***Official The Incredibles DVD Discussion (merged) Thread*** (1 Viewer)

[Roy Batty]

I am afraid you are wrong. All you can accomplish is, maybe, to have some employee to receive some kind of warning or whatever, but teaching them a little better about their products? No way.

I am pretty sure that regional manager is well aware of the fact that their employees' product knowledge is close to inexistent, but the ugly truth is that the company DOES NOT CARE about that. Why? Because most customers are the "undiscriminating" type, so the company is not losing all that much money on the well-informed, demanding customers like you or most of us on this boards. Disney –or any other big company whose name you want to put here– is just hiring cheap, and they know that, at the end of the day, it's not the product which makes the sale, it is the publicity, and that's where most companies are investing their big bucks today, and have been so for some 20 years now.

Just take a look at the electronics market. Years ago, a TV set was sold on word-of-mouth; if it looked great, customers were happy and the word got spread. It were the products themselves who were in competition, so they needed to be good for real to reach larger sales. Today, companies know that they do not need to market a good product, but just to convince people that it IS a good product. How? Through publicity. It is not the best product what makes for the best sale, but the best ad campaign.

The bottom line today is that companies simply do not care, because they are making money anyway.

 

[Eric Peterson]

My thoughts exactly. This is a store that specializes in product from one company, and only sells a limited number of DVD titles. Of those titles, it's a fair assessment that "The Incredibles" will be their biggest seller this year, and for the employees to not know anything about the release on the release date is a bit disturbing to say the least. I wonder how many other customers have questioned them today, and all walked out thinking "This is the only release".

 

[Mike Frezon]

Nope. Used to be the case, but as pointed out by Garysb, the Disney Stores are now all owned by The Children's Place. The NYC store (still owned by Disney) is called "World of Disney"

Like in so many other areas of life, customer service at the Disney Stores has dropped dramatically. There will always be exceptions, of course. But the knowledgeability of the majority of Disney Store staff has followed the lemmings off the cliff.

 

[WillG]

True, but I always like to see directors defend their Aspect Ratio Choices. This is something that sadly you don't see directors do that often, especially some directors who have enough clout to effectively do so. So I would have liked to have been to see the full introduction. It might not change people's minds on a large scale, but it couldn't hurt to include it anyway. And if you could turn just one person on to the benefits of OAR presentation, it's worth it to me.

 

[Ernest Rister]

Way back when, and I mean like ten years ago, the Disney Store was a great place, full of premium books, nice clothes, really nice merchandise, and the most up-to-date video and music selections of Disney product around. Just about the time the notrorious former Disneyland theme park Prexy Paul Pressler turned the stores on Main Street into a sea of junk, the same thing happened to the Disney store. The quality of the merchandise shifted away from premium goods towards cheap plastic crap, hideous cheap clothes, a single rack for movies, no books to be found, and unless you like no-talent pre-fab pop stars, no decent music in the entire place.

I haven't been to a Disney store since...I remember. Funny story.

Every word of this is true:

It was right after "Jungle Book 2" came out on video, and I wandered into a DS on a whim, just to see what was on the video rack. A woman with her baby was holding a copy of Jungle Book 2 with an odd expression on her face, and a female clerk was speaking to her, with her back to me. The conversation between the two went like this:

CUSTOMER
Don't you have the original Jungle Book?

CLERK
It's in the vault.

CUSTOMER
What?

CLERK
It's in the vault, ma'am.

CUSTOMER
(confused)
Can you get it?

CLERK
From time to time, Disney movies go back into the vault so they can be enjoyed again later.

CUSTOMER
So - you don't have it?

CLERK
No, ma'am. But this is just as good as Jungle Book.

Behind the clerk, I caught the customer's eye and began shaking my head "no, no, no" silently.

CUSTOMER
(putting the movie back)
Okay, well, thanks anyway.

The clerk must have caught the woman's expression after making eye contact with me and putting the movie back, because she immediately turned to face me. I had my innocent face on, and acted like I was flipping through Disney Mania CDs.

CLERK
(placing 1000 curses on me with her eyes)
Thanks.

The clerk walked back to her counter, annoyed as hell. I caught up to the customer a couple of minutes later and told her she could buy the Jungle Book on e*bay. She thanked me, then gave me the key to her hotel room. Turns out she was in town to teach a Kama Sutra seminar, and had been given multiple bottles of Jack Daniels and 2 pounds of Ethiopian hash as a gratuity and needed help consuimg it all before she flew back to the Amazon.

 

[Michael Warner]

Ernest, do you mean to tell me that after such an adventure as that you have never again set foot inside a Disney (no relation to Walt) Store?

 

[Mike Frezon]

That Kama Sutra can be tough on the back, I guess.....

 

[JohnAP]

Obviously, members of this forum know more about dvd than most, but widescreen is selling better than fullscreen now and it seems strange that people working in a store selling dvds wouldn't know the difference and downright dishonest that they would try and deliberately fool you if they did. I guess just don't buy dvds from the Disney store anymore.

