We Met in 1993 While I Was Working for Circuit City...Selling Home Audio
My name is Paul. I remember being an avid music fan ever since I was about ten years old. Perhaps this coincided somewhat with the launch of MTV in 1981. Mom allowing me and my younger brother to join both the Columbia House and RCA (later BMG) record and cassette clubs not long thereafter started off our music collections. The MTV show “120 Minutes” which aired late on Sunday nights shaped much of my taste in music to this day.
Growing up, mom and dad had one of those enormous 1970s-era furniture-style console stereos with a built-in phonograph, some storage for records, and AM/FM radio. Later when that quit working, they bought a Sony rack system with a record player on top, dual cassette deck, AM/FM tuner, remote control, and a pair of floor standing speakers. Dad even had a nice set of headphones. Of course, they had a decent record collection, too.
Mom gave us her 1960s-era record player that she still had from when she was young, and let us play some of their record collection on it. I remember being fascinated by it having four different speeds to choose from – 16, 33, 45, and 78. For Christmas one year, my brother and I got an all-in-one mini stereo system to share with a record player, cassette player, and AM/FM radio. We also each had a cassette boombox during our younger years. My brother’s had a built-in black and white TV!
My initial interest in, and appreciation for, high-fidelity sound and home audio equipment was sparked during my college years by a former friend of mine who lived two houses away from me. He was proud to show off and demo his new stereo system and also name-drop a bunch of audio and speaker brands I had never heard of up until that point in my life. He was the first person I knew who actually owned a CD player.
After having a career change of heart and dropping out of pharmacy school after two years, I transferred all my credits to another local university to ultimately decide to focus on studying business. I was 21 and needed a new part-time job to replace my pharmacy job while finishing college. I remember mom encouraging me to go apply at Circuit City in the summer of 1992. I would end up working as a “Sales Counselor” at Circuit City for six years!
They started me off in what they called the A.C.E. (Advanced Consumer Electronics) Department where I sold computers, monitors, and printers, as well as boomboxes (my favorite), Sony Walkmans, Discmans, and Watchmans, cordless phones and answering machines, and fax machines.
In December of 1992, I graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree, and also apparently had impressed the Circuit City management enough in six months after making it through my first Christmas selling season that they offered me a full-time position in the Home Audio Department. They even paid for me to go to Atlanta for a week for Home Audio sales training.
So, I sold mostly Home Audio (and quite a bit of Video) at the Circuit City South County store #530 in St. Louis, Missouri from January of 1993 until mid-1998. I was using the Telepersonals phone dating classifieds chat line service when I met my future wife Fran in April of 1993. Already with our firstborn son together, we got married in September of 1998 a few months after I left Circuit City. At that time, I was juggling my audio/video installation business called the Hookup Connection which I was promoting at all of the St. Louis area Circuit City and Best Buy locations (this was before Best Buy owned GeekSquad), and an assistant manager job at Kinko’s which I left after a few months to focus full-time on the A/V installation business.
Even though the long hours spent on the sales floor were brutal both physically and mentally, even more so around the holidays, my six years working at Circuit City were enjoyable. The best thing that ever happened to me during that time was my wife Fran proposing marriage to me in the Home Audio Department at Circuit City while I was working. Most of my fellow coworkers were good people. I worked really hard at consulting with and selling Home Audio to customers without being that pushy, stereotypical salesperson.
It was fun to demo and sell a nice selection of audio component brands such as Harman Kardon, Onkyo, Carver, Kenwood, Technics, JVC, Pioneer, Sony, and Philips, and speaker brands like JBL, Infinity, Harman Kardon, Cerwin Vega, DCM, Bose, Carver, and Velodyne subwoofers. Home Theater was starting to become a really big thing, so I especially enjoyed selling complete surround sound systems, along with perhaps a television, hi-fi VCR, DVD player, all the hookup cables, and even an extended warranty if they wanted it.
I loved the employee purchase discounts, and all the free Home Audio stuff I won during that time from various sales contests and awards. My first home theater receiver was a Harman Kardon AVR30 like the one in the above YouTube video which I purchased using my Circuit City employee discount, and my first speaker system was purchased directly from DCM with a nice discount specifically for Circuit City employees. My current computer speakers are an Infinity satellite and passive sub system I won at least twenty five years ago, connected to an Onkyo stereo receiver I bought online a long time ago from J&R of New York which is no longer in business!
I also spent several months working at the Ultimate Electronics Gravois Bluffs location in Fenton, Missouri for their grand opening in the St. Louis market during the Christmas selling season from the last quarter of 2001 until January of 2002 when I quit. I got to learn about, play around with, and sell component brands such as Denon, Marantz, and Yamaha, and speaker brands like Definitive Technology, Klipsch, Polk Audio, MartinLogan, and Boston Acoustics. One of the reasons I quit was the pressure from management to “sell more TVs”. They didn’t like the fact that I loved to hang around primarily in Home Audio. The part I miss most about my retail years working for Circuit City and Ultimate Electronics was listening to my favorite CDs and comparing how the music sounded through a wide variety of speakers, receivers, and amplifiers.
FAST FORWARD… In 2019, I registered the domain name AudCouple.com. I hand drew the logo, paid for one month of Adobe Illustrator, and my wife and I learned just enough to turn my drawing into an image file. It’s not perfect, but neither are we. “Aud” is short for “Audio” and “Aud Couple” is an obvious play on “Odd Couple”. I remember my high school doing the play “The Odd Couple”. If my wife and I were the main characters, Fran would play the role of Felix the neat freak, and I would have to settle for Oscar the slob.
I am grateful for the online and YouTube audiophile community, and of course the companies and people who actually design, engineer, produce, sell, and service the high-tech home audio components and speakers we buy that makes it easy for us to enjoy listening to great music together.