Attention K-Mart Shoppers | Hacker News Reader

Attention K-Mart Shoppers

archive.org

334 pointsrpmisms112 comments

Oh, fun! These came up on HN a few years ago[0]. Recycling some of comment from then:

The "Tower Sound and Communications" (TSC) company that recorded many of these was located a few miles up the road from my home town. The booming male voice on the recordings also sounded familiar to me, too. I'm fairly certain I heard him on the local radio station that my father played over the PA system in our family grocery store when I was growing up.

Turns out that Cecil "Lee" Rutherford, the voice on the recordings, did VO work for local radio stations near my home town, too. He died in November, 2020.

He was involved in some ventures that persist today. His company EchoSat[1] (which I'd heard of because I had some involvement in the convenience store / retail petroleum industry) merged with an IT security firm to become "ControlScan", doing PCI testing stuff because gas stations and credit cards.

Quoting the obituary[2]:

He started Tower Sound and Communications while in Greenville to pursue a venture that would eventually spearhead "in store" broadcasting for companies such as Kmart (he became the voice of Kmart) and Jamesway which evolved into another corporation in KY called EchoSat that would use satellite technology in helping with multiple stores for POS processing and security.

There's an interview with Lee Rutherford in 2011.[3] He absolutely still has that "radio voice".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25271464

[1] https://www.dandb.com/businessdirectory/towercommunicationsg...

[2] https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailyadvocate/obituary.asp...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQqoQL3pkyI

Thanks! I knew this topic sounded familiar.

Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Collected K-Mart background music tapes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35593133 - April 2023 (8 comments)

Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25271464 - Dec 2020 (91 comments)

Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Recordings of K-Mart In-Store Music from 1992 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10369105 - Oct 2015 (13 comments)

(for those curious, EvanAnderson's prior comment was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25296389 from the Dec 2020 thread)

Wild to actually hear the prices. Shoes for less than $3 USD![0] It's a fun time warp!

[0]https://archive.org/details/KmartJuly1992Generic?start=447

What a needle in a haystack find... excellent.

How did you find this?

absolutely ridiculous chance

sigh upvote

Leave it to k-mart to never let you down.

Oh boy this was a good one

lol, never expected that to happen here

I picked this tape at random and just got to this part. Imagine my surprise.

Same! It was on the first page for me, and I just jumped right to the shoe commercial on a random click. When that synth dropped I realized that I had just roll'd myself. In 2025. Absolute clownery!

How the hell did you find that.

pure luck!

Never does a deep search in The Archive let anyone down!

Dude... thanks for the laugh.

Oh god...

Woah, awesome find!

I think you started about 20 seconds late, https://archive.org/details/KmartJuly1992Generic?start=427

face palm

Oh, how embarrassing! Made a real ass(tley) of myself!

This was a covert Rickroll execution (if you kept listening)

Anyone else hiding inside of clothing racks away from siblings (or the world) listening to this???

right up until the parental unit twisted my ear dragging me out of the rack. never did it again after that. such great memories of parenting in the 80s

There was a security guard dressed like a NYC cop as they did back in the early 60s who grabbed my ear and made me leave the toy section because I was trying to open packages with my tiny hands when mom was in another aisle. I was terrified of K-Mart from then on.

I'm listening to this because Spotify is (was?) down, what a gift to find.

Favorite vaporwave rendition of this: https://adamneelymusic.bandcamp.com/track/k-m-a-r-t

From "The music theory of V A P O R W A V E" where Adam Neely not only explains and critiques Vaporwave but takes a big steaming dump on it by creating the track that captures and parodies its entire aesthetic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVEez20X_s

He got his source material directly from this archive.org collection, as it says in the opening titles:

"On October 2, 2015, Mark Davis posted his prized collection of digitized K-mart elevator music cassette tapes to archive.org, free for anybody to use.

Vaporwave producers rejoiced."

Excellent video, thanks for that.

