Before purchasing Used Kids in September 2014, Greg Hall began moonlighting at the store, helping Dow get organized and revamping the online business. Dow hadn’t made substantial improvements to the store in years; friends say he was worn down and “damaged” after decades at Used Kids. (Dow declined to comment for this story and has said he’s trying to stay separate from everything having to do with the store.)

“When I bought this store it was struggling mightily,” says Hall, who took on “significant debt” when he made the purchase. “Taking a risk, losing money—it’s all part of doing business. I don’t take any money home. I want to bury my capital back into the shop. It’s gonna take that to turn the store around and keep it alive. And I’m not into just survival. I wanna make it rock.”

“When Greg took over, it was almost night and day with how we managed everything,” says current Used Kids part-timer Kellie Morgan, 30, who fell in love with the store in high school and has worked under both Dow and Hall. Morgan recalls Hall giving her an ambitious goal—to make Used Kids “the coolest fucking record store between New York and Chicago.”

To do that, things had to change—which is something Used Kids had not done for a long time. It was dusty, disorganized, and still charming, but had begun to feel like a relic. “I’m kind of old-fashioned and stuck in my ways,” Dow said in a 2012 interview. “I’m just so against change.”

Hall could not be more different. “I think change is something that is super important for people to be able to deal with,” he says. “I accept it, hustle my ass off, and change, change, change. I do the Bowie thing.”

For Hall, part of changing is diversifying. Used Kids now sells turntables and stereo equipment. (“They gotta have the shovel to get the gold,” he says.) Some of the stereo equipment goes in the online store, too, which is managed by Tom Shannon.

Shannon, a tall man with a serious gaze offset by a soft-spoken disposition, came to Used Kids at the tail end of the CD boom and hung on through the tough times as others came and went. Armed with two decades of experience at Used Kids, a master’s degree in library science, and years of fronting deafening garage-punk trio the Cheater Slicks, Shannon is Hall’s trusted consigliere. He handles specialty buys that require the most expertise, as well as all of the store’s eBay sales, which has been an essential part of Used Kids’ business strategy since 1999.

Still, contrary to what you may hear about eBay carrying the lion’s share of sales at brick-and-mortar record stores nowadays, Shannon says the vast majority of sales—90 percent or more—still come from in-store purchases.

While some overseas sales remain strong (“Anybody who sells records sells a lot of soul records to British people,” Shannon says), most online business comes from U.S. customers. “Selling records is still very difficult, and only an extremely small percentage of records are highly desirable,” Shannon says. “The big issue with record stores is getting stock. It’s a very finite quantity out there. Getting original pressings of things is getting harder and harder.”

Some record stores refuse to sell online, claiming it robs walk-in customers the opportunity to find sought-after records. But Hall says Used Kids shouldn’t be a museum: “I do not want to see a $50 record sit on the floor. We sold a 7" single for $2,800 not too long ago, so I can get $2,800 in seven days, or I can let it sit here for years and hope the right person comes along.”

To keep the used stock fresh, Hall does home visits all over Ohio and beyond. Plus, he has a network of basement pickers. “I want a bunch of people feeding into this store,” Hall says. “I’m gonna miss a thousand deals every day, but I want to try to capture as many of them as I possibly can—every day, just jamming cool records in there.”

That philosophy carries over to new stock, as well. Hall orders far more new records than Dow did. On any given day, for example, you’ll find multiple sealed copies of Spoon’s back catalog at Used Kids. “Some stores order it in if someone asks, but that doesn’t work,” Hall says. “I realize the big capital risk, but that’s part of the cool factor: If you don’t have it, you can’t sell it.”