Best Buy selling 4k's and Blu-Rays via third party sellers

[Matalata]

Interesting? Wonder why they started again?

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/movies/...at345600050039

[jblank]

Because they get a cut of sale but don't have to hold any stock or handle any merch. Same reason Walmart and Amazon do this. I don't like it though, from any retailer.

[Cherokee Jack]

Originally Posted by jblank

Because they get a cut of sale but don't have to hold any stock or handle any merch. Same reason Walmart and Amazon do this. I don't like it though, from any retailer.

Not having to worry about this knockoff crap diluting their offerings was one of the last things Best Buy had going for it. This move smacks of pure desperation.

[Phibes]

Originally Posted by Cherokee Jack

This move smacks of pure desperation.

Don't know how they're doing. What I do know is that they sent me a $10 gift certificate and in the days of physical media availability it'd be gone so fast.

I'm sitting on it so far and guess I'm going to get a NECA figure before it expires.... or time may just run out for both of us LOL

[CSM101]

Originally Posted by Phibes

Don't know how they're doing. What I do know is that they sent me a $10 gift certificate and in the days of physical media availability it'd be gone so fast.

I'm sitting on it so far and guess I'm going to get a NECA figure before it expires.... or time may just run out for both of us LOL

I now use them on NECAs when available but when I get one about to expire I just buy snacks just so they don’t go to waste.

[drumjed]

I don't have any rewards at the moment to test, but will the Reward Zone Certificates work on the third party seller transactions?

[Cherokee Jack]

Originally Posted by Phibes

Don't know how they're doing. What I do know is that they sent me a $10 gift certificate and in the days of physical media availability it'd be gone so fast.

I'm sitting on it so far and guess I'm going to get a NECA figure before it expires.... or time may just run out for both of us LOL

They gave me one a month or two ago. Literally no impulse buy stuff I wanted so I let it expire. You have to understand, I am incredibly cheap and love a good deal, so a company has to be doing something very wrong for me to leave free money on the table rather than blow it on some random thing I only vaguely want.

[jblank]

Originally Posted by Cherokee Jack

Not having to worry about this knockoff crap diluting their offerings was one of the last things Best Buy had going for it. This move smacks of pure desperation.

I agree. The clutter, the crap, the mess it makes an e-commerce site, that's the reason I hate when companies do this.

[BluPat]

Yea they should have never stopped selling movies. We haven't set foot in a BB since January 2024.

[Streamingsux]

Originally Posted by BluPat

Yea they should have never stopped seeling movies. We haven't set foot in a BB since January 2024.

They removed most of the reason anyone had for going in and browsing in one of their stores. I wonder if the trade off was worth it..

[CyberAthlete]

Originally Posted by Streamingsux

They removed most of the reason anyone had for going in and browsing in one of their stores. I wonder if the trade off was worth it..

What have you actually purchased from them besides movies? How much of your overall spending went toward other items compared to what you spent on movies?

Simply walking into the store just to buy movies doesn’t really make someone a valuable customer—it just means you only went there for one thing. If you were regularly buying a lot from Best Buy, especially on release days, then it makes sense why losing your business would matter. But from what it sounds like, many people are upset more because Tuesday mornings gave them an excuse to get out of the house and wander into Best Buy, rather than staying home with nothing else to do.

[Cherokee Jack]

Originally Posted by CyberAthlete

What have you actually purchased from them besides movies? How much of your overall spending went toward other items compared to what you spent on movies?

[Show spoiler]Simply walking into the store just to buy movies doesn’t really make someone a valuable customer—it just means you only went there for one thing. If you were regularly buying a lot from Best Buy, especially on release days, then it makes sense why losing your business would matter. But from what it sounds like, many people are upset more because Tuesday mornings gave them an excuse to get out of the house and wander into Best Buy, rather than staying home with nothing else to do.

Having set up multiple houses with electronic equipment and appliances over the last 10 years, the dollar figure for my non-movie spending at BBY during that time is absolutely enormous. I would sometimes go to look at AV equipment and end up buying a few movies. More often I’d go to browse movies and end up comparing televisions on the floor. That would lead to conversations with sales people, and I would eventually make sure to support them with my purchase when I decided to pull the trigger. I made a point of supporting the stores even when it was inconvenient because I valued that they were offering intangible things that online-only retailers coudn’t.

Now I only go to physical locations for returns. Many of the sales people I formed connections with were fired right around the same time they dropped movies. The stores are ghost towns and generally depressing. And my BBY credit card balance is at zero for the first time in years.

