n Family Business
In addition to industry shifts, California has become a
harder place for small businesses to operate. Last year, the
company was sent nearly a dozen letters from the Internal
Revenue Service challenging its compliance with the Afford-
able Care Act and other business regulations. Dimple proved
it was in compliance each time, Andrew says. Other regula-
tions, such as California’s decision to increase the minimum
wage for employees and force businesses to provide paid
sick leave, have been challenging. “Anytime there’s regula-
tion, there’s an equation you have to solve,” Andrew says. “If
you have more costs coming in the form of labor cost … how
do you offset that?”
But for the Radakovitzs, industry shifts and tighter busi-
ness regulations were not the largest battles they would have
to face as business owners and as a family.
THREE MONTHS TO LIVE
Every five years, John and Dilyn get remarried, a ceremony
they both look forward to. In 2012, their preparations were
mostly left to Dilyn because John was experiencing severe
back problems. He had been complaining about his back for
several years, but things kept getting worse. Dilyn would take
him to the hospital, and he’d greet the doctor with his usual
jovial anecdotes. He’d tell the doctor everything was fine. Af-
ter a while, Dilyn got fed up — pretending to be John, she sent
the doctor an email saying he was embarrassed to bring up
his back pain and associated symptoms in front of his wife.
“So the doctor goes, ‘Well, come on in, we’re going to
do an MRI,’” Dilyn recounts. “I didn’t even know what an
MRI is.” The MRI revealed several large tumors along John’s
spine, the outcome of stage IV melanoma that had spread to
his central nervous system.
“(The day after the MRI,) Kaiser calls and says John has
to come in immediately, that he’s going to be paralyzed for
the rest of his life if he’s not operated on immediately,” Dilyn
says. After the operation, the surgeon greeted the Radakov-
itzs in tears, telling them John had three months — a year, at
most — to live. “The doctor felt so helpless … he got what he
could,” Andrew says.
In the days that followed, Dilyn became a fervent re-
searcher into melanoma, looking up web pages and reading
books in between filling orders for the store that she still had
to run. “I didn’t want to know how people died; I researched
how people survive,” Dilyn says. “Three people came up,
and we did what they said.”
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A marathon runner, Dilyn took the advice of her trainer:
Give John steak immediately after his surgery because the
protein will help him heal. After that, go strictly vegetarian.
He did. He also went through chemotherapy and radiation
therapy, quit smoking and drinking, increased his exer-
cise, started meditating and got a therapy dog, among other
things.
The doctor was wrong: In February, John will mark eight
years of being cancer-free.
CLOSING TIME
What John, 75, didn’t want to do anymore is run Dimple —
between his health scare, increasing animosity from the
record labels and state regulations piling on, it had become
too much. “I think he’s tired,” Dilyn, 72, says. “It’s just a lot
of hard emotions, because he’s got grandkids and he’s got
problems and he’s tired.”
John and Dilyn could have sold Dimple, but Dilyn says
John didn’t have the energy to play the business game and
jump through bureaucratic hoops anymore. It was easier to
liquidate.
They hired Great American Group to sell the remaining
inventory and assets. There was a lot of stuff — three ware-
houses full of CDs, DVDs, cassette tapes, games, hardware,
shelves, displays and miscellaneous other items, in addition
to the inventory in Dimple’s seven music and bookstores. In
its first week of liquidation, Dimple shattered Great Amer-
ican’s sales records, according to Andrew. In late August,
he told Comstock’s the stores were still pulling in $30,000-
$40,000 a week, even with a 60 percent to 80 percent price
reduction.
“There’s a lot of customers right now that are trying to
round out their collections,” Andrew says during a conver-
sation in August. “There’s so much good material out there
… and people are trying to get their hands on it now because
it’s incredibly cheap.”
That’s good news for Andrew and his business partner,
Brian McCulloch. Last year, they leased space out of the back
of Dimple’s Arden Way store to pilot a new business called
The Cave that embodies one of Dimple’s hallmark initia-
tives: buying, selling and trading used media.
“Everything about The Cave, it’s based on Dimple, but
it’s the amplification of everything that made Dimple good,”
Brian says. Like Dimple, The Cave sells music and movies,
but it also sells apparel, toys, comic books — anything col-