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

Hi

I heard something interesting on the radio yesterday, the music business is finding it hard selling product with the demise of places like Tower Records. I assume studios miss their dvd's selling in Tower too, I used to find their prices on dvd's better than BEST BUY. On BEST BUY it is difficult getting the classic titles example I called the Friday before MICHAEL SHAYNE was to be released and they told me they were only expecting 3 copies, I had to get there at 10am this past Tuesday to make sure I got one of the 3 they had, I now find myself making most of my purchases from DEEPDISCOUNT and I usually use their free shipping but it seems to come by Pony Express.

Fellow collectors can you tell me where you buy most of your classic dvd's from? I hope you guys can tell me some great places to buy from!


: )

Not brick and mortars, that's for sure. Online retail or columbiahouse accounts for at least 90% of my purchases, even including the early days of the format. Once in awhile I buy used from physical stores, once in awhile a well-priced set at Costco. The occasional advertised door buster/loss leader at someplace like Fry's or Circuit City, etc.

Once or twice I've used the B&Ms when I've heard of a title I was interested in but hadn't acquired going out of print - safer sometimes than seeing what comes of the online market. I know I've bought newly OOP stuff at Fry's, Borders.

Best Buy is next to useless for me. Uncompetetive prices, uninspiring selection.

Thanks, I bought one box at Borders to date although they do carry a good selection. Someone here last October posted a link to a $10.00 coupon for Borders if you joined their rewards program at the time they had the second Bogart box on sale at $39.99 they took the coupon so I got $10.00 so I got the box featruing THE MALTESE FALCON for a total of $32.99 including tax!!!!

By the way, any of us interested in bargain hunting on DVDs should be interested in the arguments beginning today in the Supreme Court, as the case of whether or not to overturn the 1911 Dr. Miles price-fixing ruling kicks off. This is the ruling that allows for the concept of retail sales below MSRP in the first place (to put it simply. At heart it's an antitrust question). Without it, a manufacturer (let's say Fox) could mandate that a product (let's say a Borat DVD) could only be sold at the price it sets - no differing prices from one store to another. This existing rule may well end up getting overturned or significantly modified.

Funny, we were just talking about this last night.

I mostly buy DVDs upon their release, from online retailers -- it's the cheapest and easiest thing to do.

But online "browsing" is really impossible. I really miss Tower. I would walk down Broadway from my apartment to Tower Records, at least twice a week. Good exercise, and good browsing.

I don't know how to buy CDs anymore, either.

I'm also a longtime Tower customer, especially for music. Their musical selection was very good (particularly for classical and jazz), and they also had great deals on DVD box sets (I bought my Busby Berkeley and Thin Man boxes through Tower). They also had great discount promotions (e.g. 20% off deals) which made those purchases a bit easier on my bottom line.

For DVDs and CDs nowadays, I'm all over the place online. Borders, Deep Discount, B&N, etc. I rarely go to the brick & mortar establishments, unless I'm in the area or if I need some instant gratification.

Hi Robert,

My wife and I are COSTCO members and I've purchased numerous Warners sets there for fantastic prices. Lately, they've been getting Fox boxes in also. The only downside is that sometimes you have to wait a week or two past release date. Sometimes not. It just depends on the title. Of course, COSTCO does have a $50 membership fee.

Borders has a wonderful selection and decent customer service, but unless you have one of those 30% coupons the in-store prices are horrid. Whenever I get a Borders gift certificate I use it at their on-line store which is essential the same thing as amazon.com. Best Buy does nothing for me (prices not that great, terrible customer service, etc.).

Online, I purchase from LASERS EDGE (they're excellent at getting product to you by release date and have great customer service in general), Amazon, and Deep Discount. When DeepDiscount has their semi-annual 20% sale I'll occasionally "catch-up" on my backlog. If it's something I want in a hurry, I'll pony up for shipping otherwise free is fine.

Steve

Really? Selection aside, I've always found them to be one of the cheaper of B&M stores. Usually cheaper than Circuit City.

At least the two in my area.

Tower never made it to Houston. We lost our last good CD-browsing stores years ago.

Online is the only way to go to get those more obscure releases at reasonable prices (both CD & DVD).

