Brian Faber has seen some crazy stuff during his six years as vice president and general manager of Zia Record Exchange. “We had a customer drive into one of our stores—a shoplifter trying to escape who drove right through the wall—and we’ve had ceiling collapses from weather and from people trying to break in through the ceiling,” he recalls.
Still, Faber has never had a location in his soon-to-be nine-store, Arizona-based chain catch on fire. Until January 27. That’s the day he hopped into his car and raced from Phoenix to Las Vegas to assess the damage from an early-morning electrical fire that began in the ceiling of Zia’s unopened Sahara Avenue location.
“I was receiving pictures of the damage on my phone as I drove up, going in and out of cell coverage,” says Faber, who estimates damage at more than $30,000. “The insurance companies are still assessing, but on the fire scale, we lucked out. No one was hurt, there was no product in the store yet and less than one-fifth of the store was affected thanks to the quick response of the firemen and the quick phone call made by our neighbors at the Egg & I. We’re just looking at charred wood and clean up.”
Still, the launch date for Southern Nevada’s second Zia store—originally pegged for last October, then pushed back to February—will be postponed further, probably into spring at the earliest. “I guess we can check fire off our list now, but I don’t care to repeat it,” Faber says.