Employee-owned since 2022, the Bull Moose media chain traces its roots to a single Brunswick, Maine storefront that founder Brett Wickard opened in 1989 while still an undergraduate, starting the business with roughly 37,000 dollars and a stack of used CDs. More than three decades later, the company’s Scarborough store at 456 Payne Road stands as the largest location in the entire chain, following an expansion that pushed the store to roughly 13,000 square feet of retail space. Set in the Payne Road Plaza directly across from Scarborough Gallery on Gallery Boulevard, the store has room that smaller Bull Moose locations simply do not, and it uses that space to stock more than 20,000 used books, discounted 35 percent off cover price, alongside its core business in new and used vinyl, CDs, Blu-rays, DVDs, video games, consoles, board games, and graphic novels.
The scale of the Scarborough store matters because Bull Moose is not a conventional record shop chasing rare pressings alone; it is a full media and entertainment retailer built around buying, selling, and trading. Customers bring in used games, movies, and music for cash or store credit, and the shelves mix new releases with a deep secondhand selection that turns over constantly. Vinyl remains a centerpiece of the business, both new pressings and used stock, alongside Bull Moose’s own line of exclusive vinyl releases produced in partnership with artists and labels. The chain has been credited with playing a real role in vinyl’s resurgence over the past decade and a half, and Bull Moose staff, including longtime employee Chris Brown, helped establish Record Store Day in 2008, an event that grew from a regional idea into an annual celebration observed by independent record stores worldwide.
Scarborough sits just south of Portland along Maine’s southern coastal corridor, a fast-growing commercial town where shoppers headed to the nearby Maine Mall corridor or Route 1 retail can easily fold in a stop at Bull Moose. The store’s daily hours, 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week, make it one of the more accessible browsing options in the area, open later than most Maine record shops and well suited to evening errands or weekend hunting sessions. Inside, the atmosphere leans toward unhurried browsing rather than a quick transaction: crates of vinyl organized by genre, walls of new and classic video games, and staff who tend to know the inventory well enough to point a customer toward something unexpected.
Ownership structure sets Bull Moose apart from most retail chains of its size. When Wickard announced in January 2022 that the company would be sold to its roughly 140 employees, it became one of Maine’s larger employee-owned businesses, a structure that has kept the culture rooted in the same independent, music-first ethos the company built its name on since the late 1980s. That history, combined with the sheer size of the Payne Road location, makes the Scarborough store a flagship rather than just another branch. Bull Moose in Scarborough is the largest store in Maine’s employee-owned Bull Moose chain, a 13,000-square-foot media superstore on Payne Road known for its enormous used book selection, deep vinyl and video game inventory, and daily hours that run from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.