[ben6543]

I just bought Pee Wee’s Big Adventure on Blu Ray. I had 10 dollar certificate from Best Buy and a couple of cards that needed to be used. Big Adventure has been on my dvd to Blu upgrade list and it was $8.99 with free shipping so good

[RBBrittain]

Originally Posted by Cherokee Jack

Having set up multiple houses with electronic equipment and appliances over the last 10 years, the dollar figure for my non-movie spending at BBY during that time is absolutely enormous. I would sometimes go to look at AV equipment and end up buying a few movies. More often I’d go to browse movies and end up comparing televisions on the floor. That would lead to conversations with sales people, and I would eventually make sure to support them with my purchase when I decided to pull the trigger. I made a point of supporting the stores even when it was inconvenient because I valued that they were offering intangible things that online-only retailers coudn’t.

Now I only go to physical locations for returns. Many of the sales people I formed connections with were fired right around the same time they dropped movies. The stores are ghost towns and generally depressing. And my BBY credit card balance is at zero for the first time in years.

(TL;DR warning, but IMO this is the whole point of this discussion.)

This is exactly why Best Buy's "media as loss leader" strategy worked so well for so long, right up till they got rid of movies. Every time you walked into a Best Buy to buy physical media -- vinyl, cassette (maybe 8-track in the beginning? Pretty sure reel-to-reel was before even their earliest days as a local store in Minneapolis), CD, VHS (maybe Betamax, LaserDisc, or even CED in the beginning?), DVD, BD (plus HD DVD during that format war), 4K, every gaming, PC, tablet & smartphone platform under the sun, etc., etc., ad infinitum -- you got to see the very latest in technology in action, from TVs of every generation to radios, landlines, cordless phones, tape & optical disc players, iPods & other MP3 players, all the latest hardware running those gaming, PC, tablet & smartphone platforms, even major & some small appliances, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

That was what kept Best Buy in business long after Circuit City killed its golden goose by firing all its commissioned salespeople who knew how to navigate all that tech, and even after Amazon, Walmart, and for a time Target began to eat away at their business lines -- until killing non-game physical media ended all that and reduced their media foot traffic to basically that of a glorified GameStop with NO meme stock investors to prop it up.

Walmart at least still has foot traffic from groceries, other hard to take online products like cheap clothing and tire & lube, and a low-rent but still functional electronics & physical media department, plus the Walton family's deep pockets, to enable it to chase the mighty Amazon much like Don Quixote and his windmills, with a better chance to succeed. Target blew its chance not only by prematurely killing physical media, but also by failing to adapt to changing times in grocery (always a loss leader unless you're a rich independent grocery chain like Harps, the local Northwest AR employee-owned grocery chain that went regional basically by carrying everything Walmart grocery departments can't carry, the only way they could have survived on Walmart's home turf) and souring the "woke" crowd who kept it alive by kowtowing to the "go woke, go broke" crowd (maybe true for Chick-fil-A or even Walmart, but for Target it was more like "go ANTI-woke, go broke").

Now, thanks to all the others who keep shooting themselves in the foot, there's only handful of retail giants left: Amazon, Costco & Walmart, plus possibly Kroger (Albertsons needed them more than they needed Albertsons, but the failure of their Haggen divestiture when buying Safeway came back to bite them right in Haggen's pre-divestiture territory of OR & WA, where local politicians killed that deal basically by reminding everyone of THAT debacle), Lowe's & Home Depot (home improvement has proven especially adaptable to a "clicks and mortar" approach with two strong nationwide competitors, not to mention lesser chains like Menards -- even Ace Hardware is starting to catch on), and so forth.

Best Buy? I've bought TVs, soundbars & other tech from them many a time, but let's just say my most recent mildly significant purchase from them -- a lowly TCL soundbar, 2.0 but with eARC & virtualized Atmos for not much more than the glorified Bluetooth speakers that pass as the cheapest soundbars -- required an OREI HDMI switch / eARC audio extractor that cost slightly more than the soundbar itself (but far less than the HDFury products it would have required just a few years ago) just to be able to hear complete audio from the soundbar on most BDs & many 4K's, thanks basically to audio support on my TV & soundbar combined zigging where it should have zagged & vice versa. Once upon a time, something like that would have been a job for RadioShack; later on, it was Best Buy's job. Now, it's split between Amazon, Walmart, online specialty shops like OREI (and in physical media Orbit, Atomic, Bull Moose, MovieZyng, etc.), and innumerable small sellers flooding eBay and the marketplace platforms of Amazon & Walmart, just to name a few.

