When I flew back to Prague in December and they lost my bag, I realized that my Caselogic binder of DVD's was in it, and that was more expensive than anything I own, with exception of my car. It made me think that I should have put my laptop in my bag and carried on my DVD's, because it made more sense economically. Luckily, they found my bag and everything was cool, but it made me think about how much money I have invested in DVD's.
My DVD purchasing started back in 1999 when I bought well over $200 worth of DVD's and didn't even own a DVD player yet. It was just a really good deal that I couldn't turn down, I got them all for 50% off at a now defunct Internet company that I can't even remember the name of. That same year was the famous Tower Records/flooz scam and the relatively minor buy.com scam, which netted ridiculous amounts of free DVD's. Another big purchase that comes to mind is when the DVD fallout happened and the average price of a DVD dropped from about $25 to $15. I bought about $300 worth of $15 DVD's at that point from CompUSA, which I've come to regret. Whenever I see DVD's I own for much less than I paid them, more often than not they came from that CompUSA batch. The CompUSA deal turned out in the positive because of the Xbox deal though:
I got to do a bit of cleansing of my collection when the Xbox came out, EB was doing a promotion where you could trade in DVD's for store credit ($10 each) and I traded in about 24 DVD's at this point, paid the balance (~$60) and got an Xbox. But at the time, the first season of South Park was spread out over 6 DVD's. CompUSA mistakenly sold 3-set bundles of these for $15, so I snagged as many of those as I could, and held them long enough to trade them in at EB for $10 each. I also unloaded DVD's that I had gotten in the buy.com scam that I hated, like "The Sixth Sense" and "The Blair Witch Project".
I also got Amazon to fulfill a price mistake on the movie "The Insider", where I received 12 copies of it at $0.01 each, so I managed to trade some of those for real DVD's as well. I even traded away my last copy of that terrible, terrible movie to EB for $10.
At this point, I pretty much have the bulk of the DVD's that I want to own. Most of my favorite movies are in my collection, the biggest exception is Metropolitan which hasn't been released on DVD due to some licensing issues (Cloak and Dagger got released last year, coincidentally right after my long, long process of acquiring it on VHS).
It's difficult to be a jew about DVD's. It's easy enough if you're buying a car, or a laptop, or a projector, or a sofa, you just shop around and find the best price or make the decision to wait until the price drops. For a DVD, this becomes fairly ridiculous. Are you really going to comparison shop over a $15 purchase? Are you going to wait until it drops to $5.99 in two years?
There is a forum at dvdtalk where people actually do this. I'm sure that after reading this whole story, you may say that that comment is fairly hypocritical, but I think the difference is that I nit-pick over the price of bulk orders of DVD's, not individual ones.
This being said, there's a sale at Deep Discount DVD right now that lasts until the 25th, if you use the coupon code DVDTALK you can get 20% off your order. Considering their already reasonable prices, this is a fairly good deal. I just blew about $230, a considerable portion going directly to Larry David (but I'll own the 3rd season of Curb Your Enthusiasm and Seinfeld seasons 1-4). If you don't already own it, you can get the entire series of Freaks and Geeks, the best television show ever made, for $33.
