Gizmo

It must have just happened as I was there the previous week and everything was normal.

Mine seem to have a lot of TV on DVD

JimRochester

This weeks ad needs a magnifying glass to find any media on sale

PhantomStranger

They generally carry fewer and fewer media skus each quarter. Their music section has been reduced to a handful of new releases and half of a rack for everything else. They carry far less DVDs these days and each genre category has been cut in half. There is one Best Buy I occasionally visit that seems to be immune to these changes, as its media section still takes up 8 aisles.

mcnabb

I have a question for you guys, but do you think the reason Best Buy is getting away from Physical media is that Bluray just never caught on like DVD?

Think about it, the DVD boom was at the turn of century when the casual fan jumped on. Everybody re-bought their DVD collection from their vastly inferior VHS tapes, but eventually there would be no more DVD catalog titles to re-buy?

I honestly don’t know many people who upgraded to Bluray (other then me) so you never had a Bluray boom of everyone re-buying their catalogs. The same goes with CD’s as I was honestly done upgrading from Cassette Tapes by the late 90’s.

The only Physical Media that can sell with Bluray/DVD’s these days are new movies.

kd5

One thing I've noticed with our Best Buy is that there seems to be a trend towards opening up space by, presumably, eliminating items from their B&M store inventory. Now Best Buy is open, airy, it looks nice but there has to be less product to buy to open up all that space. Our video section is still not horrible but it is shrinking, little by little. Target's video section is almost non-existent now. Very little reason to shop in-store if they don't carry what I'm looking for. If they want to kill their B&M store presence, they're doing it right.

Adam Tyner

I think that even if Blu-ray had been a meteoric success, it still would have petered out due to streaming/VOD/digital downloads.

JimRochester

Sure. I would agree with that. DVD was revolutionary. Even stubborn people like my in-laws eventually realized the ease of DVD vs. videotape was a no-brainer. No rewinding. Better picture. What's not to love? But as the formats became evolutionary instead of revolutionary, there was less reason to upgrade. With their little 32" TV not a huge difference in picture quality. They really don't care anyway. Even people like us that love movies have greatly reduced our purchases. We debate the validity of purchases and upgrades with every release. If a great number of us on this board have stopped buying numerous titles every week, who is?

So far this year I've picked up about 30 titles. 23 UHD with 7 of those upgrades from DVD, HD-DVD or BR and 7 BR with 5 new releases and 2 bargains at Family Video. During the DVD craze I was getting 5 titles a week. So I would buy in 6 weeks what I've purchased in 10 months.

Gizmo

But with less items where will I go to look and test items I buy on Amazon?

Josh-da-man

No. It's a combination of two things:

1. Streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, AppleTV.

2. People, particularly young people ("Millennials") are downsizing their lives. They're living in smaller places, don't want a lot of "stuff," and want to be more mobile. They read their books on a Kindle, listen to music on Spotify and Youtube, and watch their tv and movies online.

DthRdrX

It is really a shock that most people don't want to keep buying catalog titles over?

Best Buy apparently sees the future of their store in cell phones, because 75% of my store is just that now. When you walk in you see a massive kiosk taking up the middle of the entire building, with 4 large screen LCDs overhead comparing carrier rates. Looks like an airport terminal.

morriscroy

(Speaking in terms of hypotheticals).

If my house burned down or was completely destroyed in a natural disaster (ie. hurricane, severe flooding, etc ...), most likely I wouldn't bother "recreating" my collections of cds/dvds/blurays, vinyl records, books, etc ....

I would just go straight to watching tv shows + movies via streaming, reading ebooks on a kindle, etc ....

mattysemo247

As morbid as it may sound, that would be one of the most freeing feelings in the world. If that happened to me tomorrow, I'm absolutely positive I would end up re-buying maybe a third of what I have now, maybe even less than that. I would take the insurance check and buy an OLED TV, a new Atmos system, some nice speakers, and enjoy a smaller collection that I would actually watch more and just stick to rentals and streaming for the rest.

robin2099

I've been thinking of that since I've still screaming over trying to deal with my 600 DVD collection. Here's what IMO killed physical media.

The Rise:

1. DVD was truly as revolutionary to movies as CD's were to Music. You had better picture quality, special features, you could go to whatever scene you wanted, and you didn't have to rewind. DVD also became big when the Matrix came out and people were showing their friends how cool DVD was compared to VHS.

2. The DVD collector boom happened. Catalog titles that were long out of stock were released, sales were everywhere and everyone was rebuying movies on their new format they forgot about. A lot of these titles weren't for rent anymore so if you wanted them, you had to buy them. The X-Files seasons coming out were game changers, and people were excited about being able to watch entire seasons of TV shows in their house without dealing with tons of tapes and commercials.

The Fall:

1. Blue-Ray and HDDVD both come out, which leads people to wondering what each of them were, and what the actual benefit was. People kept talking about the picture and audio upgrades but to joe schmoe movie watcher, they cant tell a difference, thus they have no reason to upgrade.

2. DVD's were still being manufactured as Blu-Rays came out, and no one sees any reason to upgrade as DVD's are good enough and don't want to spend more money to upgrade their TV, buy a Blu-Ray player, and upgrade their whole collection.

