With everything from CDs and vinyls to custom drumsticks and cowbells, unique stores like Offbeat are harder to come by nowadays, according to Jim Betsios, Offbeat owner.

Offbeat and other music stores are essential to towns like Lake Zurich, according to Nick Sinski, who started out in 2015 and helps Betsios manage the store. He says he iss always looked for a local music store in every town he’s ever lived in.

“There’s always cool things in a local music store; you’ll see things here that you won’t see in any big box music store,” Sinski said while referencing the custom guitars Betsios acquired from a friend. These guitars have a variety of unique finishes from a psychedelic pattern of swirls to a pristine wooden finish.

Besides the instruments, Betsios says his favorite part is being his own boss, not working for big corporations and being self-employed, but at the same time he worries for the future of local businesses like his.

“America is losing their ma and pa businesses with the big box stores and the internet,” Betsios said. “There’s a beauty to being able to walk into a store [and seeing] the product, being able to hold it and hear it. When I was a kid, my dad would drive me to the music store so I could hear a cymbal and pick out the one that I liked with my ear. Today, it’s just a button on the internet that says ‘buy now,’ and you don’t even know what you’re getting tone-wise.”

Betsios said it is important to shop local, but he also had to succumb to modern consumerism by selling his products online too.

“People don’t walk in the doors as much as they used to,” Betsios said. “It’s amazing because we have great product, but no one walks in the store to see it sometimes, but a guy in France sees it online and he buys it, and a guy in Germany, and a guy in Switzerland. We ship all over the world just about every day because that’s the new trend of shopping: on the internet.”

Both Sinski and Betsios agree that local stores are a necessity to towns like Lake Zurich, and that people should support them more over larger stores.

“When Offbeat’s gone one day,” Betsios said, “I bet people are going to be saying ‘Wow I wish we had a music store in LZ.’”