Forum - View topicGood Places to Buy Anime
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Cgoten
Posts: 390 Location: Glenview, Illinois |
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I'm bored and I thought it'd be fun to see where most people buy their anime. Do you buy online more often or in actual stores? Personally, I buy from Best Buy, Suncoast, alldirect.com, rightstuf.com and sometimes buy.com.
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nagash
Posts: 280 |
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I take a look at local conventions first. There's always Tokyo Kid as well.
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4555 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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I used to buy near everything online rather than wait for it to get to Montreal, but the crappy exchange rate and the potential of paying taxes plus Canada Post's $5 "handling" charge discourages me from doing that whenever possible. In VHS days, I bought mostly from comic book stores, but in the DVD era, video retail outlets in Montreal like HMV, Archambault (Berri & Ste-Catherine location only) or Metro Video have pretty much as good a selection as the best comic book stores in the city, and are usually cheaper too. Marche Clandestin (there should be an "accent aigue" on the first e, but I'm too lazy to cut-and-paste an "e accent aigue" from WORD) , a comic book store, sometimes get things quicker than the video retail locations. Some things, like Cardcaptor Sakura, I still have to order online, since no store in Montreal seems to carry it on DVD (the Japanese version). I wonder how the anime selection at Metro Video or HMV (megastores only) compares to that at Suncoast or Sam Goody's? I used to be envious of the selection in American stores (from what I read on the Internet; I actually haven't visited the United States since 1993, before most non-comic book stores carried the stuff, and a year before I got heavily into it), but over the past couple of years, it seems Canadian retail locations have caught up. |
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Jlbkwrm
Old Regular
Posts: 94 |
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The vast majority of my purchases are done online.
Almost all my ADV, Tokyopop, and Right Stuf purchases come from bestprices.com (a site which has shown admirable support to anime fans, and carries pretty much /everything/. Shipping's a killer, though, so bulk orders are your friend). Media Blasters and Central Park Media titles I order from deepdiscountdvd.com. Their selection is fairly limited, but has gotten noticably larger recently, with the addition of Pioneer and Bandai titles. They offer free Media Mail shipping (which, it should be noted, is identical to BestPrices Standard Shipping option) in the US, which gives the nice option of placing an order for one or two titles at a time. Pioneer, Bandai, and Viz titles tend to split between DDD and Bestprices, with the occasional impulse purchase at a Best Buy brick and mortar store. Their wholesale prices are pretty darned high, so everyone charges about the same for this stuff. With the right strategy, it's possible to get a decent deal on Pioneer et. al from suncoast.com, which is nice since Suncoast is big enough that they almost never backorder. Other companies don't release enough titles I'm interested in to get me forming a plan of attack. There're also a few good sites out there for really, really cheap anime. The selection just isn't good. The Right Stuf's bargain bin can have some really good deals, but it's usually one or two a week. Also, hitmenow.com has extremely low prices on a lot of things. The tradeoff being, HMN is a company that essentially buys up old stock from bankrupt companies and sells it off. So, what they have is usually pretty much a crapshoot (Occasionally in a good way; I was one of those lucky enough to pick up a copy of the OOP Spirit of Wonder DVD from them.) |
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Cassandra
 Posts: 1356 Location: Birdsboro, PA |
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I'm too impatient to order stuff online
 I usually get my DVDs from Suncoast (the Replay program rocks!). But if it's a really expensive boxset, my husband will usually buy it online for me and make me wait for it to get shipped :/ I hate waiting.
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Cgoten
Posts: 390 Location: Glenview, Illinois |
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Yeah, I hate waiting for stuff too but if you can find a good enough price online it's worth the wait. I got the 3rd Escaflowne DVD for $10 online.
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Jlbkwrm
Old Regular
Posts: 94 |
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I'm too cheap to buy from Suncoast (Even with Replay, it's only like a 5% discount--15 on Triple Points days). Preordering usually gets me the stuff by the day it comes out, if not sooner.
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Cgoten
Posts: 390 Location: Glenview, Illinois |
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I only use Suncoast when I'm too lazy to wait for it to ship and Best Buy didn't have what I wanted.
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Ataru
 Posts: 2328 Location: Missouri (Strikeman) |
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I get mine at Fye's and Suncoast. Online wise, I also shop at Buy.com and Rightstuf.com
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OrionQuest
 Posts: 31 |
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I have found Suncoast to have the best selection of any store I have been in so far. I walked in there one day and found, of all things, Urusei Yatsura TV 1 & 2. I snapped them up instantly of course. (That was before I learned about AnimEigo... the wonderful company that has provided me with the two shows I was most interested in getting on DVD, UY and Macross.) FYE has always had a pretty decent selection too and Best Buy seems to be catching up. These places, IMO, actually have better selections than some of the local anime and comic specialty shops I have been in lately. I consider online ordering an option as well. I just have not done so yet except in the case of the Macross box set.
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LordByronius
ANN Columnist
 Posts: 861 Location: Philippe for America! He is five. |
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I go mostly for Best Buy, but I tool around eBay once in a while for the occasional out-of-print Streamline release or for, say, individual discs of a series as soon as the box set becomes available. Now that the Eva box set is released, morons are selling their individual discs for real cheap just for a stupid piece of cardboard to wedge their discs in. Suckers!
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Cgoten
Posts: 390 Location: Glenview, Illinois |
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I know, I got the first volume of Eva for less than $15. |
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cblake
Posts: 14 |
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I prefer Best Buy myself, they seem to keep there prices fairly cheep, and have a reasonable selection. I typically find that Suncost/On Cue/Sam Goody/Media Play (take your pick) is generally a bit more expensive than most other places. Unfortuantly On Cue is the only thing around here that has any anime what so ever (and that's not a whole lot). If it wasn't for that stupid "I want it _now_" disease I seem to have caught.... Oh well, at least there's the Replay club. :)
As for online, I typically use animenation.com. They have a Yahoo! store which means I can earn Yahoo! points on everything I buy through them, then I turn around and drop those points into a super certificate at giftcertificates.com, which I turn into a gift certificate at amazon so I can get more anime.. :D |
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arllyra
Posts: 70 |
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Lemme tell you, employee discounts are handy. Filled out my anime collection nicely in the last 8 months, thanks to 30% off DVDs at Suncoast. Eventually had to quit so I could stay w/in my budget.
I guess now that I don't work there anymore, I'm sticking mostly to online orders. Right Stuf is good for that. As for my anime merchandise...... eBay. And occasional visits to Cambridge. (Tokyo Kid and Sasuga Books) |
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Cgoten
Posts: 390 Location: Glenview, Illinois |
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I know. I just got my Escaflowne Ultimate Edition movie. 
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