Best Buy stores to stop selling DVDs, Blu-ray in 2024
cnn.com
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A few times a year I’ll need a cable or an external hard drive, or a new controller, mouse etc, and want it right now and I’ll just walk to whichever Best Buy has it in stock. When I do I still have the same feelings I got as a kid when I’d go to circuit city and the impulse to browse is hard to resist.
They have a lot of fun gadgets, the connected home category keeps growing and growing… doorbells, smart speakers, VR, wearables, theraguns, peloton, e-bikes; not to mention gaming has never been bigger.
My anecdotal point is: there’s lots of techy things to sell besides commoditized content like CDs and Blu-ray’s. Personally I’m never going to Best Buy for media. But it’s certainly fun to browse all the new tech and get a more hands-on view. I don’t blame them for this change, assuming the numbers make sense.
PS: I miss Radio Shack badly :(
Rather get my electronics at Best Buy, Target, or Apple Store whether in store or online.
"you go tah BNH!"
Are there full-quality digital/downloadable options that I'm not aware of?
Sometimes urgency is a factor.
I love going to Best Buy (and most stores), but maybe that’s just because it was great growing up with them as a source for all things electronic.
Personally I get more joy from browsing stores in person compared to browsing digitally. It becomes something to do—an event of sorts. We exist in the physical world; the digital world is less satisfying to my other senses.
Culture dies when libraries can't lend it (which they can today due to first sale doctrine applicable to physical media, whether books, DVDs, etc), and it's locked behind digital rights and streaming portals (where first sale doctrine does not apply). When physical media dies, you'll either be a consumer willing to pay "whatever the market will bear" for your temporary license (books, music, video, whatever), or a pirate. Archives can still accumulate culture for safekeeping (physically and digitally), it'll just be inaccessible to the public for a century or two sliding window into the past based on current flavor of copyright statute insanity.
https://time.com/6266147/internet-archive-copyright-infringe...
If you want DolbyVision, HDR, highest resolution and bitrate, physical media is still the only option that I’m aware of. Bummed about this happening because when I’ve tried ordering Bluray from Amazon, the discs sometimes show up loose in the cases and scratched up.
When I tried out the 4k Netflix option in early 2023 I found myself wanting an option to downgrade to their 1080p encoding for a few of the shows I was watching.
I was told Netflix hired really smart people for like 300-500k/year for the express purpose of avoiding stupid shit like this.
I realize different encoding can be more efficient but Netflix etc still just looks worse.
For something like a Marvel movie, whatever. For something like Planet Earth or 2001, watching it on streaming is disappointing after owning the disc version.
The bitrate of a 4k blu ray sometime peaks above 100MB/s, yet most streaming providers max out around 20MB/s.
There will always be a place for the enthusiast who is willing to put up with a little hassle and higher cost for a better overall experience, and boutique blu ray sales have really taken off lately for this exact reason.
This isn’t the death of physical media, but it might be the death of retail physical media.
FWIW If you find yourself without a choice other than streaming, check Apple first. They offer the highest bitrate typically.
It's kind of funny that on Bravia TVs, this means you have to connect wirelessly because their ethernet port only supports 100 Mbps.
It's part of why LPs have become fashionable again. The record itself is a work of art. You'll get it in a nice box or sleeve with multi-page booklet. When you hold a LP it has a substance that is lacking from a BD clamshell.
Although it looked like they were toast at one point, they're at least somewhat profitable and have something like $40B in annual revenue--although that's declined somewhat year over year.
Not sure on the rest of the appliances. Is an odd listing.
Personally, I very rarely go into a Best Buy. Yes, I might buy a TV or a major appliance there but those are very rare purchases. I might browse once a year to see what the latest wearable and Internet of Crap stuff is out there but I literally can't remember the last time I bought something at a Best Buy.
That is a very specific tradeoff; I would personally avoid getting a phone through a carrier if I can help it.
I also tried to get a new surge protector in the same visit and they only had 2 choices in-store, both of them were over $50 for no obvious benefit over a $15 one from target.
I think they're planning to convert their stores into more of a "showroom" type experience that supports their online shopping. They converted at least half the floor-space of our local Best Buy into a warehouse/online order pickup area. IIRC, the guy manning one of the cell-phone displays was actually a Samsung employee.
Everything is online, so why not. Walmart has the luxury of being somewhat essential having grocery departments, so they can keep foot traffic that way - but a lot more people get groceries via delivery as well.
My family we're all pretty much -- if I see it, I want it, so I buy it regardless of if we should. Ordering delivery we buy a TON less junk food, and uneeded crap.
We just order what we need, it also helps with our ADHD because we forget ingredients ALL the time when planning meals, so we just call and have the meal tomorrow instead of today, but that ends up being 5 days later, and then something we did buy for that meal goes bad and its a vicious cycle.
The Walmart near me is always packed even though it's a lousy place IMO to try to do a full grocery shopping.
I don't know the numbers but my sense is that online grocery shopping didn't take off and stay taken off to nearly the degree that some people thought it would. I certainly don't see that many pickers in my local stores that offer delivery.
Because that was the point of Best Buy - if I was going to buy something online, I'd just get it from Amazon|eBay|Newegg. The point of Best Buy is that it's a physical store that you can go to in order to see the physical object before you buy it, buy it immediately (zero shipping time), and also as a secondary but important angle since it's an actual store you completely skip the "market" where people try to sell you counterfeit flash drives.
DVD however is annoying. Waiting for the Menu, FBI warning - everything you don’t need nor want as paying customer.
So I am considering doing what needs to be done: NAT sever with ripped DVDs. Local streaming. ;)
At least when they finally came to the Seattle area they picked one of the worst possible locations to open. Much like the ill-fated 'supermall' that opened in the valley south of Seattle (slightly closer to the secondary city of Tacoma) decades before it, they entered an area already well served by surrounding malls/businesses without enough value to the consumer to be worth the drive / trip to a new out of the way location. This was also during the era when it was still reasonable to order things from Amazon, without too much worry of co-mingling / risks; let alone newegg which had pulled back from a brick and mortar expansion to focus entirely online.
In the last few years of Fry's Electronics operating their Renton WA (South Seattle) location they were barely even better than E.G. BestBuy or Walmart for emergency part procurement. In fact both of those stores had methods of pricing online and IIRC also buying / checking inventory directly at the local store.
Offhand I suspect there was also some sort of toxic sales person focused competition among employees, since they always seemed to really want to have documentation on the sale of helping a customer reach their purchase.
Talking about it, Fry's Electronic's reminds me of what happened to Radio Shack. Really a failure to continue delivering value and adjust to the current market (which isn't to say eliminating the niche that makes them what they are within a market).
Recently, I have been leaning more on physical media as the price of streaming has gotten higher. I have a few comfort movies and shows, and I was able to trade HBO max for a few disks.
Like how records had a resurgence, I suspect that DVD/blu-ray will also have a resurgence. Especially if gamers still demand disk drives.