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The world's worst-rated record store is in Berlin

Any regular buyer of music in physical record stores knows that the owners of these spaces are usually special, it is not exactly a business that today will make them rich and many have this type of shops open for pure motivation. However, it does not imply that this person has to be especially communicative, empathetic, or even nice.

What is strange, as indicated by the comments that users of business review pages such as Google Maps or Yelp among others point out, is to find a record seller who expels customers who want to buy and threatens to call the police if they don't hurry.

Franz & Josef is a second-hand record store in Berlin's Prenzlauer berg district and the experiences reported by its "users" are frankly surprising. First of all, it should be noted that users have been written in quotation marks because they are customers who wanted to buy records, but who have been drive out of the store in bad ways, according to these people.

The reason? According to frustrated customers, it is that if in the first five minutes a record has not been bought, the owner gets very nervous, he begins to ask the customer if all his records are crap, he better not buy any because he has no idea and finally, he orders the client to leave immediately and never come back or he will call the police. Even German television has verified this behavior with a hidden camera, as can be seen in this video posted on YouTube.

Not all the comments are bad, other users say that they have been able to chat with the owner for five minutes when he was, exceptionally, in a good mood and that it is a good place to dig for records when two girls are attending and not the owner of this store. Although most users advise avoiding this place at all costs, especially if you only want to look for bargains and it is not clear the vinyl you are looking for. This seems to be the key to unleashing the fury of an owner who looks like the caricature of an underground comic, so in love with his albums that he seems to consider that many of his clients are not up to his catalog.

The ratings of this establishment on pages that collect user experiences such as Google Maps, Yelp, specialized pages such as record-shops.org or record buyer forums (discogs.com) are devastating for Franz & Josef. In Google Maps it only gets a 1.9 out of 5, with the minimum possible being a 1, a rating practically identical to Yelp, two out of five, with dozens of comments explaining the unpleasant experience of trying to buy records in this place. There are also web pages that have picked up the witness of musicians such as Dj Levon Vincent, also expelled from the store despite being a regular customer.

The question is clear, if the owner does not let customers buy, how is it possible that this record store is still open?