also offers recording products and instrument repairs.
“Despite not being able to have as many rentals, we still had tons of repair business to take care of,” said Flandorffer. “We had all of these different types of customers with home recording and taking up new instruments because they had the time. It brought us a whole lot of different types of customers.”
When masks come off
Flandorffer joined Beacock right before the pandemic started and has seen some changes throughout this time that will stay in the store for years to come.
“We’ve already implemented a few permanent things that have come from [the pandemic],” he said.
“Curbside assistance for example. Some people just don’t want to go into a store and deal with talking to people. They just want to buy their thing, pick it up and go. For your introverted musician, it’s a godsend.”
Flandorffer has noticed that many customers are using curbside assistance for smaller music accessories ranging from woodwind reeds to guitar strings. Customers tend to come into the store when they are looking to try out and buy a new instrument.
Leider of McKenzie River Music is anticipating more jam sessions and social interactions once masks can come off and more surfaces can be touched.
“Music is important to people and guitar certainly has a more social aspect to it. People get together and play guitar and I think that’s the thing that I’m looking forward to,” Leider expressed. “People used to come in here, sit around and play guitar. We’ve had shows here. I want to get back to the social aspect. This is a very social business. It’s not the same as other businesses.”
Like many other musicians, I look forward to the day I can sit down, strum a couple chords, take my mask off and sing along with a guitar. But for now, I will continue to visit local music stores and watch them continue allowing us to safely express ourselves through music.