To be wasted is to be left on the shelf. And now, we are all just browsing ghosts, scrolling endlessly, with nothing in our hands. The dog is gone. The music stopped. And the only thing left to waste is the memory.

We don’t say we “went to HMV” anymore. We say we “walked past where HMV used to be.”

But the cruelest waste is the loss of the risk . Today, you listen to thirty seconds of a song on Spotify, decide it’s a seven out of ten, and skip it forever. In HMV, you gambled £15.99 of your Saturday job money on an album because the cover art looked cool. You took it home, and sometimes it was garbage. But sometimes—once every ten tries—it changed your life. That’s the friction we’ve lost. The beautiful waste of a bad investment that led to a great discovery.

We didn't just waste HMV. We wasted the act of hunting. We wasted the drive home, ripping open the plastic, sliding the disc into the car stereo before you’d even left the parking lot.

Now, that space is gone. Wasted.

That was the waste. The waste of time. The sublime, loitering, pointless waste of time.

Now the shops sit empty. Or they’re vape outlets. Or pound stores. The dog on the logo—Nipper, listening to “His Master’s Voice”—is finally deaf. He’s listening to silence.

Think of the geometry of it. The Saturday afternoon geometry. The orange-and-yellow signage pulling you in like a lighthouse. The metal detectors at the door that beeped aggressively even if you only had a KitKat in your pocket. Inside, it was a cathedral of plastic. Row after row of CD jewel cases, their cellophane shrink-wrap catching the fluorescent light. You went in for one thing—the new single—and emerged two hours later, £40 poorer, holding a live DVD of a band you only sort of liked, a Simpsons mug, and a T-shirt that was two sizes too small.