The owner of R&B Records in Upper Darby has an interesting customer approach: if you must come to his store, don’t stay long and know what you want, writes Beccah Hendrickson at 6abc.
Val Shively prefers doing business by mail.
“This is a landfill, not a record shop,” he said.
The store, open since 1990, gives him somewhere to keep his extensive collection.
“I sell records. I sell enough to still be here. But I love to buy, that’s my game. That’s me at my best,” Shively said.
The older and more obscure, the better.
He’s been collecting records since the 1950s.
“I heard this record ‘Don’t Be Cruel’ by Elvis Presley when I was 12 years old, and I went nuts. I don’t know what it was. It just hypnotized me or mesmerized me or something,” he said.
It’s possible he has the largest record collection in the world, numbering in the millions.
And by discouraging the casual customer, that just leaves the serious and curious.
“If you want something nobody’s ever heard of, and you see the signs ‘do not enter’ and ‘keep moving,’ that brings people in here,” he said.
Read more at 6abc.com about this unique Upper Darby record store.
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Val Shively has been collecting records since he was 12 years old and has been running R&B Records since the mid-1960s. Inside his shop are more than four million records, all stored the old-school way, no computers, no databases, just decades of knowledge and instinct.
Editor’s Note: This post first appeared on DELCO Today in July 2021.