3. YouTube and Netflix launch. People start to realize that they can get digital copies to watch anywhere, at anytime and on any device. People also realize how much easier it is to do this as opposed to having disks that take up space and become obsolete.

In essence, the revolution is DVD-digital and most people would rather consume media that way. Lets be honest, people on this forum are dinosaurs and physical media is over. And after trying to movie 600 DVD's and 200 Blu-Rays, I can handle that.

story

I've always thought of physical media in a store like Target or Walmart to be a loss leader, while Best Buy actually to have it as a cornerstone to it's business model. If it's not part of the business model anymore, I wonder why and if they've ever articulated it. If they were a loss leader, I wonder what the new loss leader is or if it was simply more loss than leader, at a certain point.

orangerunner

I think the new loss-leader for a lot of stores is internet shopping and the free shipping/free returns policy.

Trying to operate bricks n' mortar and free delivery has to be both a market-share success but also a money loser. I suppose the long-term idea is to phase-out or at least reduce the expensive brick n' mortar model and replace it with the cheaper internet shopping.

Eventually the courier companies are going to start charging more as they begin to add-up all of the wasted time and gas delivering packages to an empty house only to take the parcel back to the depot.

Even though companies may be losing money, no one wants to admit they are technologically behind-the-times when it comes to the latest consumer shopping trends.

DthRdrX

Stores like BB and Target are probably only surviving because Amazon has not decided to begin opening actual retail stores yet. At that point it will just be Amazon v.s Walmart regardless of what the others choose to sell.

kd5

Sucks for those of us who like to go on our little shopping trips weekly. If the stores don't carry what we're looking for anymore, in favor of internet shopping, then we're fucked. We don't want to stay home and do all of our shopping online, it's fun to get out and about from time to time and drive around to the local stores and look around. Where does that leave us? Up shit creek without a paddle?

BuckNaked2k

I buy very few movies these days. When I do, it's usually some store-exclusive or some boutique label import....not likely I'm shopping BB for such items.

DthRdrX

Best Buy knows people are going to that media section and will now have to walk around the cell phone area. It's not a question of space. The entire middle of the floor is pretty much empty now so that you can see everything clearly upon entering the doors. Want to buy a movie, game or TV? Going to have to walk around the cell phone kiosk and massive carrier price displays.

These companies spend millions of dollars bringing firms in that come up with the floor plans for merchandise. I remember reading about how Toys R' Us used to spend more on this than any other company in the 80s and 90s. Every aisle was accounted for right down to what height certain merchandise was supposed to be at so children could grab the right items.

kd5

I must be one of the minority of individuals who walk around (or through) the cell phone area to get to the videos. I don't give a shit about cell phones or carrier rates. Maybe one of these days I'll care about it but when/if I do, I'll probably shop for it online because I hate to be high-pressure sold anything. I bought our current set of cell phones and signed up for the service online, I can certainly do that again. If Best Buy gets rid of their media section altogether, I'll have no reason to set foot in a Best Buy store again.

story

I'm already there. I'm not a homeowner, so I'm not going to buy appliances any time soon. I'm happy going directly through the phone companies for my phone and contract. And I have a local small business I go to for computer troubleshooting. Only go in for an occasional Blu-ray deal, that's it.

I've gone into a Best Buy maybe 10 times in 10 years if that, and always paid cash ever since I read something years ago about people being charged for Entertainment Weekly and other magazines they said no to at the register. I've only gone in when a great physical media deal was posted here and if I could do in-store pickup, I took that option so I could beeline in, beeline out.

When I was a teen, employees would scoff when I asked for help finding an item. When I opened a Best Buy credit card, they screwed up the paperwork on the no-interest introduction period and I was on the phone forever trying to fix it. When I bought my parents their first DVD player, the guy tried to get me to get the service plan because, "Oh, they live in Iowa? Wow, well, you know the dust there then will just ruin a player like this." Pathetic.

Best Buy is a local company for me and that's great, but I feel treated like either a rube or a nuisance. I guess they decided their crappy interactions with me is the loss leader, because they lost me.

PhantomStranger

All retail stores are moving away from media because the rising target demo are Millennials that stream everything.

DthRdrX

Well how else are you supposed to get to the video section?

big e

Every other demographic streams as well. My 64 year-old mother, who probably bought only 1 or 2 DVDs in her entire life, streams something from Netflix every weekend. Just because someone is over 40 doesn't mean they're rushing out to Best Buy every Tuesday to buy movies. I work with plenty of people in their 40s and 50s, who haven't bought physical media in years and stream everything. Keep in mind, sales started declining before streaming became big.

I may be in the minority according to this thread, but I rarely buy movies in B&M stores. It's not because I'm an evil millennial who's out to destroy the world with his minimalist avocado toast (whatever the hell that is). It's because, I don't have to own every movie I like and the few I do buy are mostly released by smaller labels, which likely wouldn't show up in Best Buy or a B&M store, anyway.

Adam Tyner

Yeah, north of 90% of my BD/UHD BD purchases are online. Cartwheel sales are an exception since they’re only in-store, I like getting Criterion titles at Barnes and Noble in person since my wife can browse too (and I get an extra 10% off that way), every once in a blue moon there’ll be an impulse buy (like getting Fantastic Beasts the day of a birthday celebration), and sometimes my wife will be in the mood to watch a movie I don’t own and isn’t available to stream/VOD.