For a teenager in the 90s and 2000s, HMV was the secular church. You didn’t buy; you browsed . You pulled out the headphones on the listening post, scrolled through thirty seconds of a B-side, and pretended you were a DJ on Radio 1. You read the entire lyric booklet of an album you had no intention of purchasing. You judged strangers by the stack of CDs in their hand. ( Nickelback? Get out. )

That was the waste. The waste of time. The sublime, loitering, pointless waste of time.

We didn't just waste HMV. We wasted the act of hunting. We wasted the drive home, ripping open the plastic, sliding the disc into the car stereo before you’d even left the parking lot.

Now the shops sit empty. Or they’re vape outlets. Or pound stores. The dog on the logo—Nipper, listening to “His Master’s Voice”—is finally deaf. He’s listening to silence.

Now, that space is gone. Wasted.

We don’t say we “went to HMV” anymore. We say we “walked past where HMV used to be.”

But the cruelest waste is the loss of the risk . Today, you listen to thirty seconds of a song on Spotify, decide it’s a seven out of ten, and skip it forever. In HMV, you gambled £15.99 of your Saturday job money on an album because the cover art looked cool. You took it home, and sometimes it was garbage. But sometimes—once every ten tries—it changed your life. That’s the friction we’ve lost. The beautiful waste of a bad investment that led to a great discovery.