August 23, 2003

Having been to a lot of stores lately, and checked a lot of prices, one thing I can say is that DVDs vary hugely in price. I refuse to pay more than $20 for a DVD, and want to pay about $10, but usually end up paying around $15.  This takes selective shopping and the ability to resist impulse purchases, but it can be done.  I've seen the same movie selling from $9 to $32, depending on the store, so obviously some comparison shopping will save you a lot of money.  Here's my quick run down of DVD store options:

¤ Price Club (CostCo) is a good place to get them, since they sell everything for $20 at the most, with older stuff usually around $18 or $14.  Unfortunately their selection is pretty sparse, since they stock just brand new releases, with some older titles that some movie company has a promotion going for.  It's very hit or miss there though, and you've got to get it when you see it; you can't count on ever seeing anything that's been on DVD for longer than about three months.  Price Club gets in shipments of things in huge quantities (hence the low prices) but you never know what they'll get, so you have to check often. (I do not.) Also, you need to be a Price Club member to get inside, and the membership is a yearly fee.

¤ The most expensive DVDs I've ever seen were all at Barnes and Noble or Borders.  These big bookstores had a base price of $30 for most new DVDs, though they had lots of older ones for $20ish.  We got Conan and and a couple of other older titles we hadn't seen anywhere else at a B&N a couple of weeks ago for $20 a pop, but I'd rule out these places for anything new, since they were all $10 more than almost anywhere else.

¤ Fry's is a great place for DVDs, since they have an enormous selection, though their goddamned by-genre sorting system makes it almost impossible to find anything you want, and impossible to determine if what you want is actually in stock or not. They sort them by type, Comedy, Suspense, Action, Childrens, Mystery, etc.  That's nice in theory, but half the time you're not sure if the title you want is in mystery or suspense or action, so you have to pour over two or three sections looking for it, and even then there's no guarantee you'll find it, since they have big display stands of special sale movies off to the sides, as well as other random titles stacked up on the ends of the aisles.  You can go through the entire alphabetical listing for 20 minutes and find nothing, then track down a sales person who looks on the computer and find that they have 10 copies of the movie you want, and then finds them on some out of the way corner of an aisle.

Also, Fry's doesn't put up "sold out" notices for popular titles, so if you're looking for Spirited Away and not finding it, you have to ask a sales person to find out that they are all sold out of that (as well as Kiki's Delivery Service and Castle in the Sky, not that I asked about those).  What they really need is to overhaul their display to make it entirely alphabetical, and to throw in about four damn inventory computers with an easy search interface so that customers could check if given titles are in stock and in which section they're being displayed.  Cross-referencing their search to allow you to sort by genre or director or actor wouldn't hurt either.  And yes, I realize that if I want to easily find what I'm looking for, I should just use Amazon.com.  Ideally via the link from my nav bar, thusly earning me 5% of the sale price.

¤ Various random mall electronics and music stores have a wide DVD selection, but they are as hit or miss as Price Club in terms of selection, but also in terms of price.  You'll see lots of movies in stock, but almost never what you want.  However the prices are all over the place, from $5 a pop up to a laughably $35.  They also usually have box sets that other places don't, but you have no idea what sort of prices will be slapped on them.  Plus they usually have very limited display space, so you have to root through long boxes of movies to try and find what you want; compared to Fry's and Price Club's huge display areas, where most of the boxes are flat and you can see the entire face of the movie.

¤ I haven't been to one recently, but I got a few titles at the Circuit City near my apartment back in San Diego, and they were quite affordable, much to my surprise, since everything else at Circuit City is way above average.

¤ Target has a decent DVD selection, and averages around $20, with occasional sales of $15 for older movies, or brand new stuff they want to move 500 of and get you in the store to buy, hoping you'll pick up other junk while you're there.  I spent over a year wishing I'd bought Spirited Away for $14 when they had it there right after the release, back in July when I was still in San Diego, until my girlfriend grew sick of my bitching took pity on me and finally bought it for my birthday in 2004.

¤ Another option is Blockbuster or Hollywood other movie rental places. True, Blockbuster is the source of all evil, and I've never rented a movie from there in my life, despite having a $10 gift certificate for over a year, but there's one in a strip mall near Malaya's condo, and we've gone in a few times while walking around over there.  Blockbuster tends to be overpriced on new releases (since they want you to rent them), but they sell used DVDs for pretty good prices, often 2 for $20 or 3 for $25, though the selection is very sketchy and varies a great deal from store to store.

Shop around on your DVD purchases, and keep $20 in mind as a target price.  You can save enough to basically get another DVD for free by refusing to pay $30 one place, when you can surely find it for $15 somewhere else.  It obviously helps to not have a burning desire to get the movie right that second, and to have a bunch of potential titles in mind, so you can get whatever a store has for a good price, when you see it.

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