TomOpus

The customer base wants cheap. Look at the bread section and the most they stock is the plain store brand white bread. They do carry bread that's better for you but it's relegated to a small section.

PhantomStranger

Media sales for both music and movies were always about drawing traffic into stores for the big box retailers. Even Best Buy never made much money on those categories. But mass demand for them attracted millions of customers. That is how Best Buy built their brand, a big reason why they eventually destroyed their number one competitor Circuit City. It's just a shame the current management didn't want to maintain some aspect as a link to their legacy.

kd5

With the exception of the TV we bought there a couple of years ago, the only reason I even visit Best Buy is to peruse their movies/TV shows. When they purge their store/site of said videos, I'll no longer have any reason to go there.

fujishig

Dang it's coming too fast:

bluetoast

Went into a Best Buy for the first time in years a few weeks ago. Barnes and Noble too. BN as expected has had a more varied selection of movies for years. On top of that, they have vinyl.

slop101

But unless there's a sale, B&N is super expensive, especially their vinyl.
One cool thing though, if you know what to look for, each B&N location will have a few OOP vinyl still wrapped as new. So even at retail those would be way cheaper than Discogs, or any record store who understands their stock.

Inhumans99

I keep saying that I will miss buying media at places like BB,, but the truth is that while this may be an unpopular opinion, I am kind of glad that what options are available to me online are more in line with what used to be the MSRP of many blu rays.

I spent about $35 with tax to pick up The Monster Squad 4K when in the past I might have expected to buy the film for no more than $20, if that much on 4K, and no more than $12-13 if on blu. The thing is, spending $35 on a film I will watch not long after buying is about what I would have paid to watch the film even if I had paid a third of what I did for the film.

In the past...sure, I would pick up three films for $35, but I would see at least 2 of the three sitting on my shelf just doing nothing but take up space, so it was like I was spending $35 on the one film of the three I would promptly open and enjoy.

Now I might only pick up 10-12 4K or deluxe blu ray sets for about $400 over the next year or so, instead of 26-30+ titles, but it beats a ton of precious real estate in my apartment being occupied by piles of discs I would l not get around to watching anytime even remotely resembling the near future, lol.

My real cost to watch a movie I bought on sale 8-15+ years back was often times more like $20-30 per film vs the $10-13 I paid for the film. I bet that is the case for many folks who would not care to admit that.

PhantomStranger

Probably bought my last discs at Best Buy today. Picked up a couple of their exclusive 4K Disney SteelBooks. It wouldn't surprise me to discover I've spent over $75,000 on music and movies at Best Buy since the 1990s. I guess nothing is forever. Now I know how the Greatest Generation felt when they saw Sears implode.

Qué será, será...

morriscroy

In some less well-off parts of town, it was seeing Woolworths disappear.

fujishig

I mean TRU, Circuit City, and Blockbuster weren't that long ago, were they?

And before that we had Kay Bee, Radio Shack, Waldens... all stores I loved as a kid back in the day.

BuckNaked2k

CubsWin

I drive by the empty husk of our former Sears store several times a week. It feels like only yesterday I was stopping by that store for a miscellaneous tool or line for my Craftsman string trimmer. There is definitely some nostalgia for the old B&M shopping experience, but realistically there is nothing I would have bought at Sears that I can't find more easily at the local ACE hardware. Similarly, it is weird to think of Best Buy's many aisles of CD's and DVD's reduced to nothing, but there are better alternatives now. I have no reason to set foot in a Best Buy store anymore, physical media or not.

fujishig

But at least for me, the reason I don't go to BB anymore is basically Amazon, so especially once Target and Walmart wind down it's going to be a little scary having so much consolidation. I don't think many of us really want to pay full retail price for everything (ie: the Suncoast experience) once there's no competition.

PhantomStranger

Oh, I still feel gutted when I drive by a former Toys 'R Us location and remember the good 'ol days.

Inhumans99

So, to follow up on my post just a bit upthread, I get why DVDs and Blu Rays had to reach a point pretty quickly where they were being offered to buyers for in some case case 60-70% off a usual MSRP of $30, $35, or $40, because this caused a huge number of folks to take the plunge to buy lots of DVDs and blu rays, or not feel too bad about double dipping by upgrading from DVD to blu, I get it...Blu Ray might not be the beloved format we all enjoy today were it not for several years where for the most part, blu's were pretty easy to buy for no more than $10-13.00 on the day of their release. However, my point still stands, when most of us decide to figure out how many titles we purchased vs titles we actually opened and watch, the actual cost of that cheap blu ray is higher than expected, but hindsight is everything.

Now the blu ray (and to a certain degree, the UHD format) format is mature and it is just not worth it for stores to fill up aisles with discs that are dirt cheap to buy when a Ninja air fryer in that space can make them 10-20X the ROI they would get selling a blu ray. Even if Target, BB, Walmart decided to pivot and re-visit stocking a huge amount of day and date and catalog shows/films, they would need to sell the titles for pretty much the same amount many of us are paying for Shout, Arrow, Kino, VS, Criterion, and other boutique label titles (I get it that some of the boutiques have good sales, but even on sale many titles I really want to buy and promptly watch still fall into the $25-33+ range, so even on sale much more than $12-20 per title).

I have already admitted that I will probably buy no more than 12-15 titles over the next 12 months, and stores like Target just cannot survive on customers like me, they would need a ton of folks to consistently buy blu/uhd discs at $25-40 price points to bring back the experience of being able to browse multiple aisles with CDs, Vinyl, DVD, Blu, and UHD titles.

I do not rage at streaming being the demise of blu/uhd films in BB, as there is a whole new generation of tv/film watchers that are concerned about space so it was inevitable that if studios had not jumped into streaming several years back, they would have to figure out a way to enable folks to pay something for their content while being okay without adding to what is already in their apartment or home.

We all say that consumers want to buy their tv/films to watch as cheap as possible, and streaming makes it easy for an average consumer to consume a ton of content in a fairly short period of time for not all that much. Take Netflix, I am paying I believe $23.00, but I can consume all content on NF in HD/UHD on multiple devices, so even if I stopped buying physical media I would still have access to more content that I could ever consume on just one streaming site, and of course I pay for other streaming sites.

Physical media was destined to become more of a niche purchase for many folks, and I really can't complain, sure...$33+ tax is not cheap, but I also am still tickled pink that I was able to pick up The Monster Squad and stuff like Tremors 2 in UHD. Folks who want to buy films are still being catered to, but at a much higher price point than streaming or what a title like The Monster Squad might have run us 15-20 years back (and in fact, the first blu of The Monster Squad was available for a long time as low as $10).

slop101

You can still buy shit from BB's site (what's left of their exclusive steelbooks and whatnot), but you can't do a store pick up - shipping only.

Jason Bovberg

Bought my last Blu at my local Best Buy on New Year's Eve. Appropriately, it was Past Lives.

TheBang

My two stores still have pickup options for movies. Same as always.

b2net

As does the one closest to me

I did look at a tile that stated "available nearby" which means another store within driving distance has it if I wanted to still do in store pickup. Yet when adding to cart it stated not available at the local store therefore only shipping was the option.

It might be title dependent and stock dependant.

stepcoach

And THAT is where the future of entertainment is headed. They lost control when movies left the exclusivity of the neighborhood theater. If they can lock down our access again, they will regain the upper hand. I'm grabbing all the physical media (including books, which AI can easily rewrite and alter as they desire) I can afford!