Sep. 18--After 20 years of business, the Stereo Store at Valley River Center in Eugene will shut its doors on Sept. 22.

Owner Steve Scott said it was a hard decision, but necessary given the weak economy.

"The last thing I want to do after being there 20 years is to close that Valley River Center store," he said. "It's been a pretty good run. Up until now I'd never experienced this type of situation where business is so tight and tough."

The Stereo Store sells and installs car stereos and other after-market technology, as well as home stereo and theater systems.

Scott said he'll continue to operate his other Stereo Store in Eugene at 7th Avenue and Washington Street, near the Washington-Jefferson Street Bridge, as well as a store in Albany and a store in Corvallis.

Pruning back to one Eugene store will reduce overhead and enable the store to be more attentive to customers, he said.

With two Eugene stores roughly a mile apart, "we found ourselves not having enough people to service our customers very well," he said. "We only had one person at Valley River Center on some days."

The store closure involves no layoffs, Scott said. All 11 of the Stereo Store's Eugene employees will work out of the downtown store, he said.

The stores in Albany and Corvallis each have four employees, Scott said.

As for overhead, Scott owns the building that houses his 6,000-square-foot store, a Starbucks coffee shop and a piano retailer in downtown Eugene. But he leased the 4,400-square-foot space next to the Mucho Gusto restaurant at Valley River Center. That lease expires at the end of the month, he said.

"By combining all of our forces in downtown here, I think we'll be a lot healthier," Scott said.

"We're thinking (sales at) this store will pick up quite a bit when we close Valley River," he said. "Overall, we don't think we'll be doing much less (business) than with the two stores before."

Scott, who has been in the "hi-fi" business since he graduated from college in 1974, said he has survived rough patches before, but nothing like the downturn that set in late last year.

Sales last November plummeted 40 percent from sales in November 2007, he said.

"I was astonished," Scott said. "I'd never seen anything like that."

The hemorrhaging continued for the first two weeks of December, he said. Business has rallied since then, but is still down from last year, Scott said.

That "experience is not incongruent with the broader auto after-market business," said Steve Koenig, director of industry analysis at the Consumer Electronics Association, based in Arlington, Va.

"The after-market for car audio and other installed technologies has been challenged even in good economic times," he said, because of the decade-long cost-saving trend of car manufacturers integrating electronics in vehicles.

"It makes it almost impossible to upgrade the car stereo, for example, because the stereo is integrated with, say, the air-conditioning and climate control," Koenig said.

"The dip in the economy simply rubs salt in the wound," he said.

Koenig foresees a shift from the traditional after-market business of stereos, amplifiers and the like, to add-ons, such as portable navigation systems, and iPod connectivity and hands-free technologies.

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