But man, I sure miss those lazy Saturday afternoons spent perusing the stacks at Sound Warehouse or Planet Music. :frowning:

Hi Steve, I was looking forward to hearing where you and others on this great board being major "classic" dvd collector's. In my area in Long Island we had a great chain of store called LASERLAND. They were run by a great guy named Larry S and it was a "classic" collector's heaven. He carried every Laserdisc release and in fact one his locations hosted the Laserdisc Roadshows the industry conducted. I got to meet Garrett Lee from Image there and more importantly David Goldstein whom at the time was Sr VP for FOX HOME VIDEO. I had a Laserdisc newsletter and I had gotten to now Mr. Goldstein and contacts at Image very well through my newlsetter.

David did a great job at FOX and he built a good team and eventually led FOX in a great direction which Steve Feldstein and team FOX hav taken the ball and run with!


Laserland was a meeting place for all film collectors to get together and talk film and we had some famous people shop there including Spike Lee's cinematographer. Around the corner from Laserland was Tower Records and then later BEST BUY. Laserland sadly closed up before Tower because he could not compete with BEST BUY.

Which was a big blow to us classic collector's because BEST BUY has young kids whom do not know what classics are hence 3 copies of MICHAEL SHAYNE!

On collecting Laserdiscs I have a couple of treasures the biggie is a copy of LASSIE COME HOME autographed with the cover autographed by Roddy McDowell whom was a avid laseridsc collector and I had a geeat meeting with. And the laserdisc is HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY also signed by Roddy McDowell and also signed by Miss Maureen O'Hara on the same cover whom I met while researching my book on the Macy's Parade!

I went to LaserLand a few times , Great selection, and I remember those Laser disc roadshows as well

(BTW Robert - I think we may have a "6 Degrees" type connection... I believe you know my cousin Chris H. , since I realize you did the Macy's parade book )

Hey Sean

Yes in fact I think I met you at Laserland once or was it Chris' brother? Chris was great to work with io the book in fact he really worked hard because he had to match his writing style to mine as I had set the direction the book would take writing wise and his stuff matched mine seamlessly, we still are great friends!


Where do you buy your CLASSIC dvd's from?

Ahhh laser land...I used to go there all the time. I was kind of sad when everything went to DVD because going there lost its charm. Seeing a store with nothing but laser discs was quite rare.

Circuit City is just as bad. I looked for Ben Fold's newest CD at CC for 10:00 minutes. The "F's" were in a ridiculous jumbled order with lots of D's, E's and G's thrown in for no good reason.

I asked the drooling kid, "Where is Ben Fold's new CD?" He said, "What kind of music is it?"

I miss Tower. The staff knew everything & had a passion to work at a record & video store. BB and CC kids just have a job & are uninterested in music or movies.

I buy now from Amazon, some Borders, 3 local music specialty stores (non chains) and a little from the Tower replacement, FYE. However, FYE's prices are ridiculous. $18-$19 for 25 year old CDs!!!!!

Recently I have been running around town trying to find a copy of Dark Sky's COUNT DRACULA, but to no avail. Yeah, I can always go into one of the few stores left and have them order COUNT DRACULA for me - I give 'em a deposit, and then they call me when it's in -- but phooey.

I live in New York, so you can imagine how many stores there were where, in past days, I could always somehow locate any DVD I could ever have wanted for the past 10 years. Speaking of LASERLAND, I knew it well and was there each and every week, practicially. A friend of mine worked there, and being a fan of obscure horrors himself, he made sure that the store stocked every title you could possibly imagine. All I had to do was walk into LASERLAND on any given day and I could buy anything I desired, or browse titles that I never heard of, to see if I was interested in doing a blind buy. Well, sadly, LASERLAND went out of business in 2004 -- forced out by the sleazy Big Guys. After that, the genre fans in our area had to rely on TOWER and BEST BUY. But at least BB used to stock a lot of horror titles, and TOWER was a great store and there were three TOWER stores in my area alone (as Robert just said, we had TOWER and LASERLAND and BEST BUY right in the same area).