I thought this remark in the comments was pretty interesting:

> Something that helps identify Vaporwave is the natural vibrato that occurs from using tape cassettes etc. I often wonder if vibrato, as an effect, gains it's ability to evoke emotion through a psychological connection with the natural vibrato of a person's wavering voice while near to crying. If so wouldn't that be a potential factor in this kind of music's popularity?

On a slightly related note, Internet Archive archivist and notable speaker Jason Scott (@textfiles) shared to his Twitter followers Juicy the Emissary's "Attention K-Mart Choppers" - an enjoyable remix from this collection. He linked to the Medium article here: https://medium.com/micro-chop/traveling-back-in-time-with-ju...

If you like this kind of thing (as background ambience or whatever), the 'WJSV broadcast day' recording from 1939 is worth checking out too: https://archive.org/details/001WakeUpMusic

It was apparently the first recording of its type, clocking in at 19 hours: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WJSV_broadcast_day

I chopped up bits of it for the 'Old American radio' option on an ambient sound mixer I made called Ambiphone: https://ambiph.one/?m=1-Ambient+old+radio-bf37bi80

I wonder if anyone remembers the K-Mart diners and cafes. This image search[0] shows various styles. Some or all of them were branded as K-Café.

The one that I and my older brother remember from our local K-Mart is the sit-down experience with the brown chairs and tables, the server greeting you with the brown coffee canister. (Brown dominated the palette.) It was removed from the store before my younger siblings could register memories of it. They thought we were trolling when we brought it up.

[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=k-mart+diner&udm=2

Yes, the K-mart in my town had one when they opened the store in the 1970s. I think they removed the cafe some time in 1980s? The store itself closed about 6-8 years ago, sat vacant until about two years ago and was finally torn down.

Remember blue-light specials? They had a little cart with a flashing blue light that they would roll around the store and have short-term unadvertised sale prices on things.

The K-Mart where I worked in 1983-1988 had a cafe, called 'The Grill'. Ours had booths, with smooth curved plastic (unpadded) benches. The ones along the edges were typical booths but there was also a row down the center of the same thing without side walls. Orange seats and brown tabletops, I believe. A quick look at the google'd images from above doesn't show anything that looked quite like what my store had.

I announced Blue Light Specials from time to time myself. There were a bunch of rotary-dial phones throughout the store, and if you dialed a certain number (I forget what it was) you could talk on the PA system. It's surprising it wasn't abused.

They even have images of the tapes with the legal notice to not duplicate them on there ;)

K-Mart headquarters were in my hometown and I drove by them yesterday and they finally tore them down. Happy to see some K-Mart nostalgia here.

I don't know why but I absolutely love to go through things like this. They are a window into a past in a way no history article/book can bring out. Just raw, unfiltered content.

Little did I know as a child that those security alert announcements weren't real. I'd often go around the store looking for the police arresting someone they chased down for shoplifting but always ended up disappointed. Probably watched too many cop shows in my youth.

It was cool when mom finally let you roam around on your own. Beeline to the electronics section usually.

It's giving CVS Bangers[0]

[0]https://www.mixcloud.com/TOLKIENBLACK/cvs-bangers/

Listening to October 1989 right now. Loving it! I'm going to download every single .ogg file and create a radio station that I can just tune into while working. Surprisingly effective for the flow state - even with the random product announcements.

Who knew that K-Mart music from 1989 would be the perfect sound track for vibe coding in 2025?

Were you able to find the tracks using Shazam? It is having trouble matching the one from the 28:00 mark here: https://archive.org/details/KmartFebruary1990

Wow... I spent a lot time in the Naperville, IL Ogden Mall Kmart in the early/mid 1980s, so I probably heard these exact tapes.

ditto...i tried from afar seeing what the spot is now, what happened to flipside, and ogden 6.

Not to hijack the thread.. but Ogden 6 (and Fox Valley). A lot of memories.

I think Ogden 6 is being razed for a future Costco.

It's a collection of K-Mart PA tapes. Enjoy.

Listening to some of these, and it just floods back the horrendousness that was cassette tapes. They were horrible, yet they were amazing. They were great in every way except for their main purpose of listening to the recorded content. The sound was atrocious. From the muddled sound from losing all the fidelity of the highs because they were usually lost to any attempt at lowering the infamous tape hiss. The slow draggy sound from a tape that was stretched or the player having loose belts on the driving mechanism. Or worse, when the recorder did and no other player has the exact same issue so every player sounds like the batteries are dying.

