Ajax Won’t Quit
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Since the fall of 1996, Adams has been running the mail-order business out of his home, successfully enough that he didn’t need to take another job. But though Ajax started as a living-room business back in 1989, when Adams was employed as an accountant at Ernst & Young, he says he’s been suffering from cabin fever. “I had to decide to do Ajax more professionally–to get an office–or I had to get a regular job,” he says, taking a break from moving boxes of records and CDs into the rough new space, a former sign maker’s shop half a block south of the Empty Bottle. He sent out resumes for jobs in copywriting and computer programming as well as accounting, but when two months went by without a response, he hopped on his bike and began scouting the city for the perfect office. But when he found the cheap space on Western, already zoned for retail, he figured he might as well reopen the store.
Adams had found a neglected but genuine niche in the market, and by 1991 his witty, personable catalogs and relative efficiency had earned him the right to quit his day job. Adams’s success inspired the start-up of several competing operations, including Parasol in Champaign, Scat in Cleveland, and Forced Exposure in Somerville, Massachusetts. And after Nirvana broke, major-label A and R execs began their plunder of indie rock’s Eden. But Ajax weathered it all–until November 1993, when a neighbor reported Adams to the Chicago Department of Revenue for running a business without the proper license.
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