Did this store really still sell cassettes?

Jeya and Brothers, 757 East Broadway, Vancouver, BC

I saw my first cassette in early 1965. A classmate received a Norelco (Phillips) cassette machine as a Christmas present and brought it to class. We were all quite amazed at how small the machine was and how good the recordings sounded.

From the 1970s to the 1990s I was a keen user of cassettes. I used cassettes to tape my own albums for portable consumption, and to record radio programmes.

But since the advent of the Compact Disc the cassette, or to give it its trademarked name "Compact Cassette", has been in a slow and perilous decline. While millions of pre-recorded cassettes were sold as recently as the early 2000s, the US sales declined to a tiny 34,000 in 2009.

And while vinyl is making a comeback, I don't see such a rosy future for the cassette.

Did the store sell cassettes? I'll never know. By the time I go around to visiting it in person, the ownership had changed and there was not a single cassette in evidence.