When I used to go into town in the 90s, the 4 shops I would always visit were HMV, Our Price, WH Smith and Woolworths. Basically the shops you could buy music from.
The Our Price shops became Virgin Megastores and then Zavvi which closed it's doors around 15 years ago. Around the same time Woolworths closed and WH Smith stopped selling CDs. HMV was the last major music retailer standing on the high street.
By this point the main rival to HMV for music wasn't the other high street music retailers, it was the internet. The 3 main online retailers I would visit for music was Amazon, Play and CD Wow. The latter 2 are now long gone themselves but as we all know Amazon is still going strong and sells much more than music.
I've bought a few bargain CDs on Amazon over the years. However in more recent times I've found the cheaper the CD the more expensive the postage. There are also some CDs I'd quite like to buy but the prices of them on Amazon are extortionate.
My preference has always been to buy a CD from an actual shop. I bought some CDs from HMV in Oxford St the day it closed in 2014, but I don't think I've bought a CD from HMV since. Why? I find their range of CDs quite limited and as much as I like to have a physical product I'm not willing to spend £15 on something I can legitimately stream for free on the internet.
Nowadays though we have the charity shop. There are 6 of them within a 15 minute walk from where I live and I regularly visit all of them. Likewise when I'm visiting a different town I tend to visit the charity shops for CDs.
Obviously the range of CDs in charity shops are dictated by what CDs people have donated and there will be fewer CDs in there than in HMV. However, it does feel I'm more likely to find something I want in the charity shop. I went onto the HMV website and searched for 90s dance CDs, only 20 came up in the results. I've bought more than 20 90s dance CDs from the charity shops.
Obviously not all charity shops are the same and some are better than others. Mind sells CDs for 50p whilst others are generally £1. I did go to one charity shop when I was in another area of London and bought a CD for 10p.
One charity shop I do tend to avoid though is Oxfam whose CDs are the most expensive. British Heart Foundation are creeping up in price too. Only today I saw a 90s Ibiza compilation that was more of a nice to have than a particular want, but at £3 I wasn't buying it.
Generally though, like with HMV and the other shops I used to visit back in the day I leave the shop empty handed most of the times I visit. The difference though is that back in the day I didn't have enough funds to buy every CD I wanted in the shop. Now it's because the charity shop doesn't have a CD I want to buy.
It's unlikely HMV are going to expand their 90s range in CDs at least, but with the charity shop you never know which classic 90s CD will be in the shop next time you visit.
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