For twenty-one years, every new record that came into Spank Records went into the new arrivals rack in alphabetical order. A at the front, Z at the back. Clean, logical, easy to navigate. Exactly how a record store should work, right?

I changed it six weeks ago and I’m not going back.

The Problem with A to Z

The alphabetical system seems rational until you think about what it actually does to browsing behaviour. A customer walks in, flips to the letter they’re looking for, finds or doesn’t find what they want, and leaves. The system is optimised for people who already know what they’re after.

That’s fine for the back catalogue. But the new arrivals rack isn’t supposed to work like that. New arrivals should be about discovery. It’s the part of the shop that says “look what just came in, you didn’t know you wanted this.”

When everything’s alphabetical, there’s no editorial voice. The Amy Shark record sits next to the Amyl and the Sniffers record purely because of the letter A. A jazz reissue ends up next to a garage rock 7-inch because they both start with T. No conversation between the records. No story being told.

What I Do Now

I organise the new arrivals by feel. Loosely grouped by mood, genre, and what I think goes together. The new Drag City releases sit next to the post-punk stuff because the audience overlaps. The soul and funk reissues cluster together. The Australian indie section is its own thing because that’s what most of my regulars come in for.

Within those groupings, I put the records I’m most excited about face-out at the front. Not the ones I think will sell the most. The ones I think are the best. There’s a difference.

I rotate it twice a week. Tuesday when the new stock arrives, and Friday afternoon when the weekend crowd starts showing up. It takes me about forty-five minutes each time. That’s forty-five minutes I used to spend doing something else, sure, but it’s forty-five minutes of me engaging with the stock and thinking about what my customers might want to hear next.

The Results Are Real

I wasn’t expecting a dramatic change. I mostly did it because I was bored with the old system and wanted to try something. But the numbers have been noticeable.

Average transaction value is up about twelve percent since I made the switch. Not because records cost more, but because people are buying more per visit. They’re spending longer in the new arrivals section. They’re picking up things they wouldn’t have found under the old system because those records would’ve been buried between two alphabetically adjacent titles they had zero interest in.

I’ve been tracking this kind of thing more carefully since I started using some basic data tools to understand what’s actually happening in the shop. A mate pointed me towards Team400, who help small businesses make better sense of their numbers. It got me thinking differently about how the physical layout of a shop affects what people buy. It’s not rocket science, but when you see the patterns in actual data rather than just gut feeling, you start making different decisions.

The other thing I’ve noticed is more conversations. When records are grouped by taste rather than alphabet, customers ask questions. “Why are these together?” or “If I like this, what else in this section should I look at?” That’s the whole point of a record shop. If people just wanted to find a specific title, they’d order it online.

The Pushback

Not everyone loves it. I’ve had a few regulars who get annoyed that they can’t just flip to the right letter. Fair enough. I keep a handwritten list at the counter of everything in the new arrivals section, organised alphabetically, with a note about where in the rack it’s sitting. Old school solution to an old school problem.

One bloke told me the shop looked “messy.” I told him it looked curated. He still bought three records.

A couple of label reps have told me they’ve noticed their stuff getting more attention when it’s face-out in a thematic grouping rather than spine-out in an alphabetical wall. One of them started sending me listening notes with his shipments so I’d know where to place things. That’s the kind of relationship between labels and shops that makes independent music work.

It’s a Statement About What a Record Shop Is

Here’s the thing that took me twenty years to figure out: a record shop is not a library. A library’s job is to help you find what you’re looking for. A record shop’s job is to help you find what you didn’t know you were looking for.

Alphabetical order serves the library function. Curated groupings serve the record shop function. I know which one I’d rather be doing.

This won’t work for every shop. If you’re a massive store with tens of thousands of titles, you need some kind of alphabetical backbone. But for a shop my size, eighty square meters with a carefully chosen selection, the editorial approach makes more sense.

Every record I put face-out is a recommendation. Every grouping is a mixtape. Every reshuffle is a new conversation with whoever walks through the door next.