Picture this: you pull up outside a record store about ten minutes before opening, and a line is already curling down the sidewalk. Nobody around you can tell you what it is for, but everyone is standing patient and cheerful. Do you join it? One couple in Charlotte, North Carolina, did, and it turned out to be the best decision of their whole road trip.

The couple, who share their vinyl adventures on the YouTube channel Vinyl Reckoning, had driven to Charlotte for the Phoebe Bridgers Lost Weekend Tour. They called the concert phenomenal. The next morning, at 10:00 a.m., they were checking out of their hotel and heading off to hunt through record stores, with Lunchbox Records first on the list.

The Line Nobody Could Explain

Lunchbox Records is, in the creator’s words, a staple in Charlotte, and it had been two or three years since the pair had last visited. They rolled up early, and there was a line at the door before the shop had even opened. Then they noticed something: nearly everyone in it was wearing Phoebe Bridgers merchandise from the show the night before.

They asked the people ahead of them why they were standing there. The answer was a shrug. The strangers had simply seen a line and gotten into it. The creator laughed that it sounded like the plot of a sitcom, and the couple did the same thing everyone else had done and joined the queue.

The payoff came inside. Copies of Bridgers’ Lost Weekend album were waiting, and they had been autographed by the singer herself, the same woman the couple had watched on stage the night before. The creator already owned the album, but now he has a copy signed by Phoebe with an XO drawn on it. As he put it, the two have now hugged and kissed, at least on vinyl.

He says he had a hunch. Labels sometimes send stores extra signed records as a thank-you for ordering a certain number of albums, and he suspected Phoebe’s label, Dead Oceans, might do that for Lunchbox. He carried that thought around all weekend but kept quiet so he would not get his partner’s hopes up. Both ended up pleasantly surprised, she a little more than he was.

What Else Came Home From Lunchbox

The signed record was not the only find. The couple left with the first three acts of the Deerhunter box set saga, a stack they say they had been trying to complete. They also picked up Magdalena Bay’s second album, Imaginal Disk, which he praised for some of the coolest cover art around, and a repress of the grindcore record Mongrel that did not cost anywhere near the $60 he had feared.

The most charming purchase was Mother Earth’s Plantasia, billed as warm earth music for plants and the people who love them. The creator says he has been talking about it for years, and they bought it for themselves and for their houseplants, which he calls part of the family.

Then there was Lisa Loeb’s Tails, a record he remembers from childhood. He had been considering a brand new copy of the same variant from the Interscope Vinyl Collective, but with shipping that version would have totaled about $52. He bought a used copy at the store for $25 instead.

A Second Stop That Won Them Over

Next came Premium Sound Records, a shop tucked inside a guitar store. He admits he usually keeps expectations low when a record store shares space with something else, but this one blew them away. The shop has dedicated sections for the 1960s, 1970s, 1990s and Y2K years, and the owner, who runs it as a side gig alongside a job with a distributor, was warm and chatty.

What impressed the couple most was the pricing. Plenty of stores and record show vendors, he says, simply copy the Discogs asking price without considering the condition of the record or the last few sales. This owner priced with condition in mind. A 2009 original pressing of Slipknot’s All Hope Is Gone, with a rough jacket but a great record inside, cost about $45, while a pristine copy can run $70 or $80 online.

Other pickups there included the Warpaint self-titled album, a split called Hangout Forever from Those Dogs and Peach Rings released by their friend AJ of Three Count Records, and the Matador pressing of the boygenius self-titled record with the orange OBI strip, which had been on his Discogs want list for a while.

One Last Stop At Noble Records

Before the two and a half to three hour drive home, they swung by Noble Records to see their friend Dylan one last time before his shop moves into a new location. They have followed Dylan since his pop-up days with a yellow van, and the shop was one reason they were excited to move from Texas to North Carolina. There the creator added two more Defeater albums, Letters Home and Abandoned, to a discography he has been slowly completing from the Noble bins.

Tips For Your Own Record Hunt

You do not need a concert ticket to learn from this trip. A few lessons apply to any thrifty collector:

• Check a record’s condition before paying a Discogs-level price. A scuffed jacket can mean a fair discount, as the Slipknot copy showed.
• Buy used when you can. It helps the shop and often saves real money, as with the $25 copy of Tails compared with roughly $52 shipped new.
• Ask about signed copies. Labels sometimes send stores autographed stock, and a small shop may be the only place to find it.
• Talk to the owner and the other customers. The best tips and some of the best stories came from chatting.

The couple wrapped up the trip in a little over 36 hours, and the creator says it felt like six days. Their advice is to visit all three shops if you are ever near Charlotte, with Premium Sound Records at the top of the list because, in his words, the people there are in it for the right reasons. And if you ever see a mystery line outside a record store, maybe get in it.

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