 

[Ernest Rister]

Okay, MOST of that story is true. I invented a few details for entertainment value.

By the way, the Incredibles DVD is easter egg city. On Disc Two, on any of the animated menus, just wait for a bit and eventually a little tiny OmniDroid Robot will appear in the top right of your screen. Hit the -> button and then hit enter, and voila! Instant hidden bonus features.

They're even on the "Index" pages.

Most of them are very silly, so far nothing as good as the alternate version of "When She Loved Me" from Toy Story 2.

 

[RyanAn]

...and I was that woman!

The release should have come with both versions, with a side by side comparison so people could see what they were getting into.

-

I do not think the Disney store clerks get a commision, so I can not believe how someone could get mad by loosing a sale.

ry/

 

[Robert Spalding]

Was the DVD tied up?

 

[Yahya]

The only thing that will change the practices of employees in a retail environment is the store's bottom line. Eventually that store's bottom line will suffer and you'ld better believe the first place a manager will look is at their employees.If they need the job then they should strive to keep it. If they don't care about the job then they should find another. You should lodge a complaint with the store manager and not feel one bit of guilt in doing so. You'ld be helping them (the managers) do their job.
That said you can take comfort in the fact that they'll (the clerks/offenders) eventually get theirs one way or another.(probably get treated the same or worse else wheres when they are in "your shoes", karma can be a bastard)
I'm planning on picking this dvd up tomorrow night. On my way out of the supermarket tonight I saw plenty of both releases sitting at the ezscan registers in a nice lil stand off.

 

[Tony_Ramos]

You think YOu have a horror story?

I DID buy the Fullscreen copy by accident! HOPEFULLY Best Buy will let me exchange it since i work there!!!

This is the first time it has happened to me b/c I was in a hurry. and now I see why you guys complain that they even release a fullscreen.

 

[Jeff Whitford]

Ernest, that is the funniest and most clever thing ive read in sometime.

 

[Paul D G]

Eric -- sounds to me like you weren't the only one calling them on their mistake!

-paul

 

[DeanWG]

The Best Buy Litho may indeed be very limited. I didn't much care for taking one home, but since I was a Reward Zone customer, it was handed to me. When I got home I discovered that I have a wonderful lithograph HOLDER with no lithograph inside it. DOH!

 

[Drew Reiber]

I remember the good old days. Is it any wonder that most of the franchise has gone out of business? Idiots.

Well, the moronic aspects of the company go well beyond just their stores. This vault business is the most self-destruction company policy I've ever seen in home video. The buy-anything-the-kids-want phase in a parent's life is a short lived period that usually predates the age where children develop reason. So instead of opening their entire library up to their consumer base, at which point the 2-7 year olds can see any movie they want, Disney instead punishes their audience for having kids on during the wrong vault cycle.

As a twenty something without kids, I have given up bothering to buy animated films from Disney. If it's not the umpteenth million version of one of their films, it's simply not available. Disney, through Miramax, releases a great film like Finding Neverland and yet you can't buy the animated Peter Pan at the time of the Neverland's theatrical run or home video release. I wonder if this foolishness occurred to them when they reported how their DVD sales had drastically declined in the last year.

I walked out of Neverland with my love for the Peter Pan characters completely re-invigorated. As soon as I could, I went to the local Best Buy to purchase both the recent live-action version and the classic Disney film. When I couldn't find the Disney one, I called my friends up who then explained to me that it was in the vault and I could get it on ebay. You know what? Between the effort, the extra cost and having to figure out what version to look for, I lost any and all interest I had. I'm perfectly happy saving my money for the product of another studio who has the brains to respect the casual consumer or understand the fundamentals of crosspromotion. Idiots.

 

[clayton b]

It is frustrating, Disney's 'vault' policy. But it does work incredibly well for them. When Disney releases something, people flock right away to buy it because they know they won't be able to get it in a few months. They've been doing it for years, it's tried and true.

But yeah, it does suck for the consumer who doesn't have one of their titles. For whatever the reason I didn't get the Ultimate Toy Box and now I'm pretty much hooped.

 

[Jon Martin]

I buy a lot of Disney DVDs and have never bought one from a Disney Store, even though there is one in the same mall as the only area Best Buy. I've been in there a few times and they have very few DVDs.

They aren't really a DVD retailer. The clerks know more about stuffed animals then they know about DVDs. So, I wouldn't really blame them for not knowing the difference between wide and full screen.

 

[Eric Peterson]

It wasn't that they didn't know the difference, they argued that the other version didn't exist. Plus, as I mentioned above, this will most likely be their biggest selling product of the year, and I would expect a clerk to know the details about their biggest selling products. I wasn't asking whether their Cinderella Keychain is available in purple as well as pink?