davidlynchfan

We all have Superhuman-hoarding powers, here!

PhantomStranger

1000 movies is rookie league here...

Gizmo

im too afraid to count. Between BD, HD DVD and DVD….

Alan Smithee

My current count is 14,624 on all formats- not including the CEDs or HD-DVDs I haven't watched since getting the CLZ app which keeps track of everything. Multi-film sets count as one, but so do promo discs with just one music video on them.

Adam Tyner

I’d be somewhere around 4,500 titles if I hadn’t pruned over time, but I’m around 3,650 now and trying to keep it closer to 2,500 titles max. My goal with my new shelving is that there is no excess capacity. When it’s full (which…errr, it’s already been), I can’t add anything new without taking something out. I gave myself a little breathing room by moving some oversized collections, but it’ll basically be full again once I finish my Black Friday/Christmas backlog.

Weirdly, I’m excited about having to be more thoughtful about what stays and what goes.

Alan Smithee

I'm out of shelf space and the overflow has gone into boxes, so I've had to get more discriminatory about what I buy now. Trying to keep it to only things I would actually watch right away, and not just shelve and watch whenever- I haven't even gone in to a single Dollar Tree for several months despite the reports of stuff coming in there over the past few weeks. Nothing I've REALLY wanted has been found there, and I'm past buying marginal titles that just "looked good" and completely done buying movies on regular DVD, if I knew how bad they looked on modern HDTVs I wouldn't have bought so many of those to begin with.

ViewAskewbian

Request thread title change to: Lament to my small physical media count

PhantomStranger

I do see on other forums and places a yearning for Blockbuster-type stores once in awhile. I'd love visiting a fully stocked horror rental store for instance despite owning most every horror movie I want.

Alan Smithee

Renting is outdated- it started when movies on tape cost from $50-100. If I go out and get something I want to keep it, and if it's something I only want to watch one time that's where digital comes in, and they never have all the copies rented out.

And needless to say, Blockbuster is one store I don't miss. They dumbed down the video market in so many ways and were never run by true movie lovers. They could have turned themselves around in the end but chose not to, instead carrying on til they went under. Tower on the other hand was one store we never should have lost.

TomOpus

I didn't need Blockbuster to be knowledgeable. I knew what I wanted to rent and not be told what I SHOULD rent. I also didn't need Tower to be knowledgeable. I don't want another damn salesman trying to sell me something I didn't want. Especially at their high prices.

Dinosaurs deserved to die. And your definition of a "true movie lover" would probably differ wildly from others. I'd rather talk to someone with information more than an opinion.

clckworang

Lamenting the loss of the high, high prices at Tower Records? I never shopped there.

Adam Tyner

I would've thought you might see the appeal. If you're in a video rental store, you have a finite number of options. You can pick up boxes, cover art can catch your eye, yadda yadda. A digital storefront is great if you know exactly what you want to watch, but it's not nearly as much fun to browse (full-size cover art > thumbnails on a screen), and the number of choices can be overwhelming. There are upsides to digital, sure (like being able to instantly watch a trailer), but there's something to be said for the physical rental experience as well.

My favorite video store in my general neck of the woods offers rentals, but Orbit DVD is still around an hour and a half away, so...not a super-compelling option for renting for me.

Josh Z

One of my favorite video stores from days gone by didn't actually put tapes out on the shelves, just empty VHS boxes arranged in no particular order. The store didn't have genre sections or categories of any sort, and nothing was alphabetized. It was just row after row of random boxes. When new titles came in, the owner would do a circuit of the store popping the boxes onto miscellaneous shelves (no "New Releases" section either).

The tapes themselves were all held in a back room. If you knew what you wanted when you went in, you'd just ask the owner and he'd get it for you. If not, you could browse until something caught your eye. The owner was very friendly and knowledgable, and always made great suggestions if you couldn't decide on anything. I visited this store often when I was in film school, and the owner helped me out many times picking movies to write term papers about.

I still miss that place. It went under shortly after DVD hit the scene. The owner couldn't afford to upgrade his entire inventory and start over. Because the storefront was kind of out of the way and not in a normal retail district, the building never found a new tenant and has sat abandoned ever since. I sometimes get misty-eyed when I drive past it.

E Unit

I’m curious how many HD-DVD’s you amassed during the crazy ass format wars. You went hardcore and then some.

milo bloom

We never got into Blockbuster much, when I lived in Kentucky the town was too small for Blockbuster but every other gas station and grocery store had a section of tapes for rent, and then the movie theater added a tape rental section so we had a bunch of options.
And then when we moved to the Chicago suburbs in 97, there were plenty of local chains to rent from until DVD started taking over about that time.


I didn't get to it as often as I would have liked, but there was a place in the burbs called QED laser that was a big place for renting and buying laserdiscs back in the day. He did transition to DVDs and kept going for a little while but just couldn't keep up. He had a weird way of pricing things like new DVDs for sale - he would put the MSRP on the price sticker but would have little signs that he would change for sales, saying "take 10% off" or "take 20% off" and you'd just take it off that MSRP. That way he didn't have to keep changing the stickers.

I also recall that DeepDiscountDVD had a store front for a while, I think that's where I got my Forbidden Planet DVD in the collector's tin. I still have it too.

