Alright…This is ask the video store clerk, not the video store exec.
A lot of decisions are made at the corporate level, and must be followed (under threat of fines) even if they do not make sense in the specific situation.
So here we go…let’s hope I don’t make too many mispellings.
Sublight I’d imagine that the face-out low-wall set up allows for easier browsing when you don’t know what you want, and easier communication between groups of people all looking for a movie. In any case, the individual stores have no control over the style of shelveing.
divemaster At the end of the month, the computer spits out a big sheet of paper listing what movies were rented the least over the past month. Those movies are thrown out (actually, sold as pre-viewed) to make room for new items. The company I worked at was strongly commited to getting their stock to be at least fifty-percent DVD, so don’t expect it to stop any time soon.
Neidhart Why does any company raise their prices? To make money. Prices are not set by the individual stores.
Rental places do pay more for their videos, not because they are “priced to rent”, but because they receive the videos before the official video release date. The large chains typically make deals with distributers so that they do not have to field these large fees up front, and instead have a profit-sharing setup. This is one of the things that makes it harder for independent video rental places to compete.
hsapians All stickers are corporate policy. For example, the price stickers on the pre-viewed videos must be placed in a specific corner, even if that placement covers up the title.
As for stock, I think that indvidual store make the decisions, but they base them on corporate formulas. There are lots and lots of printouts and records that give the store a good idea of what will fly in a given neightborhood.
effac3d Blame the uncultured cretins in your neighborhood. Decisions about what to carry are based on what rents. In your town, obscure foreign films arn’t what rents. These stores are businesses. Why would they fill their shelves with an unprofitable product?
In my experience, I find the selection is usually not all that bad. The place I worked carried my favorite obscure foreign film (I am Cuba). Of course you will never get the same selection as you would at a university library, for example, but that is why public support of the arts is still needed.
As for censorship, it isn’t what most people think. They don’t go around cutting out wide swaths of movie. Instead, they do not carry unrated or NC-17 rated films. If you create a film that is unrated or rated NC-17, you must find a way to get it rated at least an R if you want it carried. Yeah, it’s stifling, but making a movie is a commerical venture (unless you’ve got lots of money you don’t mind burning) so everything that has to do with supply and demand is going to be stifling. Time for more public support of the arts, I say.
lainaf I only worked there part time for a few months, but I never had somebody’s VCR ruined by a faulty tape. They do try to find a balance between pulling bad tapes out of circulation and yet accounting for the fact that customers will sometimes say a perfectly good tape is bad. Blockbuster will give refunds on almost anything, but I really can’t see them ever paying for a VCR because it could never really be conclusively proven that it was their tape that did it, not your VCR. It would open the door for a lot of scamming. And believe me, there are droves of scammers just waiting for new scams to pull on video stores.