For those too young to have to suffer through your youth of listening to such inferior sounds, just be grateful. For those trying to be hip and bring back old formats, stick to vinyl. Cassettes are worth losing to history.

My brother and I bought the same album back in 1994. Stone Temple Pilots—Purple.

I had it on CD, he bought the tape.

The CD sounded (obviously) so much better than his tape. But a little while later I made my own tape copy of the CD, and my copy sounded really close to the CD! Way better than his store-bought copy.

Those bastards didn't even have the decency to use Type II cassettes for the released album.

A Type II (or even better, Type IV-Metal) tape could sound pretty damn good. Still sucked to have to rewind or fast-forward, though.

(Also, Dolby NR was terrible. I'd rather have the hiss than have the muted highs)

Don't forget about quality loss from manufactured cassettes being high speed dubs. There's significant quality loss as you increase the dub speed.

I still have cassette tapes encoded with dbx rather than Dolby and the former's sound quality is much better than the latter. I'd recorded them on Technics decks, which is why I still keep an old deck of that brand for playback and ripping as the bias values are identical.

Cassettes had a bit of a resurgence in the late aughts to 2010s among DIY/punk/indie bands due in part to the widespread availability of cheap (often free) old players, older used cars with tape decks, and cheap four track recording devices.

It would be very common for a new band in that time to have their first release on cassette, and then after they could scrape up the dough, press a vinyl single (CDs being very digitally uncool). There were several niche labels from that time whose bread was buttered with cassette sales.

You're absolutely right the sound quality sucks, but as a child of the '80s whose first music collection was purely cassette based and played back on a Radio Shack cassette dictation player, that sound has a nostalgia for me.

nails across the the chalkboard has a nostalgia sound as well, but I don't want to spend time listening to it if I don't have to!

Yeah. I lived on tapes, stuff ripped from radio, other tapes, and CDs. I honestly don't remember thinking tape sound was that bad, worse than CD's sure. Most of the audio gear kids and young people had access to were cheap walkmans & headphones, boom boxes, and crappy all-in-one stereo systems likely made everything sound like shit and we were oblivious. It wasn't until I was older and befriended someone who was into sound production that I put a bit more thought into audio gear.

I used to work for a VHS dub house while working graveyard shift. There was a weekend radio program that would play underground tunes not normally broadcast. It was a multi-hour broadcast longer than cassettes. Instead, I would hook up a tuner to a VHS audio-in, and record the entire broadcast on VHS HiFi tracks. I'd then listen to that tape through out the week. Lather, rinse, repeat.

We all put up with stuff when we have to. We no longer have to. Bringing back formats for nostalgia is fun, but for anything other than cassettes. Hell, my first car had an 8-track in it. My dad had a supply of blank 8-track tapes and an 8-track recorder in the home HiFi setup. I would record modern releases from CD to 8-track and rock it in the car. So yeah, been there done that

> and record the entire broadcast on VHS HiFi tracks.

That's a neat Idea. I once did something along those lines when I was a kid. A friend and I were trying to dub as many albums as we could on to a 160 minute VHS tape in LP or SLP, whatever gave you nearly 6 hours of play time. Was just for fun though.

I need one of those "Blue Light Special" lights attached to my laptop.

Probably will need to develop an SDK for it..

A buddy has these Woot lights: https://www.woot.com/offers/usb-powered-woot-off-lights-6

Sadly, they only draw power from USB-- no controlling them in software.

(They got me a cheap laugh when I started singing "Turn on your Woot light..." to the tune of Neil Diamond's "Heartlight". Yeah, I'm a dad... >sigh<)

SomaFM NEEDS to put up a stream of those recordings atop ambient electronica, please!

SomaFM does have a Vaporwave station [1]

[1] https://somafm.com/vaporwaves/

How new is that? I used to listen to pretty much every SomaFM station all the time and never saw this one.

