My wife and I went to Winnipeg to shop for a new CD player, hoping to find one with maybe a 5 or 6 disk capacity. The idea being, we like to choose several CDs and just spend the next several hours enjoying nice music while perhaps involved with other things. We had been without a CD changer for several years, since the other one quit working, but always planning to get a really good one when we got more settled in our new digs.
Imagine our surprise when the salesman said they don't make those anymore. Everybody's going to iPod, or putting music on computers, he said. Now it seems to me that music loses something when transferred to mp3. And as for computers, if you want to put a lot of music on a PC, you'll probably use mp3s too, because of the immense saving in disk space. And we don't use computers during thunderstorms, which we've had a lot of lately.
Enquiring locally, a sales person said they had a CD changer, but in order to get it, we'd have to buy an entire home theatre suite.
Now am I wrong? I thought music aficionados liked to put together their own sound systems; a stereo here, speakers there, etc., etc. I get the feeling that businesses these days are trying to stampede customers into buying things they don't want just to get something they want. My wife was so upset by this that it spoiled her day and didn't do much for mine either. I told her I'd see what I could find online, but as for big box stores, I'm not all that hopeful. I think they're all into maximum sales of the most salable items, but not much into serving the needs of customers. Are we losing our very culture here?