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Answerman - Will Anime Discs Keep Being Sold At Major Retailers?


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F302 Pilot



Joined: 27 Jan 2008
Posts: 45
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 6:55 pm Reply with quote
I prefer to buy DVDs/Blu-Rays at Anime Conventions,i still go to my local Best Buy if there's any Anime titles am interested in buying
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Paiprince



Joined: 21 Dec 2013
Posts: 593
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 7:06 pm Reply with quote
Blanchimont wrote:
DJStarstryker wrote:
... Too many anime nowadays have "to be continued in the light novel/manga" endings or other issues. ...

Well, a lot of anime these days, perhaps even the majority?, are essentially treated like adverts for the source material, be it light novel, manga, card game, visual novel, etc.


This complaint never fails to get a chuckle or two from me. FYI your halcyon years of the 90's and 80's had a lot of incomplete adaptations. It's only made worse because it seemed like they were gonna go through the whole story but then suddenly stops without no indication of it's closure (Groove Adventure Rave and GTO anime anyone?). Let's not forget a glut of OVA's with nonsensical endings. At least now they have the courtesy to find a good closing point to end their "advertisement" these days, and even now, if it proves to be really popular a second season greenlight is stronger than it was decades ago.
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
Posts: 7163
Location: Another Kingdom
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 7:15 pm Reply with quote
Fry's Electronics' anime section is smaller than it once was, but it's the only physical retail chain I've been to that still stocks titles from Aniplex and Sentai. If anime is stocked anywhere else, it's all FUNimation and Viz.

I've never seen an HMV or Hastings in my life though. I guess they don't exist around here. The dedicated video stores around here growing up were Wherehouse, Suncoast, Virgin, and FYE. I do hear from other people that they've never seen a Fry's Electronics though. (There was only one Virgin Electronics though, which was in Burbank, near the IKEA. It was annoying to shop there because whoever was running it just stocked whatever they felt like regardless of popularity or demand. Some of the local Sears are like that too.)

Vaisaga wrote:
Many years later and their anime section is now pretty pitiful. It hasn't been restocked in ages (save for some DBZ releases) and I swear that first G Gundam box set has been there for at least a decade.


Maybe it varies by area, but my local Best Buys, while they don't have much anime either, at least keep up with releases for One Piece, Naruto, and Sailor Moon.

DerekL1963 wrote:
As with so much else, what your local store carries often depends on local conditions. In my fairly small town, my local FYE's anime section has stayed the same size, and maybe even expanded a little. (We even have a small anime goods store across the street in the mall now. Though if their inventory was a diverse and deep as their stores down the road in the Big City they might do better than they are.) Their [Western] TV section in the meantime has perhaps doubled in size. (Their music section however is suffering.) Honestly though, every time I drive by there, I'm just surprised they aren't having a going-out-of-business sale.


Except for the one in the Santa Anita Westfield, all of our local FYEs are gone.

invalidname wrote:
Anecdotally, in the last few weeks, both of my local Sam's Clubs have eliminated packaged media (DVD, CD, Blu-Ray, console games) entirely.


Costco still sells a lot of those though. They get very few anime, but they do get some interesting things in every now and then.

Touma wrote:
Do Wal-mart and K-Mart still sell anime? I used to buy from both of them but have not been in any of their stores for several years because there are none close to me.


Some Wal•Marts do, and some don't. It depends on who's running them. One of my local Wal•Marts gets big stuff like DBZ and Sailor Moon and puts them all in the children's section, usually at the bottom row. (It does not stock Naruto, Attack on Titan, or any other anime made in the 21st century.) Another one actually gets stuff like The Tale of Princess Kaguya, One Piece: Film Z, and Gundam Build Fighters Try and puts them at eye level in the New Releases section, then puts them into either children's, movies, or TV depending on the series. All other Wal•Marts I've visited ignores anime entirely. My guess is that in the first case, they stock anime based on requests from customers who grew up in the 90's or has someone working there at about that age, and in the second case there's probably someone working there anime-savvy enough to know about those releases and accept them.

(Being within an anime fandom, it can sometimes be hard to remember that a normal person might not even know anime is still being made, simply because they've stopped hearing their friends talk about them. I had a similar issue with manga when I tried searching at a locally-owned bookstore, whose only manga they stocked was xxxHolic, and the person I asked thought they only make about one series per year.)

As for K•Mart, the company strategy is to be somewhere between a regular department store like Wal•Mart or Target and discount stores like Dollar Tree or Big Lots; due to that, I rarely find anime wandering through one. When I do see them, it's clearance stuff that I'm guessing was passed down from a bigger retailer. It's the same deal with their video games: Full of weird obscure stuff that failed to sell at bigger vendors.