Quite a bit of wow and volume instability on these tapes. Wonder if this is due to the cassette player quality or the tape being worn.

yes. cassette tape was a shit format. the longer the cassette, the thinner the tape itself was. the type of tape formulation also played into this. the more brown the tape was, the lower quality. higher end tapes were much darker nearly black.

tapes could also stretch which would give you some of that wow. the tape duplicators motors/belts could wear out so that even if the original tape used to make the dubs was solid, the dubs would have that wow when played back in other cassette players that turned at a more consistent speed than the recorder. dirty heads on the dubbers would also lower the overall sound quality.

I used to make cassette dubs with professional dubbers for years. We'd clean the heads after every X number of passes. The value of X changed depending on the length of the tapes used. I'd check for loose belts at the beginning of any dub order. For primarily talking content, we'd use the more brown colored tape. For music content, we'd use the darker tapes. At least that's what we'd recommend, but plenty of people would choose the cheaper tape regardless.

A once common sight lost to time is the cassette tape that got eaten by someone's car stereo and thrown out the window (presumably in anger). In later years, broken CDs sometimes made an appearance but nowhere near as frequently as strung out cassettes.

I couldn’t afford too many cassettes growing up. I managed to save a few roadside discards and add them to my collection. I distinctly remember being introduced to Whodini that way while living in the farmlands of Michigan.

I think it's interesting how they've worn.

> The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That's becuase they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the math assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that's over 800 passes over a tape head each month.

This just transported me to the past, shopping with my mom... The difference in tone is sharp vs. e.g. modern Wal-mart

The old Kmart tapes had a frequency that kept teens from loitering and summoned exact change. Scientists don’t talk about it because they’re scared. I played one backwards once and the parking lot stripes repainted themselves. That’s how you know it’s good audio.

Brings back a lot of memories. I worked at K-Mart when I was in high school. I recall in 1983 when the TI-99/4A was discontinued, and the Sunday morning when we were selling them for (I think) $50 with a $100 mail-in rebate. When the doors opened people sprinted down the midway aisle to the TV/electronics department at the rear of the store where the computers were. I was an Atari snob at the time and had no interest in one for myself. I think we had less than a dozen in stock.

If only vapourwave was still popular.

i mean, it still is, it's just that the window of nostalgia shifted so "vaporwave" has mutated into various strains of Y2K [0] and "windows 7" feeling music [1]

[0] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX9D5dmCM8Lo3

[1] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/47t3ywNfFeeqSj6gJDjvgF

Reminds me of a mix between Wii and Gran Turismo 3/4

Yep, vaporwave is very millennial-centric, with song samples rooted in '80s and '90s pop, with an intentional pre-Internet feel. Things that millennials would have fading, but extremely resonant, nostalgic memories about.

The younger generation caught on to vaporwave's appealing use of slowed and reverbed samples, and created their their own spin on it now with "Frutiger Aero", which is 2000s vaporwave with a graphical/audio aesthetic that brings to mind Windows XP/Vista, Nintendo DS/Wii, Neopets, Flash games and early Youtube but cuts off before the iPhone age.

Some of my favorites are the purile humor of FrankJavCee and the Simpsonwave excellence of DANKMUS.

RIP FrankJavCee

Mallsoft - or martsoft?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mallsoft

I still have it as my main coding music. Along with Wii Shop/lo-fi Nintendo. Still bops.

With enough age, I've found that popularity has little to do with my enjoyment of a particular song or artist.

They have overdrive and inconstant playback speed! Wonderful.

This is what the internet was made for, this is great

I'd say it was how the internet was used for a short period of time before the greedy corporate overlords moved in.

I listen to the Christmas tapes from this collection each December. It's become my defacto Christmas soundtrack.

This is awesome! Thanks for posting.

Reminds me of this, similar vein: https://twcclassics.com/

Are Americans unusual that they'll do anything for money? Weird for an artist to sell out and make advertising jingles?

This is amazing, but I wish they were in FLAC

Some of these tracks are absolute bangers

so many emotions. thanks for sharing.

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