Starting this month, Best Buy is ceasing the sale of DVDs and Blu-rays both online and in-store. I visited my local Best Buy this week and saw firsthand the barren shelf (singular) where movies used to be. I bought a Disney100 Steel Book of Beauty and the Beast for $23, and left the store for what may be the final time. Then I got on Amazon and ordered the new 4K Ultimate Edition of Avatar: The Way of Water, and realized Blu-Ray ain’t going anywhere after all.
A lot of people are treating Best Buy’s decision to stop selling movies as a watershed moment for physical media, but speaking as someone who has a close relationship with both Best Buy and Blu-Rays, it really isn’t. I worked at a Best Buy all through high school, back in the early 2000s when half the store was made up of rows and rows of DVDs and CDs, and I built a pretty impressive collection. Practically my entire paycheck each month went towards special edition movies, TV box sets, and new albums, and thanks to movie nerds like me, Best Buy thrived.
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As I continued to work at Best Buy during holiday breaks in college and for years after as I tried to get my filmmaking career off the ground, I watched physical media slowly disappear from the store. It’s certainly true that streaming has had a huge impact on the Blu-ray business. Only collectors buy discs now, because it’s easier and cheaper to stream things. That said, Best Buy hasn’t been the market leader in physical media for a long time, and seeing it finally give up on Blu-rays isn’t the nail in the coffin for physical media that you might think it is.
Best Buy wasn’t pushed out of the disc business by streaming; it was pushed out by Amazon. Cheap items with low markup like Blu-Rays used to be Best Buy’s way to get people into the door. Movie aisles were strategically placed towards the back of the store so that you’d have to walk past all the new phones, tablets, and laptops to find them. While you browsed the movies, giant televisions lined the walls in front of you, showcasing the latest and greatest in home theater technology. Best Buy wanted people to come in for The Dark Knight on Blu-Ray and leave with a new HD TV, and for many years, that worked great.
Fewer people are buying physical media now, yes, but more importantly, the people who are buying discs aren’t driving all the way to Best Buy to get it. Like many retailers, Amazon’s ability to ship things quickly and for free has made shopping so convenient that there’s no reason to go into a store anymore. If discs aren’t generating foot traffic, then Best Buy doesn’t need to sell them.
Note: Best Buy will continue to sell physical video games, and has not made any claims about discontinuing video game sales in the future. The rumors spreading around social media are incorrectly reported. Right now, only DVDs and Blu-rays are going away.
I don’t think anything about the physical media market has fundamentally changed here. I’ll miss Best Buy’s exclusive steel books - which were meant to be its last-ditch effort to get people back into the store - but you’re still going to be able to buy Blu-Rays if you want them. Greedy streaming services that delist their own content make a strong case for the continued existence of physical media, and it’s an important component of media preservation, no doubt about it, but this Best Buy situation isn’t the canary in the coal mine people think it is.
As long as the Criterion Collection exists, physical media will survive. As long as vinyl is still a thing, Blu-rays will be a thing too. Discs aren’t as ubiquitous as they used to be, but they’re not going to disappear completely. Not for films, and not for games, either.