Last edited by leafy sea dragon on Mon May 16, 2016 7:18 pm; edited 1 time in total
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CatSword



Joined: 01 Jul 2014
Posts: 1489
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 7:17 pm Reply with quote
Books-a-Million added a decent anime DVD selection fairly recently here. It's right by the manga.

No super-new releases though. As-seen-on-TV or huge fanbase Akira, Attack on Titan, Black Lagoon, Cowboy Bebop, Free!, Samurai Champloo, etc.
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TarsTarkas



Joined: 20 Dec 2007
Posts: 5922
Location: Virginia, United States
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 9:15 pm Reply with quote
In south-east Virginia, the only place that has the largest selection of new anime, is the Norfolk Naval Base Navy Exchange. Probably because it has the largest fleet presence on the East Coast. All of our Best Buy's have very little anime. The closest Suncoast that I know about is in greater Baltimore. All of the other military exchanges have very little or non-existent anime presence.

It is great that the Norfolk Navy Exchange has a lot of anime, but none of it ever goes on sale, and there is never any discounting. So like many others, we are forced to shop at The RightStuf and Amazon. Not that I am complaining about those two companies, I love the RightStuf. Though the RightStuf needs to make their HQ more fan/visitor friendly. I have been there twice and they still have the same soulless empty lobby that has a few anime curio cabinets.
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Eri94



Joined: 14 Feb 2011
Posts: 220
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 9:19 pm Reply with quote
All this having to ship loads of it back because it didn't sell is nonsense. Not in the sense I don't believe it happened, but rather, because the retailer forced it to happen.

If the show or manga was even half decent someone would have bought it. Maybe not for full price. But lower it enough, and someone would. What do you have to lose? It's already printed and shipped, some money is better than no money right?

But retailers for the most part refused to do this except once in a blue moon. They'd rather return whole pallets of anime discs/books and claim "no one wanted it" rather than allow someone to purchase a series at 50% off.
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
Posts: 7163
Location: Another Kingdom
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 9:41 pm Reply with quote
ninjamitsuki wrote:
I'm fortunate enough to still have a Suncoast with a big anime section near me.


TarsTarkas wrote:
The closest Suncoast that I know about is in greater Baltimore.


Wait, what's all this talk about Suncoast? I thought they went out of business and closed all of their stores, taking Sam Goody with them. Is this one of those cases where the larger chain goes bankrupt but independently run locations continue to exist, like with Blockbuster and Hot Dog on a Stick?
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HdE



Joined: 17 Nov 2015
Posts: 50
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 9:56 pm Reply with quote
Maaaaan... articles like this one really bring home to me how much the industry has changed since I was buying VHS cassettes in the early '90s.

Bear in mind that I live in a tiny, backwards town in the south west of England. It's the LAST place on Earth you'd expect anime to catch on. But, for all of five minutes right as I was taking my exams and getting ready to leave school, it arrived and started doing gangbusters.

I remember walking into my local John Menzies after school each day. They were a (now defunct) chain of newsagents who I think also dabbled in wholesale. I'm reliably informed they also had a lot to do with VHS distribution of anime in the UK. Their presence in my town may very well be the only reason anime ever made it there!

We had two branches - one that was a smaller drop-in shop, and one that was decked out more like an HMV store. Both stocked anime, which was almost exclusively distributed back then by Manga Video. The larger store had a couple of shelves of anime, which actually grew into a full rack as Manga released more titles. The smaller store had a carousel at the very back of the shop, which was where newer releases would show up first. Every time I went in, that carousel had already been ransacked.

Then the local anime bubble burst. Some of the rich kids I'd grown up with who had been buying tapes en masse cottoned on that some of those early releases weren't up to much. There may even have been a few outraged parents. Whatever, people stopped buying anime from those stores, and the shelf space it had enjoyed dwindled. I remember thinking back then that anime had been a beautiful fad and it would never get any better than that.

Sometimes I think I was completely wrong in that assumption, and other times I think I was right. At least in terms of where I live. I miss being able to walk into a local shop and find a selection of recent anime releases.
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TarsTarkas



Joined: 20 Dec 2007
Posts: 5922
Location: Virginia, United States
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 10:29 pm Reply with quote
leafy sea dragon wrote:

Wait, what's all this talk about Suncoast? I thought they went out of business and closed all of their stores, taking Sam Goody with them. Is this one of those cases where the larger chain goes bankrupt but independently run locations continue to exist, like with Blockbuster and Hot Dog on a Stick?


