With demise of places like Tower Records where are collectors buying their dvd's? (1 Viewer)

[Michael Elliott]

It's not that they can't give you five DRACULA's but you have to keep in mind how many new releases there are a week. Their shelves simply can't stock everything so they have to go buy previous sales on what to stock. The two stores in Louisville use to stock every Jess Franco title but they simply weren't moving copies so that might have something to do with why DRACULA wasn't stocked. The Image/Franco/Euro titles certainly weren't selling around here so I'm going to guess that's why they haven't been stocked the past couple of years. The lack of previous sales on Euro titles has hurt Dark Sky, BCI and various other companies. Not to mention someone like Severin and their X-rated titles that can't make it into BB.

BB also doesn't like to carry titles with a $24.95 retail price or higher. That's why Shriek Show can't get new releases in the store BUT they can get those "3 packs for $14.95" in the store. BCI can't get their 2 Naschy titles in there at retail price but they made a deal with BB to carry a cheaper, 2-disc pack.

The problem is shelf space and an overwhelming amount of new titles each week. Even the Warner sets aren't showing up like they use to so it's not just "B" films or "Z" rated Euro films. It's every genre.

 

[Jon Martin]

I think it all depends on the store, for many of the chains.

The Circuit Cities in my area are organized just fine. I never have any trouble finding DVDs.

I hear a lot of people talking about Costco, yet the ones in my area are terrible as far as DVDs go. They have one row, DVDs just released in the last few weeks, no organization, boxes piled on boxes. Just a complete mess.

As for people working in a store not knowing some of these titles, I wouldn't be too hard on them. They are retail clerks, not movie fans. I'm sure there are a lot of people here who don't know who Alice Faye is.

As for great stores, does anyone remember Laser Craze in Boston? Two floors of laserdiscs?

 

[Steve...O]

I would suspect that Warners, Fox, et al are having more luck selling their classic box sets online than anywhere else. With shelf real estate being at a premium bulky boxes just don't get the space allotted to them. That's one reason why Warners, and now Fox, has shifted to slimcase packaging. They take up a lot less room and are more likely to make it to mass merchants. In my opinion, it's really a shame that slim cases weren't used from the get go since home storage can be a real issue with many consumers. I'll admit to passing over some box sets that were questionable buys to begin with simply because I couldn't justify giving up some precious shelf space that could be used later for a title I really wanted.

Steve

 

[David Deeb]

Well, that's the biggest part of the problem & one of the reasons we're talking about it in this thread: "With demise of places like Tower Records where are collectors buying their DVDs".

Tower employees wanted to work in the music / movie business. And these type stores catered to us collectors.

Passionate media stores with passionate employees are what we miss.

Clueless clerks & boxes of cheap stuff piled high at Costco are not what we miss, nor where collectors are enjoying their hobby.

 

[ted:r]

I still go to Brick and Mortars but doing so makes me feel like a dinosaur. I do check out Best Buy (their catalog definitely aint what it used to be) and Borders (better catalog, higher prices) on most Tuesdays (used to be faithfully every Tuesday...I'm getting old, methinks.) If I don't find what I really want, I go to the Amazon route.

BTW I was in NYC last Friday and saw the papered up Tower (on 4th and B'way...near the long lost Bottom Line) . Since I remember buying records there (I remember wandering (more like straining) around the Village looking for it ca. 83 (I was NYC street unwise)) it struck me as sad. But then corps will come and corps will go I suppose.

Heck, maybe I'm just nostalgic. But I can't tell you how many hours I happily spent in used records stores just binning. (Man, I love the smell of old books and record sleeves!) It's great that its easier to get a lot of things that used to be hard to find. Growing up in a small town, I know it is. But I can't deny some of the thrill is gone.

 

[RobertGr]

Hey David andTed.

You both rock! I feel the same on Tower sure you would go in there and see the girls with the green dyed hair and piecrings everywhere and the guys with the Spiked hair at the counter and say I am in some althernate universe but when you asked them if they had Hopalong Cassidy dvd's from Image they knew exactly what you meant and took you to the bin where the discs were! I went to Costco once and saw the GARY COOPER collection for $17.99 I sadly did not buy it but I felt like a guy you see picking up the soda cans out of the garbage for recycling digging through the boxes to get a good title from the heap!

