Who turned off the music?

Does anyone even notice the music they play in stores these days? It’s not even muzak anymore, just a rehashed mix of “radio versions” and top forty hits from the last forty years.

But when I walked into Joann Fabrics last week, there was no music. There was hardly any sound whatsoever.

In case you haven’t heard, JOANN (as it’s now stylized) is going under and they’re going under in a big way. Private equity chewed the meat off Joann’s bones and then took the bones, too. At the time that I write this, it’s 60% off storewide with an everything-must-go attitude.

Walking through Joann’s, though, I didn’t have the rush of Black Friday deals or even the usual craft-store bargain-hunt thrill. It was sad. The automatic doors advertised 20-40% off everything and simultaneously offered part-time employment, which didn’t seem like a very sound career choice given the circumstances.

The first thing I noticed inside—other than the vacuum of sound where Britney usually plays—was the actual fabric. I can’t lie, dear reader: I don’t go to Joann Fabrics for fabric. I don’t sew! But every fabric I could ever imagine is out on the floor at my local Joann’s right now. Christmas prints are next to Halloween prints and denims and stretches and fleeces. There were reams and reams just waiting to be cut at the minimum yardage—had the minimum always been three yards? It seems like that might be creeping up as the prices creep down. While I usually stick my fingers in boules of yarn, this time I let my fingers savor the edges of the fabric labyrinth, with shelves shorter and messier than the rest of the store.

The first real aisle I walked down was full of candles—not your usual candle display but an aisle absolutely jam-packed. So many aisles beyond were noticeably destitute, even from a distance, just odd smatterings of notebooks or pens or water colors without brushes. The candle aisle, though, was overcompensating. I don’t think of Joann’s as a candle store, but I guess they’re always somewhere in the store. The first one I smelled was labelled [“girl boss,”] (https://www.joann.com/p/foundry-5oz-uplifting-scented-candle/zprd_19642289a.html) and oddly enough I thought the name was a good fit. It smelled like something I had smelled in high school… Maybe girl boss candle reminded me of a girl’s body spray, produced in a tall glittering body and meant to teeter on the edge of girly Lip Smackers and adult woman perfume. Or maybe the candle reminded me of a time when I went over to someone’s house to complete a group project and got a whiff of a fancy air freshener—I always ended up doing group projects in houses with thick beige carpet and two stories connected by a big central staircase, and those houses always had specifically curated air fresheners. (When I was growing up, I was only allowed to use air freshener in the moments before guests arrived, to cover up the smell of cigarettes, and said air freshener was always citrus-scented. Body spray was similarly outlawed in the household.) The girl boss candle smelled like all of these memories and it also smelled pink, to the extent anything can smell like a color, and the jar matched the scent perfectly.

Without smelling them, I picked up a two-pack of tapered candles from the other side of the aisle and began to wander the store.

There were a few other stragglers like me, trolling around, trawling the bottom of the Joann’s depths. A lot of us seemed queer. There seemed to be more men than usual, too. There were older women who seemed to know the price of good fabric and were willing to make good on what good bargains there were. There were people who seemed to be looking for specific things, too, doing slow, scanning laps, completely disoriented by the lack of usual landmarks. How can you find stickers when scrapbook supplies are completely eradicated from the adjacent aisle? How can you know embroidery floss was here if all that remains is a few crochet hooks on the opposing clip strip?

Like I always do, I spent a long time in the yarn section, touching different yarns and holding the color up to my skin. The first one I touched felt like every other ball of yarn I've ever touched, from preschool to last week, but the blue-green-teal-tiffany-beryl mae my skin look warm and sunbaked even though it's the end of winter in Michigan. Mostly acrylic yarn was left over, with the "BARGAIN," "POUND," and "MORE THAN A POUND" varieties making up the vast majority. There were certain brands that were completely bought up, leaving only empty wire shelving, but other brands had nearly every color in stock. I spent a long time holding up a few skeins and thinking about them. Could I make a blanket with these? Could I actually crochet something I would use? How much would it cost?

On a usual trip to the craft store, I'm a little resistant to buying acrylic. I know that's a controversial opinion to hold, but I also know plastic fiber sheds and creates microplastics. As I touched al those miles of yarn, I wondered where it would go if we didn't buy it.

I found one dye lot in particular that really suited my fancy. It was a pastel rainbow blend of colors--it looked like a pride flag had been left out in the sun in 1970s San Francisco. I thought it would make a beautiful blanket, multicolored but not too intense. At the same moment that I fell in love with this particular yarn, I realized every yarn color had a name! I love the lengths to which companies will go in order to name colors--I used to sit on the OPI website and laugh at shades like "I'm Not Really A Waitress" or "Cajun Shrimp." I leaned down to the plastic clip with name and pricing information and read that my new favorite yarn was labeled "Community." Next to this tower of Community yarn was a yarn in the colors of the ace pride flag, and on the other side was a column of yarn in the color of the LGBT pride flag, and beyond that the colors of the lesbian flag. There was still plenty of these yarns in stock, even though they were smaller skeins with vivid colorwork.

I pulled the ball in my hand closer to my face to inspect it and realized that the display was actually completely mislabeled. The ball I had chosen wasn't "Community" at all, but just plain boring "Fun Brights."

On my loop back around the store I picked up a few more things, including a date stamp that only featured dates from 2012 to 2023 (as I would discover when I brought it home and opened it up). I found myself back in the candle aisle, because I realized I really didn't want the tapered candles. When I got there, I put them on the shelf where I had found them, even though they had no labeled slot on that shelf and there weren't even any other similar candles in the area. They were just another one-of-a-kind pair in a sea of little candles.

I turned around to face the girl boss candle again. I considered buying it, just for the nostalgia. It reminded me of something. Right? I pulled it off the shelf, I took another sniff. Somehow the mirage was gone and the scent didn't remind me of anything much anymore.

When I got to the cash register, I pointed out how weird everything was. The cashier just looked at me for a second. He looked at me for a few seconds, actually, until I felt a little bad for saying something.

"I just meant," I started, "there's no music on."

"Oh," he said, "yeah, I guess it's because we're closing, although we're not even closing yet, we still have two more months, but I guess since they have two more months they stopped." He hesitated a little after that last bit, like he was going to say they stopped "... paying for Spotify," like he had watched someone make this change but didn't quite know how to explain their logic.

But the thing I couldn't get my head around was the part where he said "two more months." Two more months?! Even though the store had already been rendered to crumbs, I could return in a month to a presumably even-better deal? Was the music turned off just to exude an air of desperation, to make me think JOANN was in its final death throes? In a greedy way, in a way that felt wrong, I wished I had been later to the party, just for my own benefit.