Retail History | Best Buy — Sound of Music at Hamline and St Clair
· 1966-8
Unreviewed contributionBy kevin · · updated · Report an issue
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Retail History | Best Buy — Sound of Music at Hamline and St Clair
kevin
People treat Best Buy as a yellow-tag warehouse that was always the size of a parking lot.
The first room sold stereos to college men on a Saint Paul corner.
On 22 August 1966, Richard M. Schulze and a partner opened Sound of Music at Hamline and St. Clair Avenues in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Four private colleges sat around that intersection. Schulze financed the shop with savings and a second mortgage on the family house. The stock was hi-fi components. The customers were men eighteen to twenty-five who wanted the music loud and clean.
First-year sales reached about one million dollars, with a profit near fifty-eight thousand dollars in 1966 money. By 1969 there were three stores and Schulze had bought out his partner. By 1978 Sound of Music had nine Minnesota shops and was only mildly profitable.
The change of form came from weather. In the summer of 1981 a tornado wrecked the Roseville flagship. Schulze staged a no-frills clearance in what was left and called it a Best Buy sale. The crowd was the lesson. In 1983 the company took that name and opened its first superstore. The yellow tag and the warehouse aisle arrived in 1989.
The original Sound of Music corner is no longer a Best Buy. Hamline University's Old Main still marks the neighborhood that supplied the first customers. The S&P 500 retailer is now headquartered in Richfield. The first pin is this intersection.
Photo: Old Main at Hamline University, Saint Paul, via Wikimedia Commons.
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