 

[Sean A]

We may have met. I was there with him a few times.Yep, Chris is a great dude. we bonded over our mutual love of classic films

Mostly, I get my DVDs from J&R Music World in Manhattan. They usually have the cheapest prices generally on new releases. Also, they have periodic label sales where you can get stuff dirt cheap. A few weeks ago , they had a Universal sale where I picked up "Jurassic Park" and "The Lost World" for $6.00 each . Last year, on Black Friday weekend, they had a sale where I picked up the recent "Longest Day" and "Towering Inferno" 2 disc sets for $7 bucks a pop. And I watch for good sales at the Deep Discount website (just got the Criterion "Jules and Jim", which lists for $40.00, for $23.00)

 

[RobertGr]

Hey Sean,

Chris is THE man to talk to about the Warner's gangster films of the 1930's! Totally the historian on the genre. I have always wanted to get to J & R but haven't,with those prices you mentioned me thinks I will check the place out sooner than later. Interestingly they opened a satellite J & R in Macy's Herald Square and with my continuing association with Macy's through the book I should spend more time checking the dvd's in the Cellar!

 

[Michael Elliott]

Exactly. However, people still shouldn't be too hard on 16-year-old BB employees just because they don't know who Michael Shayne is. I mean, I'm sure some of us wouldn't know who some of their favorite rap artists are. Seriously, they're 16-year-olds just trying to get gas money for the weekend so they can try and score with their girlfriends. I don't see the point in giving them a beating because they don't know which year Chaney's PHANTOM OF THE OPERA was released.

In fact, I'd be ashamed of myself if one of them knew more than me.

 

[Joe Karlosi]

Yeah, and while they can't stock everything, meanwhile they're driving out TOWER and smaller stores like LASERLAND and other stores who could and did stock everything. How could a relatively tiny mom and pop store like LASERLAND stock it all while a huge monster like BEST BUY can't? Now, before you say "that's why LASERLAND went out of business," that wasn't the reason.

 

[TravisR]

If the person can look up a title on a computer (even if you have to spell it for them), I don't care if they know every title in history or if they consider The Matrix to be an old movie. Whether they know a title or not isn't going to make it appear in the store.

 

[RobertGr]

Joe I agree with you that if you are going to work in the department that sells cd/dvd's you should at least no something about what you sell. Laserland had copies of every Laserdisc release and then when dvd came out they tried to do the same. I knew that even though it would mean a 30 minute drive I would have got the disc when I got there. The BB story I relayed of only 3 copies expected in meant I HAD to be there when the store opened THEY WOULD NOT HOLD THE DISC or even order me one it was a case of if you want it be here at 10am.

I still hold firm that if these places made an effort to boldly show a CLASSIC dvd section and collector's got wind of it they would make the store THE place to shop, it worked at Lasersalnd until BB came in and dumped dvd's at great prices for new releases.

What killed Laserland was he would sell a MAJOR new release example like
SPIDERMAN for $22.99 and BB would have it for $19.99. Of course the volume BB did compared to Laserland on titles is what killed Laserland.

 

[Eric Huffstutler]

Years ago I use to shop at a Suncoast for VHS (before DVDs) and they had Laser Discs too. I really liked the atmosphere and the way the store was set up but like others, even then, the clerks didn't have that great of knowledge about what they were selling. This was also during the phasing out of Laser Discs so I am sure that had something to do with the demise of the store in our area? They were accommodating for special orders though.

If we had stores (plural) like that in my city that sold DVD and other formats (with the dim light showcased relaxed atmosphere), I would visit it more often than Circuit City, Best Buys, Barns and Noble, etc...

Eric S. Huffstutler
Richmond, VA

 

[Harpozep]

I run a b&M store that stocked over five thousand DVD titles and have seven thousand for rent. The heady days of all our romantic times of buying in stores like mine are all but over. Thankyou everyones bottom line and the e-tailer.

Overhead eats up profit and we have overhead in retail that e-tailers will never have. Rent for decent real estate is but one factor. My electric bill is one thousand to fifteen hundred a month , and staffing for a five thousand square foot front with so many items in it ( Think Newbury comics, with actual comics
) gets out of control real quickly.

The discounts offered to me by my distributors are terrible, with no price protection or returns. That is how it is in the trenches. a $29.99 DVD often costs me $22.50 plus shipping.

