Who are we?
Spatula City Records was built from the desire to spend more time with our families.
We started buying and selling storage units around 1998 and would buy one here and there and slowly sell the contents while working a full time job (remember this was before the inter-webs was the beast it is now and Ebay was in it's infancy. When you sold something on ebay in those days, you waited for the buyer to send you a check or Money Order, cash it, wait for it to clear, then send the item. When they were happy, Ebay would release the funds for you. It was torturously slow.
About 15 years later and great feedback under our belts, we decided to quit our full time jobs and sell through the swapmeet circuit. Talk about grueling. We did that for about a year while we built up the courage to rent a store front.
Finder Thrift was born.
While selling at swapmeets, we noticed that everyone from 12-65 would always scan through a box of busted and abused records we had out. When Finders Thrift opened, a friend came in looking to sell her Father's record collection and we decided to take a shot and bought them. By the time that collection had sold we had purchased 3 more collections and Finders Thrift and Vinyl was born.
Another Friend had poked and prodded us to build a website for records. We had a bad taste for all things selling online because this is when so many people were getting scammed by buyers and it just wasn't the platform it used to be and grading records is such a fickle thing. What one person things is VG is another VG-. Well, eventually we acquiesced and saw the benefits and really just wanted to spend more time at home with our families and not have to have the overhead in California. We had already built quite a following online and some of our youtube videos on scratch repair and ultrasonic cleaner had really solidified us a fair and honest record store.
The Website was about 3 month from launching when Covid hit, so We buckled down and got it launched a week after the shutdown. It was off the hook from the start. Our prices were fair and we were even delivering to locals!
About 1 1/2 years later we closed the shop and move to AZ to fulfill our dreams of being closer to our families. (although we were almost annexed after they helped move 15,000 records!) Actually, the shop remained open as a record store because we handed the keys to a friend and he took over and renamed it Finders Keepers. (Unbenounced to him at the time Finders Name came from the phrase "Finders Keepers", we just dropped the Keepers for personal reasons!)
Spatula City Records has been selling online for a little over 3 years (June 2022) and had a physical shop for about 6 years. We are well know throughout the US as one of the few shops that can and will repair warped and scratched records for customers.