To shore up any confusion about Cousins Vinyl, here’s how it works with us.

We buy up large collections of rock, soul, jazz, and others, mostly 500-1,000 at a time. High end, nice condition records gets auctioned off, and then put in our online ebay store (we are one of the largest record stores on ebay).

So what might you find in the dollar store?

Records that we have a few copies of already in our store, like The Clash’s Combat Rock, or Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters, for example, would (read: ARE) buried somewhere in the boxes. Then there’s the really good records that are slightly to moderately scuffed, but mostly not completely trashed. Max found Jimmy Smith’s first record on Blue Note that was more than acceptable (espcially for a buck). He also found an early Johnny Cash that I wish I had noticed and was actually in good shape. There’s Miles Davis, Otis Redding, Prestige and Blue Notes, Atlantics, Motowns, ect. We also have at least a dozen boxes of 12″ hip-hop that we just have so much of that we decided not to put anymore in the online store. And then there’s thousands more rock, soul, funk, and jazz records that maybe the cover was rough, or whatever. You can also find odds and ends, world music records, local stuff, ect. There’s tons and tons and tons of 45s, which we’re selling for 50 cents.

All these records are unsorted in the back office, in boxes. There’s about 15,000 in there, but there’s much more similar stuff in out warehouse, which we keep bringing in to always have new stuff. We are also constantly buying records so there’s several hundred each week that could be added.

When you visit, you can purchase anything in our online store for a discounted price, or possibly even make us an offer on something brand new that has yet to auction. Here’s a glimpse into our office that holds our online inventory:

Our goal of opening this up is to share good music with fellow collectors for a cheap price. That’s why everything’s a buck. This isn’t a snob shop - we think all music is good music. We won’t hover over you either - you can go back there and have at it for as long as your heart desires. There’s a listening station with no headphones - play whatever and have fun. We’ve kind of forgotten what we have, so even us cousins have fun digging through and finding stuff. We would like to think that it’s the best dollar record store in the world.

Thanks to all the good people we’ve met already who visited the store the first week. Hope to see you back soon, and we hope you’re enjoying all that good music you took home.

You can find a review of the dollar store by Suburban Sprawl Music here.