The repricing of DVDs is one reason we are dropping most DVD sales. We tried to offer a full line support of almost all anime titles that came out in the US and even did some importing and region free DVD player sales. With a lot of DVDs still in stock at say twenty something dollars retail, companies repriced their offerings at half that a bit later and killed profits for us. In fact we have to sell what we have way below cost just to match the newer pricing. Remember, no returns, no price protection guarantees from the DVD manufacturers.........


BB opened up and even though their pricing was almost the same on all anime, customers perceived BB as the place to get their stuff since it was new to the area . We have been here seventeen years. A number of customers love the fact they save money with DDD etc. Can't blame them. They tell me to shop there.:frowning:

I have former DVD renter who live two blocks from my store saying I'm inconvenient so he rents from Netflix WTF? We are open most hours of the day seven days a week and have been for seventeen years. Inconvenient? Huh? He rents the same titles..... I guess some folks define convenient differently than I do. We bend over backwards for customer service and availability.

I used to shop Laser Craze and Sight & Sound in Massachusetts. Now they were happening places, esp Sight & Sound! Ah those were the days before the mass merchants and cheap DVD player and even cheaper software. I guess we got what we wanted, eh?

I suppose not enough of us are really nostalgic for shopping like we used to do. The specialty shops of old are going and NOT being replaced. Read this from one of my favorite haunts for the last thirty years. Avenue Victor Hugo's Book store, Boston:

http://www.avenuevictorhugobooks.com/

Twelve reasons for the death of small and independent book stores

Ever thankful to those who made the effort before us, with heartfelt apologies to those who are still in the fight and the few who support them--offered upon the closing of Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston.

1. Corporate law (and the politicians, lawyers, businessmen and accountants who created it for their own benefit)--a legal fiction with more rights than the individual citizen, which allows the likes of Barnes & Noble and Walmart to write off the losses of a store in Massachusetts against the profit of another in California, while paying taxes in Delaware--for making ‘competition’ a joke and turning the free market down the dark road toward state capitalism.

2. Publishers--marketing their product like so much soap or breakfast cereal, aiming at demographics instead of people, looking for the biggest immediate return instead of considering the future of their industry, ignoring the art of typography, the craft of binding, and needs of editing, all to make a cheapened product of glue and glitz--for being careless of a 500 year heritage with devastating result.

3. Book buyers--those who want the ‘convenience’ and ‘cost savings’ of shopping in malls, over the quaint, the dusty, or the unique; who buy books according to price instead of content, and prefer what is popular over what is good--for creating a mass market of the cheap, the loud, and the shiny.

4. Writers--who sell their souls to be published, write what is already being written or choose the new for its own sake, opt to feed the demands of editors rather than do their own best work, place style over substance, and bear no standards--for boring their readers unto television.

5. Booksellers--who supply the artificial demand created by marketing departments for the short term gain, accept second class treatment from publishers, push what is ‘hot’ instead of developing the long term interest of the reader--for failing to promote quality of content and excellence in book making.

6. Government (local, state and federal)--which taxes commercial property to the maximum, driving out the smaller and marginal businesses which are both the seed of future enterprise and the tradition of the past, while giving tax breaks to chain stores, thus killing the personality of a city--for producing the burden of tax codes only accountants can love.

7. Librarians--once the guardians, who now watch over their budgets instead--for destroying books which would last centuries to find room for disks and tapes which disintegrate in a few years and require costly maintenance or replacement by equipment soon to be obsolete.

8. Book collectors--who have metamorphosed from book worms to moths attracted only to the bright; once the sentinels of a favorite author’s work, now mere speculators on the ephemeral product of celebrity--for putting books on the same level with beanie babies.

9. Teachers--assigning books because of topical appeal, or because of their own lazy familiarity, instead of choosing what is best; thus a tale about the teenage angst of a World War Two era prep school boy is pushed at students who do not know when World War Two took place--for failing to pass the torch of civilization to the next generation.

10. Editors--who have forgotten the editorial craft--for servicing the marketing department, pursuing fast results and name recognition over quality of content and offering authors the Faustian bargain of fame and fortune, while pleading their best intentions like goats.

11. Reviewers--for promoting what is being advertised, puffing the famous to gain attention, being petty and personal, and praising the obscure with priestly authority--all the while being paid by the word.

12. The Public--those who do not read books, or can not find the time; who live by the flickering light of the television, and will be the first to fear the darkening of civilization--for not caring about consequences.

