How a Manhattan record counter became a mall chain
Sam "Goody" Gutowitz opened the first store carrying his name in New York City in 1951, when the long-playing record was still a new product and most Americans bought music at a department store counter.
His method was volume and price. Goody sold records cheap, advertised hard, and treated music as something people bought on impulse rather than saved up for.
In 1978 the American Can Company bought Sam Goody. American Can already owned Musicland, the Minneapolis chain that was Goody's biggest rival, so from that point the two competitors answered to the same parent company.
Musicland is what pushed the name into every mall in America. It put Sam Goody stores beside food courts, ran the Suncoast Motion Picture Company for video, and built the Media Play superstores for everything at once.
By the time Best Buy made its offer in December 2000, Musicland operated more than 1,300 stores that drew over 300 million customer visits a year. For a generation of American teenagers, a Sam Goody listening station was the closest thing to a streaming service.
The 100,000 counterfeit tapes that put Sam Goody on trial
Long before the mall era ended, the company nearly ended itself in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn.
A sixteen-count indictment filed on February 28, 1980 charged Sam Goody, Inc., its president George Levy, and its vice president in charge of procurement, Samuel Stolon, with offenses arising from the way the company bought records and tapes.
The government's case was that between June and October 1978 the company took delivery of more than 100,000 counterfeit eight-track and cassette tapes. The titles were the biggest sellers of the moment: thousands of copies of the soundtracks to "Saturday Night Fever" and "Grease", plus "The Stranger" by Billy Joel and "Slowhand" by Eric Clapton.
The charges grew out of a three-year FBI investigation into counterfeit product moving through legitimate retailers, an operation the bureau called Mod Sound.
A jury convicted the company and Stolon in 1981. The stores stayed open, but the largest record retailer in the country had spent two years explaining in court where its inventory came from.
What Best Buy paid for Musicland, and what it lost
Best Buy announced the Musicland purchase in December 2000 and completed it in January 2001, paying $425.1 million in cash and assuming $271.2 million in debt, a total near $700 million.
The reasoning was distribution. Best Buy had large stores in the suburbs and nothing at all inside shopping malls, and Musicland came with 1,300 leases in the places where teenagers already spent their Saturdays.
Richard Schulze, Best Buy's chairman and chief executive, said in the January 2001 announcement that the deal would let the company "deliver digital entertainment technologies to consumer segments not currently served by Best Buy's store format, particularly in rural areas, malls and the early technology adopters".
The plan was to fill Sam Goody shelves with MP3 players, cell phones and digital cameras. What actually arrived was the collapse of the compact disc, accelerated by the file-sharing era that Napster opened in 1999.
Best Buy lost $85 million on Musicland in 2002 and started looking for an exit. By the time the group filed for bankruptcy, it belonged to the private equity firm Sun Capital Partners.
How Chapter 11 took the name off the mall directory
Musicland filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2006. The following month it announced that it would close 226 Sam Goody stores and 115 Suncoast Motion Picture Company stores, and shut every Media Play location.
Trans World Entertainment, which already ran the FYE chain, bought Sam Goody out of the bankruptcy in 2006. Between 2007 and 2008 it converted most of the surviving stores to FYE.
That is why the chain seemed to vanish overnight without a farewell sale. In most malls it was not closed, it was renamed, and shoppers walked past the same shelves under a different sign.
The broader business was leaving the mall regardless. Columbia House had already lost its music club, physical album sales were falling every year, and the customer who used to browse for 40 minutes was now downloading in four.
The FYE chain that absorbed Sam Goody was later sold by Trans World Entertainment to the Canadian retailer Sunrise Records, which runs it today. The Sam Goody name survived as a handful of stores that nobody bothered to repaint.
Why the last store is in Medford, Oregon
By 2024 exactly two Sam Goody stores were left: one at the Ohio Valley Mall in St. Clairsville, Ohio, and one at the Rogue Valley Mall in Medford, Oregon. In December 2024, national outlets reported that both were closing, and the Ohio store did shut down.
Medford refused the script. Gavin Culver, the manager of the Oregon store, told KDRV NewsWatch 12 in December 2024 that the reports were wrong: "We're going to do the last Blockbuster kind of thing because we're cool like that out here."
The comparison is a local one. The last Blockbuster is also in Oregon, in Bend, and it has turned being the final survivor into its whole business model.
It worked. Counts through November 2025 put the United States total at a single Sam Goody, and reporting in August 2026 found the Medford store still open and still selling records, movies and T-shirts.
That leaves one store on the planet, in a mall in southern Oregon, a few doors down from the only Orange Julius left in the state.
Where to find Sam Goody memorabilia today
There is no Sam Goody product to collect, because the company sold other people's records. What circulates is the retail debris: yellow shopping bags, employee name badges and polo shirts, gift cards, promotional posters and standees, and the tall cardboard longbox packaging that CDs shipped in until 1993.
Most of it reaches buyers through Etsy's vintage Sam Goody listings, generally from former staff or from people who cleared out a store when it closed. Prices track condition and sentiment rather than scarcity, since none of this was made to be rare.
The other option costs a plane ticket. The Medford store still sells new stock over the counter, which makes a receipt from it the only Sam Goody artifact anyone can still buy new.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there any Sam Goody stores left?
Yes, one. A single Sam Goody store is still trading in 2026, at the Rogue Valley Mall in Medford, Oregon, and it is the last one anywhere. The chain's other survivor, at the Ohio Valley Mall in St. Clairsville, Ohio, closed after a December 2024 announcement.
What happened to all the Sam Goody stores in malls?
Musicland, the owner of Sam Goody, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2006 and announced the following month that it would close 226 Sam Goody stores and 115 Suncoast stores. Trans World Entertainment bought what was left in 2006 and converted most of the remaining Sam Goody locations to FYE between 2007 and 2008.
How much did Best Buy pay for Sam Goody?
Best Buy bought Musicland, the parent company of Sam Goody, in January 2001 for $425.1 million in cash plus $271.2 million in assumed debt. Best Buy lost $85 million on Musicland in 2002 and sold the business on, and the group filed for bankruptcy in January 2006 under its next owner, Sun Capital Partners.