Originally published at: Best Buy to end DVD/Blue Ray sales | Boing Boing
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And this is why I’ve had no reason to go to Best Buy for the last 2-3 years, where I used to frequent it at least once a week. Good luck with the eventual sale to a vulture capitalist, BB.
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Best Buy
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We’re once a year if that. The ones around here don’t quite understand their advantages and waste it away. Spent too long trying to find someone to get us something out of a cabinet. Gave up, got it from Amazon. When your main value proposition is immediate gratification, you really need to make sure you can help people.
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I went a few weeks ago. My SO wanted a paper device but had never touched one. I thought we could compare the kindles vs the kubos, vs the Remarkable or whatever. No, they all had their own display so you couldn’t compare side by side and the only device they had was an ancient 6” kindle that had been discontinued. The Remarkable display was a smoking hole.
For the record she got a Kubo Ellipse 2 and it’s pretty incredible. But Best Buy (and Walmart and Target) where of no help in the decision. We end up buying it blind directly.
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I’ve been slowly buying Blu rays because I’m tired of wanting to watch something and have a movie on a streaming platform I don’t use, or not have it available at all. Certainly hate shopping for movies in stores, it feels like such an afterthought that I prefer to shop online for what I need
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Says the West coaster! Here on the right coast they are still omnipresent in all the usual retail clusters.
A little worse for wear yet they persist.
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Best Buy has actually done well in the retail appliance market in recent years, filling in a niche all but abandoned by Sears. They do well, too, and I’ve got several appliances from them.
But I hope this doesn’t mean Blue Ray is going away for good. It would be a bad idea to ditch all opportunities to purchase physical copies of media. Our digital storage won’t exist forever, and one day someone will just pull the plug on it, leaving us high and dry without access to the movies we paid for.
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I looked at my kindle recently and it now says that the books I bought are rented. I don’t remember it saying that many years ago when I started buying books there.
Physical media still has some attraction. Though I should probably convert all my books and music to other formats and save them. God that sounds tedious.
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Oh, that’s been that way for years. I remember being pissed when I first heard that, and it’s why I only ask for physical books these days and rarely bother with Kindle books. The only use I have for my Kindle reader now is to forward drafts of novels from friends to it when I want to read them for critique, but even then I prefer reading on my computer so I can add notes as I go along.
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Yeah, the very first thing I do when I “buy” a Kindle book is strip the DRM and load it up in Calibre, so I actually have my own copy. This process is essential now that I’m using a Kobo instead of Kindle as my e-reader.
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I liked the stores before when an Sony laptop would be next to an Asus, all the tablets were together. Now walking in it all looks like trade show booths, each brand has their own area.
All they are is an opportunity to physically feel a product that you’ll eventually buy online from somewhere else.
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My mid 80s mom called me the other day, her 5 year old printer bit the dust and she needed one by the end of next week.
She wanted the same model but it’s been discontinued. I told her I’d buy her the same brand with the same features, have it sent to her house and I’d come over and hook it up.
“No, I’m going to Best Buy, I always go to Best Buy.”
Okay then, let me know when you have it and I’ll come over and hook it up.
So, Best Buy has some customers that like them for some unknown reason.
The last time I was in a best buy they pointed me to the kiosk to place my own order. If I’m going to do that I’ll drive from my house to my living room chair and order it during a commercial.
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Killing online sales seems like the real surprise.
I can see how keeping retail locations stocked with something that has a huge number of variants and admits of very limited substitution would be fiddly and consume a lot of shelf space; all to still lose the instant gratification race to streaming/download; but the situation must be pretty bad if they can’t be bothered to keep something nonperishable that ships fairly cheaply (and, with appropriate agreements with suppliers, like the revenue share that some of the rental places used to use in place of outright purchase) something relatively cheap to have on hand) in stock online.
State of the market generally; or statement of Amazon vs. Best Buy?
I think they’ll end up being fine. They have a lot of appliances and tvs (with a few exclusive brands). Still doing decently well with the sales of games compared to Walmart, Target and the walk-in closet sized GameStops. It’s the only store in most communities that you could walk in, pick up a power supply for a PC and not have to wait a week to receive it so they basically filled in the vacuum of RadioShack after they went under.
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AT least when you pop in a bluray, there’s no overloaded service deciding to downgrade what it shows because “reasons.”
Theoretically, I have a 4k stream of Phantom Thread, but I’ve never been able to see it that way.
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The one near me started doing curbside pickup during the pandemic, and then didn’t stop. I’ve ordered something from there a couple of times, paid online, then drove to the store and they bring it out to me. That I actually liked. But it does mean there’s no real value to the brick and mortar store except as a warehouse.
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The time I was in Bestbuy, the …industrial… air conditioning was sounding actively unpleasant and somewhere in that big box store a fartbox of a speaker was being demonstrated with the aid of an distorting amplifier.
They didn’t have more than a few video discs, organized in the loosest possible sense.
Barnes and Noble is pleasant to shop, but toys and vinyl are their priorities now. I dunno where you could buy even a half decent turntable. Hoping to visit the criterion sale one final time before they throw in the towel completely.
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I’m not even entirely worried about that aspect. Video mediums like Blu-Ray have very specific formats and standards, which is a very good thing. If physical media went away and all you had were digital downloads, well it’d be like music in the early 2000’s. A slew of different formats, file containers, encoders, and compression quality. It’d be the whole Real Media vs. MOV vs. MPEG vs. AVI all over again. Everything that I rip for backup is encoded to x265 10-bit with hopefully the original audio (and stored as an MKV).
For some reason at first I read this to mean your mom was stuck in the mid 1980s, picturing her rocking some mid 80s, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” era Cyndi Lauper style to this day. Then I realized you meant she’s in her 80s. But who knows, maybe it’s both. That would be cool
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