RECORD STORE TALES PART 121:  MOVIES

 As a movie buff I was glad when one of our stores decided to carry VHS tapes!  My movie collection grew massively at the time.  I had access to lots of cool items, in widescreen format.  I bought virtually everything that we saw come in, if it was in widescreen format.  The staff, T-Rev in particular, knew to keep an eye out for widescreen movies for me.  This opened up a whole new retail world for us, for now we had customers that were not interested in music at all, just movies.  Of course movie knowledge now came into play, especially when customers would ask a question like, “Do you have that John Wayne movie where he’s after the outlaw guys?”

In 1998 or 1999, I bought my first DVD player.  We started carrying DVDs at that time as well.  That was exciting too.   A lot of people had been asking about them.

When they were still big, you could expect to pay $8.99 to $11.99 for a used VHS tape.  $5.99 if it was a cheapie bin special.  For DVDs, you might expect to pay $16.99 to $19.99 for a used one.  That was in the beginning, prices dropped quickly and within five years, DVDs were almost as cheap as CDs!  We even had laserdiscs, on the rare occasion that they came in.  They were giant.  If you don’t remember what I’m talking about, here’s a size comparison to a CD.

We learned right away though that handling DVDs was not the same as handling CDs!  Maybe the plastic they were made of was softer, because they scratched so much more easily than a CD, and the scratches were so much harder to remove.  This trouble was doubled with the 2-sided DVD discs.

Fixing a scratched double sided DVD was very, very difficult.  You could spend 5 minutes buffing the scratches out of one side, only to find that handling the disc put more scratches in the other side.  They were very tricky, and a lot of the DVD discs that we sold in the early days looked terrible, for that reason.  They would work fine on most players (most), but looked cloudy and streaky.  And a lot of our DVD customers were really, really picky.

Eventually the 2-sided discs became a lot less common.  In the meantime, we had to set up display spaces for DVDs, figured out how to store the discs themselves behind the counter without damaging them, and so on.  Even slight handling or dust could create problems.  Dusting the DVDs could often make them look worse, as the wiping left slight but visible scratches.

At first the selection was pretty poor.  Sony were giving away a number of titles for free with their players, so we had a lot of copies of Sphere, and The Negotiator.  Trade-ins started after a few months.  We started seeing box sets, before they were really common, Criterion Editions, all kinds of stuff.  It happened quick, our stock grew and grew….

…And so did my own personal collection!  Ain’t it the way?

Continued in Part 284:  The Impact of Movies