ROCKIN' RAD ANARCHY RITE AID! - Come for the Shampoo / Stay for the Music

A few times I’ve stayed a little too long at Rite Aid because the music was that good and I thought it was some kind of ‘shuffle fluke’, but it’s official: The Rite Aid downstairs plays the best music out of anywhere in town. For serious.

The Rite Aid downstairs is kind of like ‘Anarchy Rite Aid’. They play any music they want, any time of day; we’re talking about ‘Lola’ by the Kinks – (LOUD!), and this is smack in the middle of the lunch hour during the Holiday season when we’re apparently all supposed to be listening to Burl Ives. Burl Ives? Not for this fucking rad Rite Aid.

They have a staff which makes me want to work there and on one occasion (while picking out my conditioner) I nearly stayed to listen to all of the Pixies’ ‘Doolittle’. I’ve heard The Clash, the Doors (they played ‘The End’! ‘THE END’! At fucking Rite Aid! LOUD!) and they didn’t even try to fade out: “The killer awoke before dawn…” (where he “walks on down the hawllll-yeahhhhhh…”) Brilliant.

On the flip side, they’ve also played the kind of swinging 1960’s supermarket music that I’ve always thought should be played in supermarkets at all times. I can die tomorrow happily saying that I’ve full on done the twist up and down the Maybelline and Revlon aisle. And I think it was expected. This Rite Aid wants you to dance and have a good time!

The best was the other day. A beige haired woman weighed down with Nordstrom bags complained to her equally beige friend about the lack of Christmas carols to one of the Rite Aid staff, to which he replied: “Sometimes you just have to take a holiday from the holidays. And this is the Doors.”

It was classic Anarchy Rite Aid.

-J.