Black November

Black Friday has been creeping earlier and earlier. Last year it worked itself to Thursday morning. This year, in an effort to reduce door busting crowds, they have spread things out. I am mostly shopping for blu-ray movies and the two best sources are Walmart and Best Buy, with Amazon usually price matching those two as long as the items are in stock at those stores. This year, Walmart released 3 different Black Friday ads. The first was effective November 4, the second November 11, and the last on the actual Black Friday (closed for Thanksgiving for a change). The only one of those with movie deals was the November 11 ad, but it was for in-store purchases only, which didn’t actually start until November 14, with stores opening at 5:30 AM. Normally they have a lot of cardboard bins of movies (shippers) lined up in the aisles that are unwrapped at door-busting time (Thursday night lately) and quickly picked clean within minutes, certainly within an hour, by the masses. But my trick was to go that morning when the prices were already active and get movies off the shelf instead of the wrapped up shippers and avoid the crowds. Last year I was able to pick up some leftovers that night though. But with the store opening at 5:30 AM, that strategy probably wouldn’t work.

On the off chance that prices might activate early, I went the night before, but not only were the prices not active, but the shelves were barely stocked. Plus the advertised movies were kind of lame. One problem is very few new movies have been released in 2020, plus streaming or digital purchases are more popular than buying physical media. Walmart had some great prices last year, including on 4k blu-rays, but not much this time, with higher prices on some of the same movies. Still, I thought I might pick up Once Upon a Time in Hollywood¹ for $5.96 on blu-ray even though I wasn’t that crazy about it (it has some great moments, was nominated for Best Picture, and has an 83 on Metacritic, where anything over 60 is pretty good). They also had all three Lord of the Rings movies (theatrical releases) for the same price. They did have Rise of Skywalker on 4k blu-ray for only $7.96, but I already had it on blu-ray. When I went the night before I didn’t see anything about them opening at 5:30, just their normal 7 AM. So I set my alarm and got there just after opening. No crowds. The rest of the ad was pretty sparse and most deals had been online for days, so this was not a big event. The movie selection was pretty small, just 4 shippers with maybe 6 blu-rays on each (mostly DVD’s), but they had Hollywood and I looked through everything else, including a DVD box set of the first 5 seasons of Orange Is the New Black for $9.96 (20 discs!) which I passed on. I forgot to look for Lord of the Rings, but they may not have had it. Later on I went to a different Walmart and they were still not picked over and I got LOTR². That was it for Walmart (except I also bought a vacuum cleaner and some Rubbermaid containers on good sales; they had some amazing deals on TV’s, but I am set already).

Best Buy released its Black Friday ad in late October and they had plenty of smaller sales as well. One nice thing about Best Buy is they usually have plenty of copies of everything and they have the same deals online and in store and because I earn points for using my Best Buy Visa card, I get free shipping for Elite members and had earned $35 in rewards points. One of the early preview sales was for 4k discs at $9.99 and I got last year’s Best Picture winner, Parasite³ (a 96 at Metacritic!), hoping I like it (and using $5 credit to get it for $4.99). The price of The Help⁴ (62 at MC) also dropped to $5.99 which makes it very cheap with another $5 off. Before Black Friday, Best Buy has a member preview sale which has gotten more and more underwhelming over the years. This year all they had was Disney/Marvel/Pixar/Star Wars titles at $14.99 for 4k and $9.99 for blu-ray. I am stocked up on blu-rays of those already for lower average prices by doing the Disney Movie Club, and I can stream most in 4k on Disney+. Then on the 17th Best Buy had another preview sale including a couple of the titles I was hoping to get, Knives Out⁵ (82) for $5.99 and the HBO mini series The Pacific⁶ for $9.99. It wasn’t clear which titles would be on sale until the prices were activated at 1 in the morning, so when I woke up late that night and it was 1:30, I checked and ordered those two using $15 in credits. They had same day delivery as a free option so I got that. In the morning after I was up the dogs started barking and a man was delivering my movies at about 9:20. 8 hours! Later in the day, reading about what all people had been ordering, someone mentioned getting the Godfather⁷ trilogy for $9.99. While I feel like those are overrated, the first two are classics, winning Best Picture Oscars, and making it on the AFI 100 best films lists. So I went ahead and ordered, but didn’t want to make the guy come to my house again, so I said I would pick it up at the store. But a couple of hours later, I guess Best Buy realized they didn’t actually have the 2 copies they said they had at that store and canceled it, so I re-ordered with next day delivery (can’t do same day after 3 PM) and used another $5 credit. So those 3 movies for $4.99, but no digital copy. There wouldn’t be anymore preview sales until the big sale started on Sunday, November 22. I still had three more movies I wanted to get at $5.99 each and $15 in credits to spend.

Meanwhile I found out that when I ordered The Help somehow they got the price wrong. It should have been $5.99 less $5 in rewards (before tax, which is nice), but I was charged $6.47 even though my $5 reward was now gone. I called up their support to avoid driving to the store, but wound up spending an hour on the phone with first the Elite member customer service, then rewards, then the regular returns desk, and none of them knew what to do, finally filling out a support ticket for me. A few days later, they added $15 in rewards points to my account, which is more than fair, even though I still wound up paying more than I wanted for the movie.

