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Pinellas Park’s Sound Exchange store to close next month
“I am one human being and I cannot do it any more – managing two stores, two staffs, two sets of inventory, two of everything.”
Pinellas County is about to lose one of its cornerstone record stores.
Sound Exchange, which has had a location in Pinellas Park since 2001, will close at the end of April.
The independent retail outlet at 8625 66th Street N., Pinellas Park opened in 2017, replacing an earlier incarnation on Park Boulevard. The anchor store, in Tampa, has been in business since 1987.
Erin Stoy co-owns Sound Exchange with her father, the business’ founder Ron Stoy. Since 2014, she has managed both the Tampa and Pinellas Park locations.
“We had a great 2025; the store is not failing in any way,” she insisted. “It’s just, I am one human being and I cannot do it any more – managing two stores, two staffs, two sets of inventory, two of everything. Because I’m working every day. When I’m not at the stores, I’m working from home, and it’s just not sustainable for a single person to do. Or to do well.
“I could cut back at both and do kind of a mediocre job at both of them, but that’s not what I want.”
Her father, who’ll be 75 this year, is retiring. So it seemed the time was right to make additional changes. They put the building up for sale.
Sound Exchange sells new and used vinyl, CDs, cassettes, DVDs, Blu-Rays and audio equipment, and has a large selection of books. Although vinyl, both new and used, continues to move in good numbers, Stoy said she’s seen a resurgence in the sale of CDs to young people – presumably, she said, because new titles on vinyl are much more expensive than their compact disc counterparts.
The inventory is being moved to Tampa. “That’s one of the large reasons that we didn’t attempt to sell off a business location as a whole,” she explained, “because we can use this inventory. And it’s worth more to us than it is to anybody else; we can sell it in Tampa.”
A percentage of the used CDs in the store’s large “budget bins” will be sold at reduced prices, so that it won’t have to be hauled across the bay.
When the 66th Street location debuted in 2017, the 6,400-square-foot space was stocked with everything that had been in the (smaller) first Pinellas store, as well as the inventory from a Sound Exchange outlet in Brandon, which closed when Ron Stoy’s original business partner retired.
The building, on 0.64 acres, is already under contract, Erin Stoy said.
Record fans need not worry that the Pinellas Park Sound Exchange will close before Record Store Day, the national event wherein record labels create limited-edition “specialty” vinyl releases, just for independent record retailers.
Record Store Day 2026 is April 18. “I placed a big order for Pinellas, even bigger than I did last year,” Stoy said. “So we’re not skimping on Record Store Day. At all.”
frank masone
March 14, 2026at12:30 pm
Why don’t you a hire a manager to run the one store and run the other store
Brian Connolly
March 15, 2026at4:20 am
Maybe because they were paying their managers $13.75? Maybe because the turnover rate is so high because nobody wants to spend their entire life eating gas station food and having no free time to themselves after an 11:00 to 8:00 shift? Leaving them no time to do other things? Yet they are told it’s not really a real job although you aren’t able to do anything else? Maybe because they have cameras with audio and video and monitor your every move and if you say the wrong thing while ringing up stereo equipment you’ll never hear the end of it? Maybe because they spend every waking hour of their lives responding to bad reviews. Which there are a lot of. And they never once concede any sort of blame for anything being their fault. They live in literal mansions and all of their employees are struggling and starving. Some of them literally collapse while on the clock. Then they won’t even bother to visit when laid up.