Flipville Records

One of the great record stores of Milwaukee which was eventually done in by the owners hoarding. He has recently passed on and the future of the store is in limbo.
There were always treasures there worth digging for (though I prefer not to dig) and the mess kept the daytrip hipster kids from Chicago away.

After writing this review, I was emailed by what I can only assume to be a friend of the owner’s or one of the gentleman I encountered in the shop on the day I was in. As the gentleman has no prior Unilocal reviews, I’ll assume he logged an account only to send the email. I would imagine the other ‘disparaging’ reviewers received emails as well.
From Mike S: «I understand you’re a sarcastic reviewer, but you were there the week after the owner and only „employee“ died. So the usual mess was worse than normal. You may want to take down your disparaging review out of respect. Although based on your level of snark, maybe you’ll jusy wear it as a badge of honor.»
My response (which mentions a pair of circumstances I chose to omit from the prior review):
«Mike,
When I first eyed the store from the street, I had no prior knowledge of its history, significance to the local community or of its owner passing. I send my condolences. When I entered, I had high hopes as I do with any store which has the claim of selling records. When I walked in, it was quickly apparent to me that there was no way I was going to find much of anything. There were atleast four folks there shuffling product around and when I wanted to look at particular items off of the shelf, one gentleman kept eyeballing me as if I was going to break whatever I was picking up and insisted that HE could look at it for me.
Now let’s be fair here, I didn’t know that the owner passed on and that gentleman didn’t know that I’m a man in my mid 20’s who has never stolen anything from a store nor that I’ve ever broken anything in a store upon picking it up. That gentleman in particular made myself and both of my friends feel unwelcome because while we were trying to look through stock in the back room, he kept staring as if he were either waiting for us to move or waiting for us to pull a fast one. Either way felt extremely uncomfortable and we quickly left.
Now according to this Unilocal page, I was the fifth at the time to review the establishment. Two out of those four prior reviews (that’s half) both held the same line of thought that I did. While I chose to employ sarcasm only to describe the difficulty of navigating the vinyl stacks, one of those reviewers was making cracks on the owner’s ‘inner pathology’ — what I’m really saying is this, while I employ sarcasm, I often (of course there are exceptions in some reviews depending on just how rubbed wrong they’ve left me as well as their general reputation amongst other reviewers) attempt to stay objective.
The truth is this, if I found the stock hard to navigate because the owner passed on a week earlier, what is the explanation for the gentleman who couldn’t navigate them and wrote a review over two years ago? To say that I would retain the review as a ‘badge of honor’ now that I hold that knowledge that the employee has passed on is itself an insult and is uncalled for. I can only assume that you were a friend of the owner or were one of those folks I encountered on the day I was in. My review stands and will be amended with both your email as well as this response.
Thank You.»

The Wizard (owner of Flipville) has passed to the great record store in the sky. He died a few weeks ago. Don’t know the fate of the store.

Tommy A. was being generous when he said 3 feet. You open the door and you’re faced with a room full of stuff to about shoulder height. At first I was excited because there’s a ton of records and neat vintage toys, but there’s no order to anything! If you’re cool with just browsing, be sure you have plenty of time because it’s just stacks and stacks. I think there were 3 crates that were somewhat alphabetized. Also, a lot of the records are on the floor. In the basement. Who does that? I suppose if I just wanted to say, «I have this album» that would be fine. But I like to LISTEN to my vinyls and for obvious reasons they shouldn’t be stacked on the floor of a basement.

Sort of a legendary place amongst local record diggers, but maybe not a place for the casual vinyl shopper. If you know, then you know…

Good selection of Records and cd’s. Give it a try.