Since my early record shopping days at various Rhino Records locales throughout the Hudson Valley, I’ve loved rifling through dollar bins in search of overlooked treasures or misplaced greats. The main Rhino find I can think of off the top of my head was Thingy’s To the Innocent, one of Rob Crow’s better efforts. Particularly back in high school, when I actually sold CDs back in order to fund the purchase of new discs, every dollar counted. I couldn’t necessarily hear a record from start to finish before purchasing it, so being able to take a chance on a hunch or a whim was refreshing. My record collection is littered with near hits from the dollar bin—discs no one would buy back, so I kept—but I look at these as fond mementos of a few hours spent looking at everything a given record store had to offer.

Reckless Records in Chicago not only surpassed Rhino’s dollar bin selection, but the two and a half hours between their locations and Champaign compelled me to pick up everything that triggered the slightest nerve for fear that I would never see it again. With a campus job in tow, I was fine with dropping seventy five bucks on a single trip, and I wanted to bring home as much as I possible could. The weighty bags typically contained a few full-price CDs, a smattering of lesser-priced used discs, a handful of cheap ’80s vinyl, and a lining of dollar bin selections. Vintage Vinyl in St. Louis typically forced me to go for the higher priced material, but I remember one time when all seven inches were on sale for a buck apiece. I recall buying around thirty of them.

Even Parasol Records—the bastion of my full-price indie rock purchases even before learning of Rhino Records—got in on the act when they moved to their Griggs Street location, setting up a nice sized dollar bin which provided a rare moment of finding what I was actually looking for in Sixto’s lone, self-titled album. This set-up was especially great because Record Swap, a longtime Urbana store, charged three (yes, three) dollars for selections from their wall of forgotten ’90s indie rock, a price I was largely unwilling to pay. Parasol deserves even more credit for the lasting effect of their old print catalogs, with one line descriptions of every band that I circled and memorized for future reference. Between these catalogs, the Trouser Press Guide to ’90s Rock, and recommendations from friends and magazines, I knew what I was looking at when I skimmed through a huge bin of cheap discs.

Throughout these adventures in dirtying my fingers and bolstering my stacks, I started noticing the trends, the various discs that would be in every dollar bin in a given city or in every dollar bin in every city; Agnes Gooch, I’m talking to you. Occasionally I even felt bad for such bands, but typically the response was more of a “How did they get this many CDs pressed?” I could understand why Bush’s Razorblade Suitcase, R.E.M.’s Monster, every Sugar album, and every Candlebox album litter higher priced sections in used stores (I blame record store hubris for not putting such frequent residents in the cheapest of cheap bins, or, preferably, their own landfill), but it was always the unknown bands, the complete failures of the post-grunge major label signing rush, that baffled me the most.

When I found In Your Ear in Harvard Square and its massive, double-layered dollar shelf, I figured that this finally might have lent some depth to the largely disappointing array of Boston record shops. Newbury Comics is passable for relatively new material, CD Spins (or whatever various locations are now called) typically has a few worthy used selections, and Twisted Village is excellent for when I want some bona fide psych-rock (which, sadly, is not that often), but the dollar bins attached to these and other stores have been small and underwhelming. In Your Ear took all of my prior assumptions about the residents of dollar bins and amplified them a thousand times.

Have you been searching for the complete discography of Claw Hammer? What about seven copies of Dig’s Dig? Do you need copies of their other material as well? What about Lucas maxi-singles? Would you prefer not to recognize the band name at all? Wait a second, everybody remembers the self-titled Tesla album, right? I bet you need that in the most carnal way possible.

If I had taken notes, that paragraph could go on forever.

The best thing I found in that bin was a promo of Knapsack’s This Conversation Is Ending Starting Right Now, and unlike my pre-.mp3 willingness to pick these up in order to hear an album on the cheap, there is almost no reason (besides supporting a record store in the most middling way possible) to pick up a cardboard sleeve–encased disc anymore. Perhaps at some point I would have buckled to the whim of hearing TripleFastAction’s first album on six different stereos (an experience akin to the Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka, I can only imagine), but I slinked up the stairwell with nothing in hand, passing a crate of absolutely free Barbara Streisand LPs on my way to the door. There’s even another In Your Ear location over by the Paradise in Boston University turf, but unless I have some inkling for the complete output of J-Bird Records, I will not enter it.

I have two theories on this situation. First, In Your Ear had its heyday in approximately 1994. Since then, they’ve restocked the absolute bare minimum to remain open—a copy of the Killers’ Hot Fuss on LP, for example—while continually picking up marginal vinyl selections from estate sales and Goodwill stores and overpricing any album that seems remotely intriguing. (Big Black’s Songs About Fucking for fifteen bucks? No thanks.) The dollar bin filled up in 1998 and local residents simply knew better than to look through it. It may already be categorized as a landfill, but the store owners refuse to put the permit on display just in case someone comes in desperately searching for their college roommate’s frat brother’s cousin’s band, which put out one record on Atlantic in 1995, selling 1,600 copies of their 100,000 copy pressing.

Second, I’m finally tired with the process of record shopping. Whereas in 2000 I could easily outlast any companions on trips to record stores, at this point I just don’t care to see everything a given store has to offer. I’d rather find a way to purchase a disc new from a band or a store I like (Parasol, Tonevendor, even Newbury Comics in a pinch) than to pick it up for eight or ten bucks used from a store I dislike. Nine years of dollar bin shopping has taken its toll on me, sure, but I’ve also probably hit the reasonable limit of forgotten ’90s indie rock discs that my CD cabinet will hold without vomiting them out in disgust. Thanks to .mp3s, I purchase discs that I know I like instead of discs I think I might like because they’re on a familiar label or feature the first guitarist of a band whose second record showed promise. Taking chances requires a considerable amount of time and patience and results in more disappointments than crowning achievements, so I’m more willing to play it safe, even if it means paying more per disc.

Of course, there’s a third option in which this is just a phase and I’ll grow out of it, but I’ve already seen used book shopping surpass used CD shopping in my priority list. The best thing about buying used books is that virtually all of the authors I care about are dead, meaning that unlike the moral dilemma of buying used CDs of active contemporary bands and thereby not contributing to their capacity to make new music, proceeds from buying new books would only allow their families to enjoy more royalties and publishing companies to live off made commodities. The ironic thing is that even though I’m a graduate student in English, I probably know more about lesser-known ’90s indie rock than I do about lesser-known modernist poets. I’m sure there’s a Trouser Press Guide for this somewhere.