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Mr. Cheapo’s, Commack
best for compact discs
Completists pining for a foreign edition of their favorite CD with an exclusive bonus track or a bootleg show of their favorite band will likely find it in Mr. Cheapo’s CD bins, which inhabit a wall the full length of the shop, plus floor bins.
The stockpile of CDs is but one of the changes the Goldman family’s record store underwent during its 40-year-history. Stu Goldberg started the shop in 1981 in Flushing Queens and named it after his wife’s nickname for him. They opened a Mineola location in 1983 and relocated the Queens location in 1986 to Commack in where it is today.
Josh Goldberg, Stu’s son, has worked in the shop since he was 13, and is now officially an owner of the shop. For four decades, Mr. Cheapo specialized in the buying and selling of CDs and second-hand vinyl. “The record business now is as good as when we started,” Josh said. “If not better.”
The young Goldberg remembers more difficult times and transitions, citing the burgeoning popularity of sharing and streaming music digitally in the early to mid 2000s as a “brutal.” “The main thing was it took away so much of the sales of CDs, which was our main driving force.”
Mr. Cheapo, these albums and Josh Goldberg himself all turn 40 this year.
By the end of the decade, the turntables turned. The RSD revinylization began, and Mr. Cheapo survived and even expanded. “We used to never carry new vinyl,” Goldberg said. “We used to have two rows, now we have 20 rows of new vinyl.”
Mr. Cheapo will carry RSD releases this year.
