THERE was a band covering Guns n’ Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle in the Union Square Virgin Megastore last Thursday night. It is not an easy song and it was good but no one seemed to know who the band was. “Some guy who used to work here,” was all I could get out of the staff.

They have reason to be surly. In a few days’ time, they will all be some guy who used to work there.

Having died in the UK and Ireland, the chain is now shutting up shop across America. I feel like I’ve been on a Virgin Megastore closing tour in recent months. It started in the February snow in Times Square, by the time I got up there they were down to the fixtures and fittings. I browsed sadly in the classic and jazz sections and went home with Miles Davis.

Then last month, I was in San Francisco and caught Twitter in time for another Virgin sacrifice. I thought about buying something San Franciscan but the whole experience was maudlin enough: Jefferson Airplane would have finished me off. I took home the DVD of Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Virgin Union Square closes in the middle of May. The store has looked like a junk shop for months and seemed to run a constant sale. Now comes the death blow, prices are down by 40% already but shoppers could be heard speculating on how much further they will drop.

At 11pm last week, the place was packed. It is a shame Virgin could not draw these crowds when it was still alive. I came away with a remastered CD of the Stones’ Sticky Fingers, the Handsome Furs’ latest and a Bluray of John Carpenter’s The Thing. It was a sad affair. In front of me, another middle-aged man was buying five Watchmen posters.

I nearly wept. A young girl behind me buying a Justin Timberlake-style hat played with one of those useless CD openers. “I never saw the point of those things,” she said, her tense betraying the fact she was aware they were soon destined for the landfill along with the CDs they were supposed to open.

This is not my first retail death since I’ve been in New York. A few years ago I watched Tower Records suffer the same fate. Even more recently, Circuit City, Virgin’s neighbour, shut up shop (giving me a flatscreen TV and Guitar Hero III Legends of Rock on the cheap).

But this time things are different. This really is it. The CD is dead, the DVD is next.

Our digital future has arrived and a retail era has ended. Someone told me Forever 21, a hilariously awful clothing store, is moving into the Virgin space. My daughter (13) goes to Forever 21 to try things on and giggle.

I used to do the same with my friends in Virgin at the listening posts, chortling at Madonna’s latest. But where am I supposed to go now? Where will men shop if all the electronic shops and music stores close? Welcome to the digital desert.

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