Which leads us to the recent tragedy of the closing of TOWER RECORDS/VIDEO. I cannot even begin to express the loss I feel there. The closing of TOWER was a painful crush to all the lovers of music and movies, and its void is tremendous. And I often call BEST BUY either "BUST" BUY or "WORST" BUY, as they have recently stopped stocking rare titles and they continually kill off all their small competition but yet are ironically selling far less genre titles than the old stores did!! Who ever thought that going shopping and loving the thrill of the hunt, of being able to physically touch and hold an item in your hand and going home that same day with a treasure would start to become a thing of the past?? Going shopping is actually becoming a dinosaur!! Going on shopping sprees with friends is being resigned to the dustbins of nostalgia!

I always hear online shoppers expresing how much they "love shopping online," and now much more "convenient" it is. Well, I'm sorry, but I don't like doing it. I don't like having to put my personal credit card info online, don't like dealing with people who aren't flesh and blood and instead exist only out there in cyberspace somewhere, and I don't like racking up interest and other fees to an already overwhelmed credit account which I am struggling to conquer. I just want to go in a store, browse around, mingle, enjoy the live feeling and experience of shopping, pay in CASH, and hand pick the one title I choose to take home and make part of my library myself - not have to risk being mailed a damaged amaray case, or a disc that has fallen from it's hub and rattled around in transit.

So shopping for our favorite movies and music has gone the way of the dinosaur.

Boy, is it Over.

I pre-order a lot of my stuff through Amazon.com - although I am in Montreal, QC - because Amazon.ca is a lot more expensive somehow.

But if I want to buy in a store, we have a fabulous one in downtown Montreal that carries every DVD you can think of including all the classics and foreign films. It's called Metro-Video (DVD only) - if any of you ever come over here, that's the place to go. Just amazing and the prices are very good usually. The only downfall is that the release dates are not always the same in Canada, they are usually delayed by a few weeks (probably the time it takes to make those beloved bilingual covers .

I live in Richmond, VA and the national headquaters for Cirucit City is here but their stores are not doing so well. In fact they closed one of the original stores here a year ago. Best Buys is doing better but we only have one and is a 40 mile round trip for me across town. Towers here had mainly retail pricing so was no bargain with DVDs. Music was different but since I am a bargain hunter, I shop online 99% of the time anyway. I am not above purchasing "viewed once" DVDs especially OOP or hard to find titles. Haven't had any problems with them yet.

Eric

This type of price fixing goes on today "unofficially" with quite a few products. Those that come to mind offhand are name brand golf clubs, Apple Ipods, a certain four-letter word speaker company (rhymes with blows ), and video game consoles. Try finding any price differences on any of these products at a legimitate retailer or etailer.

My DVD and music purchases are almost exclusively done online. Amazon is my first choice.

Newbury Comics is pretty great if you live in New England - the prices are generally better than Tower's full-retail prices were, and the DVD shelves include Criterion, Foreign, and "Asian Action" (although they can sometimes be light on older films). I'm doing most of my purchasing through Amazon right now because of their quite frankly ridiculous discounts on HD media through the end of the year, but Newbury Comics is where I like to browse.

Hey Joe and Charlie

Laserland was THE place to buy laserdsics/dvd's on Long Island! You are right but when he moved the main store from Glen Cove Rd around the corner the store lost a lot of charm too.

Eric totally agree on Circuit City, it is so frustrating because they have some great loss leaders to get you in the store. But they never have the titles in stock. When the ALICE FAYE box came out they had it in their flyer for $39.99 which was the best price in any store in my area. I called about 6 of them in the area and not one had the gotten the box or even heard of it. If they want to increase their customer base for dvd's they should at least make an effort to stock the titles in their flyers.

And one the problems is hiring people whom no nothing about films either. Like Joe said Laserland had people whom cared about film, Joe P was the horror nut whom was always speaking of Mario Bava, Matt was always talking about TOP SECRET or HOTS SHOTS. Chris was always talking classics especially anything from Warner's gangster genre 1930's!

One of the biggest sellers in laserdiscs there at the time was the Looney Tunes laserdiscs box's and also the STAR WARS cav box! The best times there were on Sunday morning when a bunch of the customers would meet in the store and talk about what they were buying, ordering, what they heard was coming out soon etc.

I feel BEST BUY is certainly losing their edge on sale prices. They wanted $44.99 for the ALICE FAYE box when CIRCUIT CUT was advertising it at $39.99. All of these B & M's should have a "classic corner" though and keep it fully stocked with a wide variety if they did I bet they would pick up customers whom wanted to get a title in their hands on day of release instead of being held hostage by the postal service.