Back in the early 1970s, I was working in the camera department of a now-defunct major retailer, Fortunoff’s.
The large building was presented as a single entity, but different departments were owned by one half of the family and the balance, the other half. The two halves had split as a family, distrusted each other and never spoke (according to rumors).
The store hours were from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. The cleaning crew came in at 8:30 each morning. Because of the distrust, a staff member of the camera department, the jewelry department and the silver departments had to arrive at 8:30 to ensure that there were no thefts.
The camera department was mainly cameras, but they also carried some high end sound equipment, including one reel to reel tape recorder/player with a demo tape.
So on the two mornings each week when I was assigned the 8:30 to 10:00 security detail, I was in a largely empty 100,000 square foot building. I would play the demo tape at a volume that could be heard in the entire store.
I can remember two of songs: Dusty Springfields “Wishing and Hoping”, and Roberta Flack’s “First Time I Saw His Face”, and right now I cannot get the Wishing and Hoping song out of my head. I suspect that when it does leave my head, it will be replaced by the Flack song. [big grin]
I worked at the store for 5 summers and I believe that the reel to reel was never sold. I listened to the demo tape probably 200 times over that 5 year span.
Correction: I just looked up the store size. It was 150,000 square feet. It does not change anything else about this post, however.