No Hi Def in Costco or Walmart

[Frankie]

Swung by both of these places in Calgary today and neither one had any players or movies.

Actually Costco had an older HD Toshiba but that was it. The sales guy said the cleared out the BD players because sales was so slow.

I was suprised that Walmart had nothing.

F

[esc]

The Walmart in Camrose about 3 hours north of you has a huge square display now with 3 sides of Blu and one of HD. There are no players other than 1 PS3 a month coming in.

[Derb]

Originally Posted by esc

The Walmart in Camrose about 3 hours north of you has a huge square display now with 3 sides of Blu and one of HD. There are no players other than 1 PS3 a month coming in.

Same deal in BC.

The only side of HD DVD isn't facing the consumer as they walk in. It really gives the illusion there isn't any at all, but both have a tv displayed above adverting them.

[Frankie]

Hmmmmm, Wonder why Calgary dosen't get the same treatment.

F

Just noticed you and I joined at the same time esc. We've been visting this site for 7 years.

[MooglePorn]

Wal-Mart stocks different items depending on the area and customer base... I know one Wal-Mart near me has a ton of HD discs, even a nice endcap display for them. The other has a smaller selection in with the videogames. Guess which store is more towards the country, away from Tampa?

I visited a Wal-Mart in Weirton, West Virginia not long ago and they still had a large selection of VHS tapes.

[dugpa]

Yeah, Walmart allows local stores a lot of say in what they stock depending on their market and what sells well. For instance, just here in the DFW area there are some that stock tons of HD discs and some that don't carry a single one. And you'd be surprised which ones do and don't carry discs, it's not necessarily the ones in the rougher neighborhoods that don't and the ritzier ones that do.

[Frankie]

There's another Walmart on my way to work. I'll check that one out.


Maybe they carry something.

F

[esc]

Originally Posted by Frankie

There's another Walmart on my way to work. I'll check that one out.

Maybe they carry something.

just order from Amazon.com. the dollar in price difference makes up for not having to put up with crappy English/French on the DVD case.

I was so cheesed when 2001 HD arrived and it had

Stanley Kubrick's L'euvre De Stanley Kubrick 2001 A Space Odyssey L'Odyssee De L'espace

all crammed onto the spine.

[EM3]

Originally Posted by MooglePorn

Wal-Mart stocks different items depending on the area and customer base... I know one Wal-Mart near me has a ton of HD discs, even a nice endcap display for them. The other has a smaller selection in with the videogames. Guess which store is more towards the country, away from Tampa?

I visited a Wal-Mart in Weirton, West Virginia not long ago and they still had a large selection of VHS tapes.

Damn Moog what did you do get lost. Very few people ever come to WV unless they are White water rafting, base jumping off the New River Gorge Bridge. Of course we are drawing tourists for the 4 wheeler trails.

BTW the Wal Mart in Logan has a few HD-DVD and Blu Ray discs but no players and no VHS tapes.

[jriseden]

I have a hard time believing all these Wal-Mart hd dvd stories. I thought Wal-Mart was supposed to be the place where hd was winning the format war but we just didn't know it because they don't report sales numbers???

[Ruined]

Originally Posted by jriseden

I have a hard time believing all these Wal-Mart hd dvd stories. I thought Wal-Mart was supposed to be the place where hd was winning the format war but we just didn't know it because they don't report sales numbers???

Its pretty obvious Walmart is behind HD DVD:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=WG_lJmxCenI

However my Walmarts have an equal selection of HD and BD. That only happened once the above commercial came out - previously they only had a paltry BD selection locked in the PS3 cabinet and no HD DVDs. So it appears despite their preference for HD DVD they are giving the consumer a choice of movies, and it also looks like not all stores have ramped up HDM support yet.

[MooglePorn]

Originally Posted by EM3

Damn Moog what did you do get lost. Very few people ever come to WV unless they are White water rafting, base jumping off the New River Gorge Bridge. Of course we are drawing tourists for the 4 wheeler trails.

Yeah, it was a hiking trip when I lived in Pittsburgh.

[rixrex]

Wal-Mart, and the others like it, always are looking at what's going to give them the biggest sales margins, and of course locality is taken into consideration or they'd be really lamebrained.

Compare the sales of both HD and BD vs S-DVD, they look something like 5% hi-def and 95% S-DVD. Like Transformers sold 190,000 HD first week, and sold 8.3 million S-DVD. Apparently Spidey 3 bested the robot giants by several thousand BD discs sold eventually, though not first week figures.

Still S-DVD sales are the biggest selling items of all, and so why wouldn't many Big Boxes lean heavily toward those items and less so towards 5% sellers? Just a logical marketing decision, and they really don't care a lot about what they consider the small-fry Hi Def fans desires are, as evidenced by one comment above about a Wal-Mart selling some VHS. Big Box stores are not generally the leaders in breaking in new technology, but they will jump on the bandwagon eventually.

Where did they get those VHS tapes? Considering that the last VHS big studio factory tape out was The Fog back in 2006. Must be a Wal-Mart in a big retirement area that put out the call for all others to send their tape stocks to them. I can't count the number of seniors I know who just learned how to handle their VCRs and are really pissed about DVDs, especially the navigation menues.

They all say: Dammit, I just want to put it in and press play, and then stop it to go take a leak, then have it start where I left off and I can't get the DVD to do that. And besides I don't know why they have to cut off the top and bottom of the movie too! If I managed the Wal-Mart in that town, I'd be putting tapes up for sale too, no matter what I like personally.

I always give thanks that there's Amazon!

[Frankie]

Originally Posted by Frankie

There's another Walmart on my way to work. I'll check that one out.


Maybe they carry something.

F

Yeah the other one I checked out had a high def display. Both BD and HD but no players.

F