I'm not sure amazon really cares about selling anything themselves. They seem more content with hosting other vendors. They've been devolving into something of a more reputable ebay ever since the tax thing and are rapidly losing credibility even there. Where ebay has been trying to be more like amazon for years, at the chagrin of all the smaller sellers. Amazon has become almost dependent on giving Chinese manufacturers a more direct line to the US, so they at least appear to offer competitive prices of their own, since most of these brands can't be found at Walmart, Target, etc. Yet they can usually be had for even less elsewhere, including ebay. Fortunate for amazon, the majority of their loyal clientele is less interested in competitive prices than convenience. But they're going to lose their remaining faithful, eventually, if they keep down this road of shipping damaged goods as brand new, and generic knock-offs that don't hold up.
Amazon had a surprising number of good media deals on prime day(s) though, which it appears they've now even openly stated is their BF. I guess that way the rest of the world looks like they're competing with them still instead of the other way around like on the real BF in recent years. Of course, as it turns out, a LOT of amazon's PD media deals were still just secretly pricematching Target's 20% promotion, and rather badly, considering most were excluded and so many weren't even getting a full 20% discount at checkout.
I think we've tended to give stores most of the credit for the deals we see, when just as much credit should go to the studios themselves. With Corporate Hollywood solely and so utterly interested in driving their digital holy grail, they're just feeding the collector market as an afterthought they can't afford to give up yet, but don't want to actively encourage younger generations, to continue that route. Kids (and I use that term broadly, as it obviously applies to the gullibility of many college age adults too) believe just about anything Hollywood sells them, in their effort to be in style or accepted.
But even if a retailer initiates negotiating a special sale with the publisher, which they're less encouraged to considering they know there will be virtually no corresponding marketing to further support their own sale, they're more likely to meet resistance from studios not far enough along with their digital campaign to want a lower priced physical product cutting into their market. So we mostly see sales of underperforming titles and the gradual devalue of overstock, testing the market's patience with $10, before they liquidate the rest in November for $5 to people who didn't really want it in the first place and maybe some scalpers.
But, yeah, it's really sad that amazon has driven so much of their competition to close. With Hollywood itself having lost interest in continuing to grow the physical market nearly a decade ago, it's a losing proposition for any upstart, even if the physical market is holding on more stubbornly than they anticipated. Even prompting something of a renewal via MOD and boutique labels in recent years. Still we're ultimately left with the surviving big-box stores, which can only justify allocating space to new releases and the theme of the month, with maybe some trashbin of overstocks piled up in such an unappealing way as to intimidate most buyers regardless of the discount.
It could be a different scenario if the likes of DeepDiscount hadn't sold out so many years ago to a parent company with no ambition, nor genuine love for the products it sells, or the collector market it seemingly depends on. They've almost become part of the problem. And boutique labels like Twilight Time exploiting consumer ignorance as a marketing ploy, at a time when digital was still all talk and hadn't even made much of a dent in the rental market yet - the major victim Hollywood was after with their push for digital, thanks in large to Blockbuster Video. Seeing much better labels, like Shout, seemingly adopt the same strategy in recent years is just disheartening when some of these players have become such a fundamental avenue for older and smaller films.
Last edited by JurassicBD; 08-08-2019 at 07:32 AM.
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amazon selling resealed movies as brand new?!?!?
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