Thus, we come to the twilight of the age of books; to the closing of the mind; to the pitiful end of the quest for knowledge--and stare into the cold abyss of night.

John Usher

From THE HOUND by John Usher, copyright 2004. Permission to reproduce is granted to all upon request with proper attribution. "


Truer words I could not speak. He has said much on the death of the specialty shop.

I leave now for work, to reinvent my place once again. DVD is dead, time for me to make room for something that sells and that a specialty store can still do better than the big boys...... Games Workshop Miniatures, comics and graphic novels. Bring back the readers.

I'm tired of catering to the masses who shun the smaller stores and think unendingly about the bottom line. Yes, it is our duty to be thrifty, but folks, we are losing some of our legacy in the process. Just checkout any down town a few years after a Wal Mart appears.........
The old adage, "Be careful what you Wish for.......

 

[SteveJKo]

The last time I purchased a DVD at a brick & mortar was the recent release of "A Man For All Seasons". I went to three major retailers, at each one I had employees look at me like I had three heads. I finally ended up at Barnes & Nobles. They had one copy there, and it was in the action/adventure section. Like the rest of you, I find myself purchasing more and more on line.

 

[Barry_B_B]

This thread sure makes you see what's slowly been happening; sad and a little frightening. 99% of my shopping is done online now (mainly DeepDiscount) except Tuesday release if anything of interest comes out. :frowning:

 

[David Deeb]

Now it's starting to happen w/ the high end audio stores too. One of the premier audio stores here is getting out of retail and only doing home installations. Tweeter is closing about 40+ stores throughout the region including all the ones in this market.

Its a shame because people go listen / "test drive" great home theater equipment in these AV shops then go home and order it online. And much of the public is perfectly satisfied with "home theater in a box" stuff at BB or CC so they don't shop at AV store anymore anyway.

Are the high end audio stores going to be extinct too?

 

[Dave B Ferris]

I miss Tower, as well. For CD's, I'll browse at a Virgin Megastore, but I have
found I am now ordering more items online from Dusty Groove. I heartily recommend Dusty Groove, although they specialize in soul, R&B, latin,
and Brazilian (very little rock, no classical, for example).

For DVD's I *should be* one of the lucky fellows because I live near a
well-known dedicated DVD store: DVD Planet (formerly Ken Crane's)
in Huntington Beach. However, in the last two weeks, I have had
the following experiences: during the initial release week, by the time I went to the store on the first Saturday after the Tuesday release date, DVD Planet had sold-out of the Michael Shayne collection, as well as the Literary Classics
collection and the Ernest Hemingway collection. In each case however, I was
able to find the releases at a Best Buy I passed on the way back to my house.

I'm now thinking DVD Planet sells out of these hard-to-find releases because
customers go there specifically to purchase the more esoteric titles, knowing other titles like Borat can be found at virtually any store (even supermarkets have displays for massively popular titles).

 

[Brian Whitish]

I too am very sad about the small stores going out of business. I love to by things from a person. Here in Seattle we had Videophile which is going out of business and was Laserdisc only when it opened. They gave a discount for preorders. But they were more than BB and CC on a lot of things. They still even have Laserdiscs(used) on consignment. A bunch of mine are there. They would credit your account when they sold and allowed me to expand my DVD collection. We do have a CD-DVD specialty store called Silver Platters. They have four locations in the Seattle area and took over one of the Tower stores. They are higher than the big box stores but have a great staff and a deep selection. Hopefully they will stay around because I really love uncovering hidden gems or finding something you have been looking for. I really dont like online retailers.

 

[RobertGr]

Hey Brian

It is amazing how many stores have closed up here in Long Island, we lost the Laserland's, we lost Tower, We lost Sam Goody. We have Borders, Barnes and Noble, BB Walmart and Circuit City too. Last time I went to Walmart everything was out of order and any title was impossible to find. The clerks suggestion was "go on our website and order it."

I still hold firm like another poster here that if there was a dvd dedicated store with a great low-key atmosphere that would carry a huge selection it would do well.

Laserland here had a great deal when they sold laserdiscs they gave you a punch card and after your 10th disc you would get one for free. Somebody should do the same with dvd's the extra free disc when factored in would bring the other discs down in price another $2.00 and kind of zero-ing out the tax bringing them in line with the total price of e-tailers!