A retro retreat
Mount Pleasant media store survives evolving entertainment trends
Amid an ever-changing world of technology, Main Street Audio/Video has successfully adapted in Mount Pleasant for more than 30 years.
Sandy Halasz purchased the store in 1984, to serve the entertainment needs of students and the city’s residents before the advent of digital media.
Located at 701 N. Mission St., the store primarily focused on video rentals, but as technology has changed, it has continually changed with its customers to survive in a world of harsh competition from Netflix, online videos and other entertainment innovations.
“We saw early on the economic landscape was changing here in Mount Pleasant,” said Greg Koutz, assistant manager. “With (Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort) and Central Michigan University, it became so large that we had to carve out a niche.”
Now the store mostly deals in high-end brands of speakers and stereos, along with installation services, home entertainment systems and rentals in a limited capacity. It also boasts a large collection of used vinyl records. The store boasts over 3,000 used DVDs, which Koutz said has been especially profitable amongst CMU students.
For gamers, the store is a haven of old-school cartridge and early disc-rom systems. Koutz’s store even has a fair share the games used by the systems.
Koutz said the store has adapted to specialize in capturing the student population’s business, mainly through buybacks. This is popular during the fall; as students begin to flow back into the city, the market for affordable electronics explodes.
Main Street Audio/Video is less affected by the seasonal change in their customer base than other business in town, however Koutz said there are challenges that come with having a transient student population.
They have benefitted, however, from a inexhaustible supply of eager students in the workforce. Scott Wager, another assistant manager, said they have predominately hired part-time workers that are CMU students.
Koutz said they are small enough to make decisions immediately. A larger company might have a tougher fight before they can make changes in regular inventory items.
“We can make those on the fly,” Koutz said. “We saw that if we were going to survive it wouldn’t be as a pure video store, we had to get into electronics.”