There are a few of the Suncoast stores that survived the great culling. Those few I believe exist where there is no F.Y.E. to compete against them.
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
Posts: 7163
Location: Another Kingdom
PostPosted: Mon May 16, 2016 11:02 pm Reply with quote
TarsTarkas wrote:
There are a few of the Suncoast stores that survived the great culling. Those few I believe exist where there is no F.Y.E. to compete against them.


We only have one F.Y.E. remaining as well, and it's become more merchandise-oriented, with the storefront full of figures, keychains, and plushes. Every other dedicated video store around here is gone. (Which is weird considering our proximity to Hollywood.) The only retailers that sell video are electronics stores, like Best Buy, and department stores, like Target. (And independent music stores, like Amoeba Music.)
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LadyKuzunoha



Joined: 18 May 2011
Posts: 91
Location: United States
PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 12:11 am Reply with quote
TarsTarkas wrote:
There are a few of the Suncoast stores that survived the great culling. Those few I believe exist where there is no F.Y.E. to compete against them.


I'm a former employee of both Suncoast and FYE, and I can pretty much confirm what you said here. This has especially been the case since FYE's parent company took over Suncoast's back in '06 - the higher-ups strongly prefer having their flagship store around any given town.

Edit: Forgot to add that the only brick-and-mortar store in my area with what I would call a respectable stock of anime is one of these elusive Suncoasts, but regrettably, it's over an hour away, and with a toll road at that, so online shopping is sadly much more cost-effective for me. I do miss being able to browse an anime section and - sometimes literally - stumble across something new or weird.


Last edited by LadyKuzunoha on Tue May 17, 2016 12:34 am; edited 1 time in total
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AnimeLordLuis



Joined: 27 Jan 2015
Posts: 1626
Location: The Borderlands of Pandora
PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 12:25 am Reply with quote
There is still a Suncoast open where I live and they still have an entire wall dedicated to Anime with the largest selection of DVD's and Blu-Ray's I've ever seen at a brick and mortar store. I think that they're able to keep this big section because every once in a while they have a buy one get one half off on all Anime titles of which I sometimes take advantage of but other than that I usually just buy my Anime online. Cool
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error5051



Joined: 22 Apr 2014
Posts: 6
PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 12:44 am Reply with quote
at this point why bother having whole shelfs full of DVDs when you can set-up a koisk and have it print/burn disks on demand. the extras like books and posters could be done through a mail-in rebate type of system. optical media may appear to be going the way of the dodo but it still has some thing to offer alot of people aren't considering.

SSDs have speed but they also don't like sitting on a shelf for long periods of time not to mention that when they die the chance of recovering your data is basicly .00001%. HDDs are more forgiving when it comes to data preservation but are nearing their capacity limit and don't like to be moved. but future multilayer M-disks or somthing like hyper CD-roms will no doubt last a lifetime under typical use scenarios.
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DerekL1963
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Joined: 14 Jan 2015
Posts: 1120
Location: Puget Sound
PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 1:12 am Reply with quote
Eri94 wrote:
If the show or manga was even half decent someone would have bought it. Maybe not for full price. But lower it enough, and someone would. What do you have to lose? It's already printed and shipped, some money is better than no money right?

But retailers for the most part refused to do this except once in a blue moon.


You do understand the retailer has already paid for the product, and that the markup is generally 50%? (And that markup is eaten into by labor and the cost of maintaining the product.) It really doesn't take much of a discount before the retailer isn't making "some money", he's making "negative money". (That is, he's taking in less than he's spent.)

Quote:
They'd rather return whole pallets of anime discs/books and claim "no one wanted it" rather than allow someone to purchase a series at 50% off.


If somebody wanted it - it wouldn't still be on the shelves. And selling it at 50% off is essentially giving it away for free.
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TonyTonyChopper



Joined: 12 Mar 2012
Posts: 258
PostPosted: Tue May 17, 2016 3:30 am Reply with quote
Blanchimont wrote:
DJStarstryker wrote:
... Too many anime nowadays have "to be continued in the light novel/manga" endings or other issues. ...

Well, a lot of anime these days, perhaps even the majority?, are essentially treated like adverts for the source material, be it light novel, manga, card game, visual novel, etc.
Yes i have caught up on that as well ... didn't used to be the case especially with OVA's being a big thing and what about more studio's other then ghibli making weird/intresting movie just because.
And world master piece theather, alot of co-pro's and son on ... i suppose that really isn't working anymore also in the past alot more anime would be based on actual manga what a concept Shocked !!!
But today all this visual novels and such whatever i hardly care about most of it (alot of otaku fanservice..) the only really good thing tat came out of that was Steins gate.
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