Finally Target joined the fray, releasing an ad on November 16. They had already had a Buy 2, Get 1 Free deal they do every few months, but I couldn’t pick 3 movies that would work out that great since they usually charge full price for everything during those sales. I would have to wait until November 22 to see the prices. Target has drastically reduced the number of blu-rays and DVD’s they sell in their stores, but will have some shippers out. In fact, people posted pictures of their shippers a few days before the sale and it looked like they might have some decent things, especially if they kept some of their prices.

Lastly, Dollar Tree is doing another round of DVD and Blu-ray sales that looks like it could be promising, but it is always random what a given store might have and most of the overstock movies they sell are terrible, though for $1 each there are usually some gems, often titles I haven’t heard of. Their movies are supposed to go out November 27, but some stores put them out early.

On November 22, all of the promised Black Friday prices on movies were available at Best Buy. Rather than wait up until 1 AM for the prices to change, I felt like I should go to the store and maybe see what had slipcovers and what didn’t. With the extra $10 in rewards points, I could get a couple of extra titles. The main ones I wanted were three acclaimed movies released by Lionsgate in 2018 or 2019: The Farewell⁸ (89), The Peanut Butter Falcon (70), and The Lighthouse (83). I hadn’t seen any of them. I got to Best Buy right at opening at 10 AM and there were about five people waiting outside for them to open the door. I was worried that if people ordered stuff at 1 AM using in store pickup, that the store could be sold out before they even opened. And things did look pretty scarce once I was in. I never found the three movies I wanted originally (ordered them once I got back in my car). Just in the last day or so I thought I might get Birds of Prey⁹ (60), a better reviewed sequel to the DC Comics antihero movie Suicide Squad (40), neither of which I had seen, but Birds of Prey was something a lot of people were getting and the 4K version was only $7.99 with a nice slipcover, plus, like a lot of 4K movies, comes with a blu-ray version and a digital code. I finally found it on a new release shelf and I think I got the last copy. Another 2019 movie with decent reviews was Just Mercy¹⁰ (68) and it came with a slipcover. At $5.99 on sale and with $5 off in rewards, it was only $1. I had bought a poster for the 2019 movie Motherless Brooklyn¹¹ primarily because it had a nice picture of the Brooklyn Bridge, but it was on sale now for $5.99 as well. It got okay reviews (60 at Metacritic), but sounded interesting, so I got it too. Three movies in store plus the three I ordered in the car, and I used $30 in rewards points, wiping me out, but the check out price was less than $10 for everything.

I wanted to drop by Target now that their prices were active too. Last year I bought John Wick 3 (73) in 4K and it was a little disappointing, but Target had the first two, better movies^{12, 13} (68, 75) for $4 each and a Buy 2 Get 1 Free deal stacked on that. So I added Doctor Sleep¹⁴, a 2019 movie with okay reviews (59), a sequel to The Shining which I had just recently watched for the first time. $2.67 each for those three seemed hard to resist. When I got to the store I noticed they had Elf¹⁵ (64) and The Grinch (51) marked at only $6 each. I hadn’t seen this 2018 version of The Grinch but Carol gave me a poster from it for my birthday, so it would be good to see it (and it has a slipcover), and then Elf from 2003 is kind of a classic. I needed a third and picked Midway¹⁶ from last year (also with a slipcover), another movie I haven’t seen, and the reviews weren’t great (47), but I always enjoyed watching the version from the 70’s on TV about this decisive US victory in the Pacific, and many reviews said this one was better, so why not. I had told myself I would just rent it from Redbox, but hard to go wrong at $4. When I went to the self checkout, it didn’t seem to be totaling everything in my favor (should have been $20 before tax and was coming out to about $23), so I got help to cancel the order and decided to buy in two separate orders so the $4 items would be together and the $6 items. It still didn’t come out right. Elf and The Grinch despite being marked on the shelf at $6 had rung up at $7 each. So instead of costing $4 each on average, they were $5 each, which is still good, but 25% more than I hoped for. When I got to the car I looked online to see if the price should be $6 and it said $7, which is also what I had written down yesterday. I decided to go back and look at the shelf tag before trying a return and the tag said $6 was for the DVD even though that space on the shelf was all blu-rays and the DVDs were on a different shipper. I moved the erroneous tags to the spot where the DVDs were so that nobody else would be taken in. Disappointing, but not much I could do and probably not worth trying to hassle with customer service over $2.

Sixteen movies is more than I wanted to buy, but there are a lot of good movies in there and a lot of things I have never seen (most from 2019). I haven’t opened any of the movies in case better deals come along on these movies soon or on 4K versions for the same price. Except for anything that might appear at Dollar Tree, I feel like I am done, 5 days before the actual Black Friday. Then there is cyber Monday, now cyber week, which can have some good deals, along with sales that go on in December and January.