Back on track, this is probably my first picture showing the inside of a Fred Meyer electronics section. Traditionally they've been separated off from the rest of the salesfloor, with everyone funneled past the dedicated checkout to enter and exit -- not the greatest setup for photographing! The recent remodels have opened them up to the rest of the salesfloor a bit more, but I don't think I've bothered stopping in considering how boring the remodeled ones are. This place certainly isn't boring, though! I love the ceiling structures (especially the flying saucer-looking thing over the checkout) and the wacky color scheme they chose. I'm sure this looked pretty futuristic 20 years ago!
As I mentioned previously, Fred Meyer's electronics departments were traditionally the home of music and movies too. It doesn't look like much has changed with the movie shelving here since roughly 2006, considering there's just one shelf labeled for Blu-rays while most of them still advertise DVDs! Can you even buy new movies (the kind of things you would find at a general interest store like Fred Meyer) on DVD any longer? (I say that, but I've never even used a Blu-ray -- I know they're ubiquitous these days, but the only disc player I own is a USB CD/DVD drive from 2010, back when Blu-rays were still relatively pricey and exotic!)
While some of the movies on those shelves are Blu-Rays, it looks like the majority of them are DVDs. I'm not much of a movie fan and so I have not bought a DVD or Blu-Ray movie in a number of years, but my understanding is that the major Hollywood releases are still sold on both DVD and on Blu-Ray. My understanding is that some studios will actually sell the DVD and Blu-Ray in the same combo pack in some instances at least. DVD players are still being sold and probably a good number of people still only have DVD players since Blu-Ray never really took off as Sony had hoped. With that, DVD versions still sell relatively well.
ReplyDeleteI have a Blu-Ray player and also a Blu-Ray PC drive. The PC drive is only used for larger scale backups. The player is only used as a Super Audio CD player since it is a Sony player which does Blu-ray and SACD. I suppose it might get used for Blu-Rays if I ever buy any audio albums on Blu-Ray Audio, but I have not done that yet and I'm not sure if I ever will. I don't intend on buying any movies on Blu-Ray. Even as a SACD player, the Blu-Ray player gets used sparingly, but it does get used as I do have more than a handful of classical music SACDs and they are still publishing new classical music albums on SACD. Most SACD albums are hybrid SACD albums which can also be played on regular CD players at regular CD quality, and really there isn't much difference if one is listening to SACD in stereo as I do. The main advantages are with surround sound SACDs since regular CDs can't do true surround. Of course, I don't have a surround sound setup in current times so that's not of great use to me.
It does look very stereotypical early 2000's in here!
ReplyDeleteAs far as I'm aware, new movies are still released on DVD/BluRay (and I think that's about all recently remodeled Targets and Walmarts sell anymore are the movies released in the last couple months too, outside of a small seasonal selection like Christmas movies). I know there still are movie buffs who want to buy the new DVDs/BluRays when they come out, particularly those special edition releases like steelbooks and Target exclusive content and such. After those first few weeks coming from a new release, physical media sales drop off a cliff, which is why most of these stores only stock the super new stuff as that's all that really sells.
Interesting! I really would have thought Blu-ray would have all but replaced DVD by now, nearly 20 years on. It's not like new movies were coming out on VHS 20 years after DVD came out (that would have been 2016)!
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