Downtown in The Dalles, nestled away on Second Street, there’s a narrow storefront that might catch your eye as a type of store you don’t see very often nowadays. With a spinning record in the window and a name taken from a Beatles song, Yesterday and Today evokes the feeling of a different era.
Mark Thomas, the owner of Yesterday and Today, has been selling records in The Dalles since 1989, when he opened The Record Shop. It was something he’d been thinking about for a while, inspired by his own collection of records at home.
“This all came out of a hobby, because I’ve always had records since I was a kid,” Thomas said. “I bought a lot and it just turned into a collection which then turned into a business.”
Having started in 1989, Thomas has been witness to a lot of change, both in The Dalles and in the industry as a whole. By the late 1990s, there wasn’t as much of a demand for records as there had been, which made using the name “The Record Shop” tricky.
“That’s when records were almost dead,” he said. “Nobody wanted them. But I loved the name.”
Almost a decade into running the store, it seemed like something needed to change, and Thomas found himself tempted by the prospect of moving online. He decided to make the leap, closing down his storefront and selling his wares on the internet instead.
“There was a point in, oh, the late 90s, when the internet was relatively new and man, you could make a lot of money selling records online,” he said. “But it was not the same. Not even close.”
Though it was possible to make a lot more money with the larger clientele base that came with the internet, Thomas realized he didn’t enjoy the monotony of dealing with customers online. He also found that missed his storefront and seeing customers face-to-face.
A year and a half after closing his store to go online, he did the opposite. He decided to stop selling online and to instead return to having an in-person store. But, with the decreased popularity of records, he felt like he needed a new name.
He reached out to a good friend who lives in England, writing him a letter, asking about potential name ideas.
“He says, ‘Well, why don’t you call it ‘Yesterday and Today?’ But here’s the thing. The day before I got his letter, I had decided to call it that,” Thomas said. “The day before, I told (my wife) Vicki, I’m going to call it Yesterday and Today. And when I got his letter, I showed my wife and she said it was meant to be. So that’s what it’s been since ‘99.”
One would think that now, 20 years later, there would be even less demand for records, but Thomas said they’ve made a huge comeback, despite the popularity of streaming.
“When people come in and go, ‘Well, I can just download that,’ I say, ‘Well, you can, but it’s not going to sound any good,’” he said. “I mean if you put a record on a quality turntable and you play an MP3 side-by-side, it’s like they’re two different songs. Once you teach people that, wow, they just never go back.”
Thomas said a lot of people assume that his audience is made up mainly of the elderly, but that’s just not true anymore.
“I have people coming here and going ‘well, only old people buy records,’” he said. “But my average vinyl buyer is probably 20 to 23. It really used to be 50 or 60, but now it’s 20. And I get 15-year-olds in here and they don’t even look at CDs. They want records. It’s just everybody. I mean, it’s 15-year-olds, it’s 75-year-olds, they’re all enjoying it because they’ve taken the plunge.”
Thomas said he believes that it’s actually not just the quality that people take to, when it comes to records. He said there’s just something different about the way you consume records that changes your whole perspective.
“You know, many people talk about how vinyl sounds so much better. And yeah, maybe it does,” he said. “But I think this is the first time you’ve actually really listened to it, instead of putting it on in your earbuds and going for a walk. You know, that’s a different thing altogether. When you’re sitting at home, you just want to relax, you put on a record, you’re going to listen to it.”
Anyone can get into records, Thomas said, and he encourages people to give it a try.
“It’s kind of a commitment, you’ve got to stand up and put the thing on and turn everything on,” he said. “But once you do that, you’ll listen to the whole album, and it’ll be like hearing it again for the first time.”
Yesterday and Today is located at 414 E. Second St., and is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
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