Can Best Buy save itself by using marketplace sellers to bring back its physical media glory days online? Only time will tell, but for now the storm clouds in their Magic 8-Ball still appear to be there.

[Streamingsux]

Originally Posted by CyberAthlete

What have you actually purchased from them besides movies? How much of your overall spending went toward other items compared to what you spent on movies?

Simply walking into the store just to buy movies doesn’t really make someone a valuable customer—it just means you only went there for one thing. If you were regularly buying a lot from Best Buy, especially on release days, then it makes sense why losing your business would matter. But from what it sounds like, many people are upset more because Tuesday mornings gave them an excuse to get out of the house and wander into Best Buy, rather than staying home with nothing else to do.

Practically everything I have in my home electronics-wise is from Best Buy. Plus my smartphone. I always preferred them to everyone else but now haven't been in one in a couple years. I used to always go in there once a week to browse movies and almost always ended up making a non-blu-ray impulse purchase of some kind. But please, do be my guest to do the math for me on whether that makes me valuable to them or not. Maybe it doesn't. Oh well. They gotta do what's best for them I suppose..

[RBBrittain]

Originally Posted by Streamingsux

Practically everything I have in my home electronics-wise is from Best Buy. Plus my smartphone. I always preferred them to everyone else but now haven't been in one in a couple years. I used to always go in there once a week to browse movies and almost always ended up making a non-blu-ray impulse purchase of some kind. But please, do be my guest to do the math for me on whether that makes me valuable to them or not. Maybe it doesn't. Oh well. They gotta do what's best for them I suppose..

My main TV *and* smartphone both came from Best Buy shortly before they abandoned physical media; my main soundbar is one or two years older. Guess where my new bedroom TV came from last month? Walmart, which according to Lon Seidman's "shopping for ATSC 3.0" video is now the nation's top seller of TV sets (pushing Best Buy to second)... not a one of which (at Walmart) has a built-in ATSC 3.0 tuner, while Best Buy has some but doesn't even mention ATSC 3.0 on their floor signage. (I didn't know my Hisense from Best Buy had one till after I first set it up at home.)

Yet from my own testing, two of the three streaming boxes behind what I consider the best ATSC 3.0 tuner setup shy of the HDHR Flex 4K (despite its DRM issues) or a built-in tuner are... Walmart's own Onn 4K Plus & 4K Pro Google TV boxes. Every other standalone Android/Google TV or Fire TV device on the U.S. market (there's a handful of fully equivalent boxes in other countries), except possibly the top of the line Fire TV Cube 4K, is apparently missing one or more of the necessary A/V codec & Widevine DRM components needed to support full ATSC 1.0 & 3.0 reception via ADTH's $70 Nextgen TV USB tuner dongle; the codecs are also needed for GTMedia's HDTV Mate dongle from China (the cheapest ATSC 3.0 tuning device on the market, currently under $40 from "ships from U.S." AliExpress vendors & slightly more that that on Amazon), but despite its microSD advantage over ADTH, it doesn't support DRM & its software is much buggier than ADTH's, though they still say someday they'll make their software do DRM (just like their full-featured but underpowered HDTV Converter X1 box) if the right Android TV box comes along. (Earth to GTMedia: The Onn 4K Plus & 4K Pro ARE the right Android TV boxes.)

Bottom line: Best Buy is no longer THE place to go for cutting-edge tech that it once was. Now it's mostly Amazon, but like the two Onn boxes above, sometimes even Walmart has a "diamond in the rough" (to borrow a line from both Disney versions of Aladdin).

[Matalata]

Originally Posted by BluPat

Yea they should have never stopped seeling movies. We haven't set foot in a BB since January 2024.

You know they're going downhill when you see them selling BBQ grills and massage equipment.

[bhampton]

Originally Posted by Matalata

You know they're going downhill when you see them selling BBQ grills and massage equipment.

If you couldn't tell they were going downhill you aren't paying attention.

My local store is nearly empty esp in regards to customers.

[Streamingsux]

Maybe they'll pick physical media back up completely..

[Cherokee Jack]

Ok, took a look and Pop.Market is the company selling everything I clicked. I buy from them regularly on EBay. They’re reliable and their prices are competitive, especially during sales. This might actually be useful if we can use BBY rewards on purchases and make returns at BBY stores.