The smell was new plastic and burnt coffee from a broken machine. The sound was the low hum of a hundred television sets, all tuned to different channels, playing silently in the bright, fluorescent-lit rows of the Good Guys! store. It was a cathedral of consumer electronics on the morning of April 4, 1991. Then the guns came out.
Four men, armed and desperate, herded forty-one customers and employees to the back. They wanted one million dollars and a helicopter. What they got was a cordon of police, snipers on rooftops, and the relentless gaze of local news cameras broadcasting the standoff live. The hostages weren’t in a bank or an embassy; they were surrounded by VCRs and stereo systems. The negotiators’ voices crackled over the phone line next to a display of cordless phones.
For eight hours, the scene was a grotesque parody of the store’s purpose. Life was bargained for amid the gadgets promised to enhance it. A father used a store television to show police the layout. A clerk, forced to act as a messenger, stepped over cables and around camcorder displays.
The end was violent and abrupt. When police stormed the building after a hostage was shot, the clean, orderly aisles became a chaotic maze. Three hostages and three gunmen died in the clash. The final image was not of liberation, but of dazed survivors stumbling out past the bright yellow price tags, into a parking lot flooded with spinning red and blue lights, the electronic chimes of the entrance door now silent.