Alan Smithee

I definitely have memories of that, but that's one thing where I think technology got better. I certainly remember spending hours looking at the covers and carefully deciding what to rent, as it was a bigger commitment. Not just the time to watch the movies but to get and return them the next day. When I get credits to spend for online rentals I sort of go through the choices the same way- the regular prices are actually higher than video store rentals so I don't usually rent there a lot, I've got plenty of other stuff to watch anyways and it doesn't matter much anymore if I see something while it's still brand new. I remember renting some movies at the stores just because they were actually on the shelves and available, and someone else could grab them at any moment. That's one thing I don't miss now.

TomOpus

Before there was online shopping, the higher priced places were actually good at getting hard-to-find titles, at least for me. I would pay more just to be able to quickly grab it.

TomOpus

Sounds like it was one of those neighborhood stores where you become fast friends with the owner. It's too bad he couldn't navigate the transition to DVD. How long was he there?

Josh Z

Precisely.

I lived in that neighborhood while I was in college during the early-to-mid '90s. The store had been there at least a decade, since the VHS home video boom in the 1980s.

EdTheRipper

Borders and Suncoast were aces in this regard! I would always include them in my weekly physical media hunts. I overpaid for a lot of titles there, but it was so worth it to just grab what I was looking for and be done with it.

Alan Smithee

Suncoast priced everything at full list price, and their sale prices were higher than the standard. I hardly bought anything there except clearance and bargain-brand stuff. Borders dropped their DVD prices in 2000 to near Best Buy levels, I went there first for everything after that. Their prices eventually crept back up and then they reduced their selection, so they weren't really worth bothering with anymore. They outlasted Tower so they should have done something to stay around- I bought a bunch of stuff from them when they went out of business, I remember the box sets and sometimes all of the Blu-Rays were locked up. One place I was looking the girl opening the glass said "Is everyone almost done looking here so I can close it back up?" and I said "This is why Borders is going out of business." Another store had a note posted next to the case saying "Please make your selections before asking to open the case" and I wrote under that "THIS is why you're out of business!" I hate having to ask anyone to unlock something for me, might as well buy online. It might keep people from stealing but it also keeps many from buying.

It just really sucks that Best Buy put a lot of dedicated media store out of business by underpricing them on the popular titles, many times below cost which those stores could never match if their lives depended on it, and afterwards decided they didn't really want to sell that stuff and cutting their selection when there's no place else to go. Whenever I went by one of their stores I'd usually drop in and leave with something, now it's not worth my time. When I've gone in for electronics or computer stuff they usually don't have what I need either. I miss Fry's

milo bloom

I also miss Fry's. They were more likely to have weird scifi/horror titles than Best Buy and such.

Josh-da-man

I really, really, really fucking miss places like Borders, Suncoast, Camelot, and Hastings.

I'd go to Borders every week or two, and just spend an hour or two in there going through the whole store, checking out the vast selection of books, magazines, CDs, and DVDs. Prices were kind of high, but those coupons they e-mailed out helped a lot. (And, yes, I bought stuff.)

Suncoast was a good place, too, though I seldom bought anything there because it was more expensive than everywhere else. Still nice to have a dedicated movie store that carried VHS, DVD, toys, posters, and other memorabilia. They really got shit-hammered in the early internet age when places like 800.com and Reel.com were selling DVDs below cost and burning through investment capital.

Camelot had a really great selection of CDs; lots of obscure and oddball stuff that the other chains like Musicland and Sam Goody didn't carry. Sky high prices, though. Loved the stores, but as a teenager I couldn't afford to pay $18.99 for every CD I wanted.

And into the late 80s, Hastings had an amazing selection of vinyl. Even as late as 1988/1989, the whole center of the store was vinyl, and I was buying punk and metal LPs from indie labels when everyone else was ditching vinyl for CDs. Then, around 1990 or so, they moved out of the mall into a bigger store in a strip mall and started selling books and renting videos and ditched most the music and switched over to CDs; by that time I think they stopped manufacturing LPs, anyway. But the store really went downhill after that. Seemed more like a junk shop than a proper media store. (They actually did have a pretty good selection of VHS films to rent, but they were too far away from me to make renting them practical. It would have a been a 150 mile round trip to return the videos.)

PhantomStranger

I bought a ton of stuff from Borders before they went out of business. I always enjoyed browsing their stores and their media sections often saw less traffic than other media stores. They had listening stations for many new CD releases, which was a godsend before the Internet and YouTube made them obsolete.

Alan Smithee

Yeah, another thing I didn't like about stuff mainly being available via renting, I'd go to stores more than an hour away from home and find incredible stuff but would never be worth the trip to return them the next day. I remember making two trips to two video stores out of town and signing up just to rent a few desired tapes, copy them that night and return them the next day. I was afraid they'd raise an issue with how far away I lived but nothing was said about that.

The only thing I still go to the local mall for anymore is the food court. It's across from what used to be Suncoast, which I'd always check out before or after eating. Downstairs used to have Camelot Music, where I stupidly passed up a cutout laserdisc of Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park for $15. Most recently it was a "Footaction" store, but that has just closed- taped to the front was a note saying the store had closed and to send any mail to another stupid sporting shoes store in the mall, so I wrote on it "Bring back Camelot Music!"