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Former K-Mart Employee Uploads Years of Store Music (1989-1993)

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Sanjuro

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https://archive.org/details/attentionkmartshoppers

Mark Davis said:
OK, I have to admit this this is a strange collection. In the late 1980's and early 1990's, I worked for Kmart behind the service desk and the store played specific pre-recorded cassettes issued by corporate. This was background music, or perhaps you could call it elevator music. Anyways, I saved these tapes from the trash during this period and this video shows you my extensive, odd collection.

Until around 1992, the cassettes were rotated monthly. Then, they were replaced weekly. Finally sometime around 1993, satellite programming was intoduced which eliminated the need for these tapes altogether.

The older tapes contain canned elevator music with instrumental renditions of songs. Then, the songs became completely mainstream around 1991. All of them have advertisements every few songs.

The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That's becuase they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the math assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that's over 800 passes over a tape head each month.

Finally, one tape in the collection was from the Kmart 30th anniversary celebration on 3/1/92. This was a special day at the store where employees spent all night setting up for special promotions and extra excitement. It was a real fun day, the store was packed wall to wall, and I recall that the stores were asked to play the music at a much higher volume. The tape contains oldies and all sorts of fun facts from 1962. This may have been one of the last days where Kmart was in their heyday - really!

One last thing for you techies, the stores built in the early 1970's (such as Naperville, IL Ogden Mall Kmart #3066, Harwood Heights, IL #3503 and Bridgeview, IL #4381) orignally had Altec-Lansing amplifiers with high quality speakers throughout the store. When you applied a higher quality sounding source, the audio was extremely good. Later stores had cheaper speakers and eventually the amps were switched out with different ones usually lacking bass and treble controls.
Click to expand...

YouTube video about it from a few years ago. He also has a ton of strange things uploaded to his account.

https://youtu.be/8t5TYw2bkOk
 
Listening to 7.26.1992, and they have a message reminding shoppers to not smoke inside the store. Really cool to listen to this kind of stuff.
 
I really love that things like this exist. Thank God for those who try to capture even the most mundane parts of history because there's typically some fascinating stories such as this guy's story related to it.
 
hipbabboom said:
I really love that things like this exist. Thank God for those who try to capture even the most mundane parts of history because there's typically some fascinating stories such as this guy's story related to it.
Click to expand...

I wish I had the mindset to consider stuff like this. I can't wait to listen to some of these! I hope they aren't taken down.
 
this is somehow the dopest thing I've come across today

cool that the first tape is from October '89, which was the month and year I was born
 
It's things like this that make me really love the internet. Completely trivial and yet fascinating. I love weird shopping/elevator type music. It brings me back to childhood.
 
As someone that goes through estate, garage, and yard sales looking for old VHS tapes, audio cassettes, and magazines so as to digitize and preserve their contents, this is a very impressive contribution.
 
So who picked the music? I remember walking through a K Mart(the one located at the intersections of Five Mile Road and Fairview Avenue in Boise Idaho, if it still exists) sometime in the late 90s and that song "Bitch" came on. At the time it was still a contemporary song, but I still thought it was a weird choice to be playing in a department store, with the female singer singing "I'm a bitch..." repeatedly.
 
Awesome! I love stuff like this. It reminds me of r/ObscureMedia.
Actually, this is on there already!
It's weird to listen to this and think that it was 25 years ago!

This is why I love the Internet.
 
Also I'm still waiting for that lady who lived in Philadelphia or wherever it was that recorded the news for several decades to dump all of those tapes onto the internet.
 
As a historian, this is actually pretty exciting. There are branches of history dedicated to attempting to gain some sort of insight into how ordinary people lived hundreds of years ago, based on tiny scraps of evidence. This the first period of time in history where something so menial and everyday will be saved, despite not coming under any artistic, social or political criteria. And yet these things can give such a fantastic picture of how people lived, worked and indeed, shopped.
 
This type of ephemera (especially in this case, where he probably owns the only copy of these things still in existence) makes me really excited for some reason. I actually found this guy's YouTube channel a couple months ago while browsing some related videos I got from the ObscureMedia subreddit. There weren't any specific plans at the time to digitize it all and make it available, but I remember wishing he had. I'll have to check this out.
 
I remember Matchbox 20 and Madonna being part of their in-store selection of music. Savage Garden and Cherry Cola was probably more Target than K-Mart, but I remember K-Mart would always have Madonna's Frozen on while I was there. Natalie Imbruglia's Torn was played a lot too.

I worked there in 2006 and it was somewhat nostalgic working there. I got to work in electronics, garden, sporting goods, and unloading the truck. I got what I wanted out of it. lol

It's interesting hearing the music my parents had to listen to while I was a child.
 
Thanks for posting this. The early 1990s were a really fun time of life for me, so this is a pretty cool glimpse back in time.
 
This is a sampler diggers heaven for dance and vapourware, though I wish there were lossless formats available.
 
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