Beloved Coeur d'Alene record shop The Long Ear to close after 53 years

The Long Ear will close its Coeur d’Alene store on July 3, ending a 53-year run that helped define the city’s music scene and gave generations of customers a place to browse, compare albums and talk about what they were hearing. Owners Terry and Deon Borchard said they could not find a new location that fit their needs for size, visibility and rent after the building they leased on Government Way was sold.

The shutdown lands at a moment when the business itself was still strong. Terry Borchard said sales have been healthy over the past two years, helped by a vinyl resurgence, so the closure is not being driven by weak demand. Instead, the loss comes from the economics of the building and the difficulty of replacing a long-time storefront in a city where visible, affordable retail space is increasingly hard to find.

The store’s history stretches back to 1973, when the Borchards opened The Long Ear in Big Bear Lake, California, in a 480-square-foot shop that sold LPs, eight-tracks and cassette tapes. They moved the business to Coeur d’Alene in 1985, and their first local location opened Nov. 4, 1985, on Government Way just south of Neider Avenue. A 2018 profile noted that when they arrived, the area around Appleway and Government Way had neither a stop sign nor a traffic light.

The shop later moved again in 1991, and The Long Ear’s own history page says the business had already shifted into larger quarters in 1975 before making the move north. Over the decades, the store built a reputation that went beyond retail. Its website points to in-store gatherings, events and a family atmosphere that made it a familiar stop for regulars as well as casual browsers.

Longtime customer Tad Mosher said he has been shopping there for more than 30 years, underscoring how deeply the store reached into local life. For many residents, The Long Ear was one of the few places in Coeur d’Alene where music was still a shared, in-person experience, with staff who knew the stock and customers who kept coming back to talk about records, CDs and what they had just discovered.

Its closing leaves behind more than an empty storefront on Government Way. It removes one of Coeur d’Alene’s enduring cultural landmarks, a business that outlasted the traffic patterns around Neider Avenue, survived the shift from physical media to streaming and remained relevant even as listening habits changed around it.