DVD Talk Forum - Five Below

A search through the forum did not find a thread on Five Below stores,so I thought I'd start one.Five Below is an interesting spin on the super discount store. Everything is priced five dollars or less(get it,Five Below)and they started from the guys who invented Zany Brainy,an upscale toy store of the '90s,and Encore Books,one of the first super book discounters. The angle is that they play to 'tweens and their allowances,so you'll see lots of lound colors and stuff that was popular last year. East Coast stores are in Pa.,NJ,DE,VA,NY,etc. Lots of new stores opening this year,some of them in malls so they must be getting some kind of break landing in abandoned stores,'cause stuff priced under five bucks vs. mall rent is a scary business model. But these stores are busy,which you can't always say about your neighborhood dollar store,where inflation makes it tough to keep things at a buck.
And they sell DVDs. For 5 bucks. Not a great price,but that price point is also where Big Lots is coming to and both are doing business during bad times. They started carrying G, PG and PG-13 rated stuff,because of their aim at kids,but increasingly they have stocked R rated titles,though I have not seen Unrated titles. I do not know if they restrict R DVDs sales to grown ups.A recent visit to Reading,Pa. found The SNL cartoon collection of Robert Smigel,Doubt,Underdog,Vol.1 and Essential Gumby. They had a 20 foot run of titles,neatly stacked by title with duplicates behind,so there is no need to go through tons of duplicates. The opposite side of the DVDs is for software and games.Titles are rung up by UPC,so if the bar code is sliced,the cashier must enter the UPC manually,a tiresome job and sometimes an infuriating one if they make one mistake(I showed my cashier that the tops of the packages sometimes have the same bar code-maybe she will tell others). Not a great deal,but a pretty well laid out store,where you don't waste much time looking for something that isn't there and one doing real business in 2010.