Downtown Raleigh Retail Week brings shoppers to locally owned shops and boutiques

Sorry State Records is a small shop that's full of vintage recorded music formats, mostly long playing vinyl albums along with tape cassettes and the now obsolete two-sided single discs known as 45s. Numbers count in a small, locally-owned business that's been around for more than a decade.

"Yeah, we celebrated our ten-year anniversary last year," said store clerk Jon Roberts. "We had a big little festival for it."

Now the shop is benefiting from another celebration: Downtown Raleigh Retail Week.

The record store's part of the DTR Independent Shops collective, promoted by the Downtown Raleigh Alliance as a way to support bottle shops, bookstores, and vintage clothing boutiques like The Unorthodox , where business is brisk as the week winds down.

"It's Saturday, so we are pretty busy on Saturdays," said shop clerk Iyana Thompson. "But now that there's a lot of vintage stores popping up in the area, the word-of-mouth marketing is really coming through. Like we're all talking about each other. People come in there, especially people who are like newly moving in and they want to know what's happening."

Shoppers can browse the available items in both shops and other participants at their leisure, making purchases that help to boost the local economy and provide jobs for people like Roberts.

"I lived right down the street, and I would shop here, so it worked out," he said.

DTR Retail Week continues through Sunday, July 21.