So I’m out looking to buy the Band of Brothers DVD set. K-Mart has it at $65.99. Sold out. Wal-Mart has her at $62.99. Sold Out.
Hollywood Video lists at $69.99. Sold out. Best Buy? $$69.99. Sold out. Cell call to wife to check Amazon.com. $82.99 but won’t be delivered till the 27th.
I’m getting discouraged.
Suncoast! They must have it! Drive to the fucking mall, park 8 miles away, trudge to the store and…find the last one!!!
One hundred and twenty nine fucking dollars!!!
I carry it to the register and ask the guy if it’s going on sale soon, as it’s half-price everywhere else. He says, “No, we really can’t reduce our prices as we don’t have other items to make up the loss, we make nominal profits on what we sell.” Enough for me, I’ll just buy a friggin gift card to buy it after Christmas.
I call my wife on the way home just so I don’t have to wait to bitch about this. She suggests I stop for a drink and calm down (this is so awesome). While I’m enjoying a cold one, she’s on the phone to a friend that works at Target. She calls me back to tell me that there is a copy waiting for me at the Electronics counter. Apparently, she was able to snag a copy from the stock room before they got the last 10 copies in the fucking city to the floor.
$69.99
Bought it, went back to Suncoast, and demanded to know why they were so adamant on MSRP. Guess what? If I agreed to buy their copy at 20% off (assuming I’d return the Target copy) I’d qualify for 50% off any DVD $24.99 or less.
My God! Sounds like the free market in action. Scarce resources are more expensive than those which are found in ample supply. Imagine that. Shocking, I tell you, simply shocking.
Occasionally, I’ll drop by the local Suncoast at the Pentagon City mall, because it’s so close to Best Buy and Borders, on the off chance that they have items on sale at a competitive price, such as the “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” DVD I bought last week for $9.99. EVERY time I buy something there the clerk tries to wheedle me into joing Replay, the Suncoast frequent buyers club, where if you buy so many units, you can get reduced prices on selected. And EVERY time I explain that their prices are so high that even with the discounts, the costs in buying DVDs would outweigh the benefits.
If you want to get good deals on DVDs, check out Deepdiscountdvd.com. They have really rockbottom prices for DVDs; the only hitch is that they take longer to fulfill orders than other online merchants do. Showwow.com is also a good place to check. Their prices are not as low on all items as DDD, but they have really good discounts on box sets–I bought Babylon 5 Season 2 from them for $60.00.
And next time, do your Christmas shopping earlier so you don’t have this kind of last-minute panic again.
UncleBeer, this is not a rise-in-demand case study at B-school. The price of the Band of Brothers box set was not jacked up because it is a scarce item; DVD pricing is usually heavily discounted by electronics retailers to serve as a loss leader to get people into the stores to buy DVD players, cell phones, and the like–notice that the OP got it at Target at a below-MSRP discount. Suncoast keeps the MSRP because they only sell DVDs (and movie memorabilia, but I have no idea if anybody buys Lord of the Rings dolls and Nightmare Before Christmas t-shirts), thus their product line is smaller, in turn making their profit margin much narrower.
I’m right with you on the free market, but you’re doing a bad case analysis in this instance.
That’s the place, Gary. They’re a chain that sells movies on DVD/VHS, plus various TV show and movie paraphenalia like toys and the like. Usually they’re priced high, but since they have a fairly large stock and are present in a lot of malls, they still tempt me to walk in and check out what they have for sale. I don’t mind them - like someone else said, it’s all what the market will bear. I walk in knowing that prices may be high, but that I might be able to find some films that aren’t commonly carried by other stores.
Best Buy owned them. Bought them as part of the horrible Musicland aquisition (Musicland, SunCoast, Sam Goody). Sold them all last summer or fall - actually gave them away to a company willing to aquire their debt. They are all losing money at an ungodly pace. (Actually, I think SunCoast is the one division of that company still vaguely profitable). In a few years, its doubtful there will be a SunCoast around to sell you a DVD at any price.
Its really difficult for mall stores to compete with big box retailers. Mall stores are really expensive to run. They have a really high cost per square foot.
Suncoast is the only former Musicland store that remains profitable, mostly because, get this folks:
It’s a speciality store.
That’s right, if you’re buying new releases there, or things they have at Target, you’re in the wrong place. You pay more for selection and for presumably more knowledgeable associates.
I used to work there, and I am not by any means thrilled and excited by a lot of their business practices, but good lord, it’s a free market economy - if you don’t like the price, go elsewhere. When elsewhere dosen’t have it, well, how bad do you want it? Obviously it’s a business model that works, as the concept was doing quite well when I left (right as Best Buy sold us). It’s true that the profit margin for the storefront is quite slim on DVDs (obviously profits are high for somebody, but not for the people who actually sell it to you.) And clearly, Best Buy buys a whole lot more of them than Suncoast does. Economy of scale. Ever wonder why the Suncoast people were so desperately trying to get you to buy batteries, or those damned DVD Doctors? Those are high profit items. It’s more expensive to run a smaller chain.
That being said, if you didn’t buy anything there, they’d go out of business or come down on the price, you bet. I never understood why anybody would buy American Pie 2 on its release weekend at Suncoast when you can get the thing at Target, or even your local grocery store. I went to work there because at the time if you wanted hands-on anime shopping with any selection Suncoast was actually the cheapest option when compared with real specialty stores, and you couldn’t just get what you wanted at Target. Now Best Buy has a lot of what I want, plus I got utterly fed up with my store’s management. But still I have to say to people who bitch about the pricing - it is a free market. If the market bears it, well, hell. Last year you couldn’t find Band of Brothers for love nor money unless you pre-ordered it anyway.
It always blew my mind that people still shopped at Musicland/Sam Goody and Suncoast. The prices are totally fucking obscene. 18+ for a new release CD. 25-30 for a DVD. The selection at Suncoast is far below what my local BBuy carries. I hate Mediaplay too because they have shitty prices as well. I normally shop at BBuy for music and DVDs mainly because the prices are really good and the selection is alot better than it used to be. Especially in the music dept. They carry a pretty darn wide variety of music now from obscure artists that I used to only be able to find at my local indie record store.
Does your OP imply that you have a second ass that’s not white? Do you perhaps have an African American ass? A Native American ass? How about a nice Asian ass?
If indeed you do have a second, third, or fourth ass, can we assume that you are not inviting Suncoast to suck any of them?
I recently got some great prices at Sam Goody. Got 2 Playstation 2 games for $40, still retail $100 anywhere else… 50% minimum off of everything I purchased.
They were going out of business.
Good riddance. I don’t know why anyone would have paid their normal prices.
