Music Stores
Chilliwax Records
About Chilliwax Records
An independent music shop in the blocks that have been Chilliwack's centre since before the malls.
Record shops were not supposed to survive, and the used vinyl trade has turned out to be one of the more stubborn things in retail. Music in Chilliwack is a small category overall. A couple of instrument shops handle sales, rentals, repairs and lessons, kept steady by a school district and a university campus at the south end that between them generate a wave of band and orchestral rentals every September. Alongside them sit the record dealers, one of them a counter inside a downtown bookshop, and a scatter of independent teachers and repair techs who work from a studio rather than a shopfront. Three or four listings rather than thirty, but for anyone after a luthier or a rental clarinet in the eastern valley, they are the right three or four.
Chilliwax Records trades on Wellington Avenue, one of the three roads that arrive at Five Corners and one of the spines of the old downtown. Those blocks have been the commercial centre of the city since long before the malls, they hold more than 350 businesses, and the older buildings among them have the kind of ceilings that make a room feel like something. A record shop in that grid is where a record shop ought to be. District 1881, built on the former Chilliwack Cattle Sales site, has added a second cluster of food and retail a short walk away, so there is more reason than there once was to be down here on foot.
A telephone number and a website are both published, which is more than most entries here manage and genuinely useful in a trade where the racks change constantly. This directory does not record what is stocked, what gets bought in, whether trades are taken, or which way the shelves lean by genre. Any of those is worth asking before driving in from Sardis or off the hillsides, and hours are not listed either.
Visiting Chilliwax Records
Getting there
In the Chilliwack Proper neighbourhood of Chilliwack.
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