Kembles. (Store Of The Week).

PAUL WATKINS, CO-OWNER

"One of the biggest problems for the independent retailer at the moment is the way that the major supermarkets seem to just mess around with CDs. They wreck the prices for Top 20 albums, so much so that people feel that they're being ripped off if they pay more than 9.99 [pounds sterling] for a chart album. If the major labels want to maintain their profit margins, this is something that they will need to address along with downloading and copying. However the issue of copying is somewhat complicated by the fact that shops like us sell blank CDs as well. Last year they sold in ones and twos, but this year kids come in and buy boxes of 10.

We don't stock vinyl although we do the occasional special order. One thing that we have mourned the passing of is the compilation cassettes as we did good business with those, particularly as most cars still have cassette players.

As a shop we're very mixed media, stocking music, DVDs, games and books. We also stock instrument accessories like guitar strings and saxophone reeds and there's a recording studio, Right Trax, which is based upstairs.

Where we find we are picking up big sales is in the budget, and mid-price area from labels such as Castle and Pegasus. We're selling a lot of Forties and Fifties acts, like Harry Roy and Jack Payne, as well as Sixties and Seventies pop and MOR acts such as Billy Fury and Josh Feliciano. We sell them for 2.99 [pounds sterling] or two for 5 [pounds sterling].

DVD is one of the few areas where people are still prepared to pay the full price for the product on release, although once a film has been out for a while people will wait until the price drops. That said, we have sold a lot of DVDs. Also games software is a big line for us, particularly the Playstation 2 games ...