According to the World Economic Forum in 2020, 34% of small businesses across the United States closed because of the effects of the pandemic. However, a small business in downtown Urbana met the challenge head on and is close to celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2025.
See You CD & Vinyl is located at 208 W. Main St. The shop, one of the several staple record stores in the Champaign-Urbana area, is owned by Jesse Grubbs, who opened the store when he was 22. Grubbs is a prime example of mixing passion into work.
“I’d been buying and selling records all through high school, selling stuff on eBay to have money to run around on the weekends and stuff like that,” Grubbs said in an interview. “So buying and selling vinyl was something I always did.”
Grubbs said he found a passion for records at an early age after the passing of his uncle:
“Kind of my dad getting me to know my uncle through his record collection. And so me hanging out with my dad, going to flea markets. Him sharing music with me and talking about his brother,” Grubbs said.
When he was getting his bachelor’s degree, Grubbs began interning at independent record labels before working at the record store Error Records, which Grubbs took over the space in 2015 after the owner wanted to step away and work on his record label.
In 2020, the store was faced with the challenge of operating during the COVID-19 pandemic that had claimed countless small businesses. In the months leading up to the pandemic, Grubbs received insight to begin preparing for a worst case scenario.
“It was a whole new model that I had never attempted before. And so when in March or February, when, you know, we shut down, I was basically ready to launch the website that day,” Grubbs said.
In order to compensate for COVID guidelines and the shutdown, Grubbs personally packaged and delivered any record within 10 miles of the store in addition to offering a curbside pickup.
“So, for me, COVID just clicked something in my brain,” Grubbs said. “If I’m going to make this work, I have to adapt.”
Since then, Grubbs hasn’t looked back, keeping the new business model. He said the record store has seen an increase in business, filled with a mix of regulars and a new community who found the store through the website during the pandemic.
“When we came out of it, you know, it was just a surge of new customers and we were more, busy, had more foot traffic than we’d ever had,” Grubbs said.
Although record sales are a shell of what they were half a century ago, there has no doubt been a vinyl revival across the United States. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, revenue from vinyl LP/EP sales rose from $49 million in 2000 to a staggering $1.4 billion in 2023.
“I already thought that we were in a gigantic bubble that was going to burst,” Grubbs said.
A big assist to this resurgence can be attributed to popular musicians moving back to vinyl releases, particularly limited or collector edition releases. The revival movement has only intensified with the creation of Record Store Day, where artists, new and old, release exclusive pressings of unheard tracks or records with custom designs that move away from the classic black record.
The store recently held a record store day during Black Friday and again back in March, and both events had lines down the street with many waiting throughout the night in order to obtain exclusive records.
See You CD & Vinyl shares the building space alongside the Skeuwep skate shop and new neighbor Elm City Roastery, which opened its doors for the first time on Dec. 12.