We break the radio-silence of Term-Paper-Hell-Week to bring you this important bulletin: Record Kingdom, my oft–lamented but still–beloved co-op employer from 2002, is apparently going out of business! Lindsay and I haven’t spoken to any of our former co-workers yet, but we were both sad to hear about it; though we didn’t exactly pledge our undying allegiance to RK, we spent a lot of long hours trying to make them a more organized, more profitable company.

Details of the sale impressed upon me how much work really goes into an eBusiness — L and I were around for much of that development, but i could never so easily rattle it off. Lindsay alone is probably responsible for a third of all of the audio samples they have on their site, and i think i had entered more than five thousand record summaries in the six months of my employment.

It’s funny, because i joke at Admissions events that the best part of working for an eBusiness as an intern is that if the company goes under it’s an educational experience rather than a occupational crisis. However, even over a year removed from my experience i am sad to think of someone other than Steve answering the phone, or someone other than Train pricing up the records. For half a year Lindsay and I were essential to records getting bagged, and bar coded, and shelved, and filling and boxing orders, and even sometimes opening the building in the morning; it’s hard to picture the evidence of that disappearing.

As a note, i can’t even begin to imagine what they’re asking for the whole operation. On one hand, the cheapest records they have in stock (out of 35k+ onsite alone) are $4, and they have an obsessive international customer base. On the other, a lot of the $4-$8 records were bought for pennies on the dollar, and the customer base obviously wasn’t quite enough to fund the four to eight employees it took to keep everything running smoothly. If you know any big record resellers or eBusiness tycoons, have them give a call — it’s a rock solid operation.