dvdjunkie32

Apparently, there used to be a time when sites like Amazon offered decent trade-in values for used dvds, but no more.

Everytime I go to check on a trade-in value, my jaw is on the floor. The prices are insulting. Amazon is offering me a mere two bucks for my Cheers seasons. Wherehouse.com offers only .50 cents. Best Buy is shitty as well. Screw that, I'll keep them.

The blu-ray market is even more crazy. Amazon is offering a mere .10 cents for the new Indiana Jones blu-ray set. $20 bucks if it is new and sealed. Why on earth would anyone be willing to trade at these prices? At .10 cents, I would have to send them 100 dvds just to get 10 bucks. Ridiculous.

Has the used market just become so glutted with media that they really don't care if you send in your dvd/blu-ray or not? I know media in general doesn't hold value, but I never would have thought my Lords of the Rings extended editions that I bought 10 years ago would be worth less than price of a Coke.

Mattflix

It definitely sucks. But on the other hand, the prices to purchase used DVD's have equally dropped, so that works just as well.

Back when you could safely resell your DVD's for at least a few dollars, you'd still have to shell out closer to $10 if you wanted to buy used. Now you can take $20 to Amazon and come out with a bunch of discs.

It's definitely not worth it to try to trade-in your old DVD's at this point though. I sold a box of about 50 DVD's to Amazon for a total of about $38, and on top of that I had to pay $8 for UPS packing. It's not worth the time to do all that. So now if I'm getting rid of discs I just post on Facebook and ask if any of my friends want them.

milo bloom

Yup, market is glutted. We've been downsizing lately and I've unloaded some "chaff" titles that I picked up from rental store closings and such and I've barely gotten pennies for them. Now that I've started moving some stuff to binders to save space, I'm just as likely to put the disc in the binder and toss the case. Maybe someday down the road I'll get around to watching it.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

It depends on what you have. I never bother to open my stuff until the first time I get around to watching them. Many times it takes so long before I get to them that they've either gone OOP and are worth selling, or a blu-ray has come out and I can still unload the dvd as new. In oddball cases, I'll have something like Captain America on blu-ray and then I ordered the Avengers set and sold Captain off for a good price, since he hasn't gone down much.

asianxcore

I looked online at FYE's trade-in prices recently and saw the same.

Though they never had high trade-in prices, offering $10 for the Complete Collection of Battlestar Galactica? Ouch!

Groucho

Basically, DVDs have gotten so cheap that they're essentially disposable.

wildman1037

Yeah, I've noticed this as well. I been trying to downsize my collection by selling on Amazon. The only thing I can offload is TV boxsets. Catalog releases are usually under a dollar if they've been out for awhile. Even with $3 for shipping, I still lose money paying for a $1 padded envelope to ship.

Better off donating to public library and taking the tax deduction...

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

Unless they're out of print horror.

starseed1981

The prices aren't insulting at all. Its simple supply and demand. The medium as a whole is on the decline. You're best bet is to donate them and get some type of tax write off imho.

rw2516

Depends on what you have. This month I got $1000 for about 40 used dvds

WOODPRODUCTIONS

There's a few Rasputins locally that sell tons of DVD's in the $3-10 range. Of course, they also have the likes of OOP which are more pricier. New Used. CD, VHS, vinyl, posters, tshirts in a warehouse setting. Rents arent cheap locally, so overhead is definitely an issue as well the manpower to deal/organize the volume of inventory, thus probably why they are willing to pay only pennies for DVDS. And there are tons everywhere, Barnes and Nobles, Target, Best Buy etc. Its saturated. Its the current market.

EdTheRipper

Yup. Same thing with the cd market. I attempted to sell a bunch of cds a few months ago and most of them were scanning into the store's computer system at 1 cent. Anything less than 50 cents and they're not buying them. I wound up donating several reusable grocery bags worth to Savers.

asianxcore

All the OOP Horror/Exploitation DVD scores I've gotten at Rasputin Records have been dirt cheap.

Amoeba Music which is right up the street from the Berkeley location, pretty much prices all of their OOP DVDs by Ebay/Amazon Marketplace prices. They even price OOP (inferior) editions of films high, just because they are OOP.

mdnitoil

The bottom line is there was always a whole lot less actual movie collectors than there were discs actually being manufactured. Once the collectors have their copy, the rest of the inventory for a given title is just crap.

