Last night Best Buy had a special online sale of Black Friday items for their Elite and Elite Plus customers only. I don’t really spend that much at Best Buy, but last year I got their credit card and all of my purchases on that card count as if I was spending there, doubling or tripling for some purchases. I just recently reached Elite Plus status, primarily by using the Best Buy credit card to buy lunch instead of paying cash and getting double credits for every dollar spent. Over the last year they have probably given me over $100 in store credits that I have used mostly for Blu-ray purchases. With all that buying done already, I was thinking Black Friday would be pretty tame this year, picking out about 5 movies I would like to get. However most of those were not available during the preview sale (I still bought 3 movies, 2 of which I didn’t know would be on sale), so I will have to wait for Thursday like everyone else.
I had never been to a Dollar General store before. But if you live long enough, you get all kinds of new experiences. On Blu-ray Forum people were saying that Dollar General would soon be having a Buy One Get One Free sale on Blu-rays. When they ran this sale last year, there was a “glitch” that caused movies to ring up BOGO but also 50% off. The movies in question were all priced at $4.95, dropping the price to $1.24, which is pretty amazing. Maybe not as amazing as $1 like Dollar Tree has, but the selection seems to be better at Dollar General. The sale runs Sunday before Thanksgiving to Wednesday. This morning as stores opened, people reported the return of the glitch. So I looked up where my nearest store was and off I went.
Dollar Generals aren’t real nice stores and it didn’t even look like it was open, but I was able to walk in. I found some DVDs on a shelf, but no Blu-rays, eventually finding a carousel in a random aisle loaded with Blu-rays. And not bad ones either, most marked at $4.95, but some higher and some as low as $2.95. I wasn’t sure the glitch would really work, so I wanted to choose decent movies:
- Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)
- The Hustler (1961)
- In the Heat of the Night (1967)
- Inside Man (2006)
- Robocop (includes both the original 1987 movies and the 2014 remake)
- West Side Story (1961)
Except maybe for Robocop, that’s a pretty good list. Three of them won Best Picture. As I was checking out, the movies were ringing up for $2.48 each (there was nothing at the store to indicate these were on sale for anything other than the price marked), but when she totaled it up it was only $8.04 for 6 movies, so they cost $1.34 each with tax. Other people online were getting some different movies, so I looked up two other nearby Dollar General stores and visited those, getting 4 more at each location:
- Beasts of the Southern Wild
- 500 Days of Summer/Life Among the Ruins 2-pack
- Die Hard 2
- DodgeBall/There’s Something About Mary 2-pack
- Fast Times at Ridgemont High
- Lincoln
- Little Miss Sunshine
- Robots
The quality of these is not quite as high, but I have come close to buying 500 Days of Summer a few times for $4 or $5, so $1.34 with tax is pretty hard to pass up. Beasts of the Southern Wild got good reviews. I had Fast Times at Ridgemont High on DVD already, so I was glad to upgrade it to Blu-ray. Little Miss Sunshine was a legitimately good movie. Robots got okay reviews, included a digital copy, and I have considered buying it when it has gone on sale. DodgeBall is a movie I have seen and enjoyed. Lincoln was good too, but the sticker on the package said it was used (I believe all the others I got were new). While the package was in very good shape, the disks inside (Blu-ray and DVD) had little bar code stickers around the hole indicating they were rental copies and they showed some wear. Blu-ray disks are more scratch resistant than DVD’s, so hopefully they will play okay.
That evening, one of the movies I ordered from Best Buy’s preview sale was available for pickup at Edgewood, so I looked up any Dollar Generals on the way and found two more. I couldn’t find the first one and at the second one I had to ask where the Blu-rays were, finding the carousel behind some boxes making most of the movies almost impossible to reach, but I did some contortions and was able to go through all of them, picking up Platoon and A Bridge Too Far. I had never seen the latter and the former is another Best Picture winner. I also found a DigiBook edition of All Quiet on the Western Front, but it was $2.95. However I knew that had to a pretty well regarded movie, so I got it anyway. I thought it was a World War II movie, but actually it is from 1930 and about World War I from the perspective of German soldiers. It also won Best Picture. So I think that was another quality haul of movies and I was pleased to find a card to redeem a digital copy of All Quiet inside. I also got a free HD copy of Fast Times. Beasts and Robots each came with a digital copy disk that I was able to use with iTunes to get a digital copy but they are SD instead of HD. I also went ahead and paid $2 each to get digital copies of Die Hard 2 and Inside Man, the only 2 movies eligible for Disc 2 Digital redemptions at Vudu, figuring the total price was still awfully cheap.
Like with the Dollar Tree sale earlier, some people online went really crazy and got 30 or more movies. i could have picked more things, but they would have been more marginal and I already have more movies than I will be able to watch in the next year. Anyway, fun day of scrounging cheap movies.
Last night I hit up three more stores. The first store had no Blu-rays; it was like they had never heard of them. I bought two at the next one and two at the last one. Definitely seeing a lot of repeats and not much else I really want, but I still got: Fast Five (I have never seen any Fast and Furious movies, but this is supposed to be one of the better ones and it came with a digital copy), Live Free or Die Hard (probably the best of the sequels in that series), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 1978 remake, gets good reviews), and Hang ‘Em High (maybe not the best Clint Eastwood western, but should be good). I may revisit my closest store and see if they have restocked before the sale winds up tomorrow.
The cashier at the last store was pretty funny. He rang up the two movies and said what a good deal it was that they were ringing up at half price. I said “wait and see” and when he totaled the order, they dropped in half again. He was very impressed. He had no idea they were on sale.
The executives at Dollar General must read my blog because today the glitch ended and the movies are just 50% off, which is still a great price for a good movie. I went to my nearest store and picked two movies I had skipped over before, MASH and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (the original, not the remake). They rang up at $2.68 each, but I figured it was worth it. Even though I wasn’t crazy about MASH, I forgot that it is on the AFI Top 100 list, plus it came in a nice steelbook case. I needed another movie to go with it and Pelham seemed like my best option. I had seen it many years ago on TV and it was pretty good. So that’s all done with. Well, I did find out some people were getting a 3-disk version of West Side Story, so I might go look for that since mine is the 1-disk version with *no* extras and the 3-disk version includes a DVD and a second Blu-ray of extras. I had seen some movies marked on top “West Side Story Widescreen” and had gotten that one, so maybe I should have picked the regular version though with 3 disks there should have been a noticeable weight difference.