Josh-da-man

This.

The bottom line is that, over the past fifteen years or so, there have been so many DVDs produced, both in quantity of titles and quantity of units, that they basically have no value. Shitty movies were mass-produced in such numbers that they are able to fill any demand that there is. This is also why places like Big Lots are selling DVDs for $3 a piece... nobody wants the fucking things.

The only DVDs that are worth over a dollar or two are titles that are now out of print, sought out by collectors, and produced in low numbers.

milo bloom

One thing I've noticed though, is places like Half Price Books that are holding steady on what they sell their DVDs for. I actually find myself hesitating on paying $7-$10 for a DVD because I would have only paid $5 or so for it in the past. As I've mentioned in the other collecting threads here, I've gotten to where I'm not really interested in buying a bunch of DVDs just because they're cheap.

And things like Netflix have really impacted people's buying habits. Hard to justify buying things like TV show sets, unless there's significant extras that enhance the experience.

EDIT: Just got an email from one of the local used DVD chains: they're running a "buy 3, get the 4th DVD free" sale this weekend. Just not interested.

WOODPRODUCTIONS

Oh really, I need to take a closer look. The ones I frequent most often are the ones on the peninsula and southbay. Thanks for the tip. In general I get the impression that some of the more in demand titles are pricier. For example, I want to expand my Mystery Science Theater 3000 collection, and the ones I've seen there are almost $50.

Mattflix

Streaming is definitely impacting this market. Personally, it's saved me a lot of money. I used to blind-buy everything. Now everything gets a shot via Netflix first. And the only movies I buy now are the ones that I really, really love. I used to buy movies that I thought I might possibly like. Now I only keep the cream of the crop that I know I'll rewatch.

And remember that we here are all hardcore collectors. Average Joe doesn't care about owning a library of choice selections, he views movies as a fun way to kill a couple hours. Netflix is all most people need.

asianxcore

That could be it. I normally go to the Berkeley Rasputin store because I've always gotten great deals there. At the very least the store prices OOP Horror/Exploitation pretty well

Last year I found a sealed copy of Last House on Dead End Street (Barrel Entertainment) for only $13.95!

Also found The Entity (Anchor Bay) for $3.95!

If it had been Amoeba Music up the street, I'm sure they would have looked up the pricing. Though I did find the R2 UK Santa Sangre (Anchor Bay) at that Amoeba for $9.99, but they always price their non-R1 DVDs to sell since its a small amount of what gets traded in and not many 'usual' customers have Region-Free players. Sames goes for Rasputin Records when they get them in.

The Man with the Golden Doujinshi

That seems fair for a used price since it was about $9 when it came out new.

Gobear

That's why the Best Buy Upgrade and Save has been such a blessing, allowing us to trade in worthless DVDs for new Blu-rays for $5. Given how quickly the home media market has crumbled, even for $5 I only buy movies that I love and want to watch multiple times because it's more than likely I'll be stuck with them for life.

SethDLH

That score of Last House on Dead End Street is one of those finds that you can brag about/reminisce about forever. What a find.

I bring my trade-ins to a local store that gives good value for most things and will take almost anything as long as it isn't in crap condition. They don't give less than a dollar for dvds so even some of the super common titles are worth bringing there, much better than Amazon's dime. They also take region 2 titles however they're very picky with which ones they take and it seems like there is no rhyme or reason. I'll be making a trip to the store after October so that anything I bought for the OHMC and didn't care for will goto a good home and give me credit towards something else.

smurr05

It really sometimes depends on the area of the buyer in my experience. For instance, There is a buyer on the east coast that gives .45 for Criterions but I found a buyer in CA. that gives much more and very decent prices for Criterion DVD's. I guess they sell better in CA.!

shredking9000

I used to wait until I was ready to watch something to open it, until I went to watch Ghoulies(1 and 2) a year after I bought it and found this ->tinypic.com/view.php?pic=rtfho1&s=6 in the case. Now I open any discs I get as soon as I can.

asianxcore

I'm not a person who is huge on bragging, but I agree with you there. It's probably the find that I am most happy about (in terms of the secondary market).

I already owned the R2 release (which I believe is also now OOP) and when I ran into that at Rasputin Records with one of my best friends, I flipped out