Which is of course a knock off of:
Some readers may recall that the same store also had a floor to ceiling display with at least 50 copies of Snakes on a Train.
What’s next… Transmorphers?
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Well, yes. I took a secondary gig at BB and it was hilarious when this woman came in and wanted to try a different copy of Transmorphers, because she thought something was wrong with the one was renting.
“The sound is off,” she said. “Everyone told me this was supposed to be a really good movie! It sounds like, dubbed or something.”
Yes, she was thinking of Transformers and this movie was so bad she thought the disc was defective. She wanted to exchange it for a different “non-defective” disc. I had to explain to her that no, it’s just a really bad movie, but that she should see Transformers when it comes out. I then had to apologize that we can’t give rental credits for bad choices.
I can’t blame BB, we can’t afford to give rental credits over something so subjective. And some people hate all movies, and people would abuse it anyways. We already have people that scratch up discs after watching them and come in and demand a rental credit, and they do this whenever they know we don’t have another copy. We catch on and make a note to watch for such credits on the account.
And I don’t think it’s even just trying to trick people having these knock-offs. There’s been knock offs forever. Equilibrium, for example. People enter the store and they usually already know how many movies they’re looking for- we don’t have to sell them on the idea. And to keep deals with the distributors/movie companies, we can’t be SO choosy in what we get. Just be glad most of us will ask the customer “You realize this is not X right?”
What gets me the most about the knock off films, is Blockbuster’s promotion of them. They didn’t just carry Snakes On A Train, they gave it an entire wall. When Snakes On A Plane came out, they gave it half a wall, but sprinkled in copies of S.O.A.T. between the S.O.A.P. dvds.
They also did this with Pirates of the Caribbean (with the film Pirates), and probably with Transformers (with the film Transmorphers).
There’s a lot of talk on the yo-yo web boards these days about pirated yo-yos coming from China, but I don’t see any difference between that and the malicious nature that Blockbuster Inc endorses knock off films and tries to pass them off as legitimate movies. It could be argued that Blockbuster is just carrying a bad movie and placing it near the title it’s knocking off simply because of the alphabetized listings…
… but a whole wall of Snakes On A Train or Pirates? Is that simply carrying a bad movie, or intentionally attempting to mislead the consumer?
Hmm… I started in Aug, so I can’t speak for SOAT vs SOAP or Pirates. I can say that I haven’t even seen a copy of SOAT (i assume it’s somewhere in our store), but we have so many copies of SOAP that the extras for sale fill a 3.99 bin, making it cheaper to buy than rent. As for Pirates being in the middle of a POTC wall, that could just be stupid workers. Whenever a sequel comes out (that’s popular), we pull the older ones out and put them on a row in the middle. It’s so people can catch up. So we had the old Harry potter movies in the middle of the new one, and the older Bourne movies the same way. If the worker was stupid (And they might be if BB is their career), they might have pulled the wrong movies to put in the display, especially if they’re not “with it”. At the last POTC release/ at world’s end, Pirates was not on the new release wall, so it shouldn’t have been there. It wasn’t in our store in WBL.
I know in August we had maybe 6 copies of Transmorphers. We got over 200 copies of Transformers in… October? Since ‘morphers had been out for over a couple months, it had to be on the bottom half of the wall (which is why the alphabetizing always looks wrong, the new new ones are on top half and the older new ones on bottom, except when a new movie gets a whole bay of shelves). Transformers shipped with it’s own shelf-covers and decorations and such, so other movies shouldn’t have been integrated in that. My confused customer was before Transformers came out.
AVH we had yes, a row of it. Maybe 25 of them. People rented them, and some even liked them. We’re down to maybe 10 or so already. I love it when people say we need more copies of something, when we have 300 and it’s the Friday before a long weekend (like MLK) and frickin cold and the movie just came out.
When in doubt, ask a worker. We’re allowed to say if a movie sucks or is ghetto.
(and no, i’m not just in love with bb. I hadn’t rented in years before working there. Some things make sense, and some are BS. There’s nothing deliberate on the store’s part, and they’re not profitable to us. They cost the same, don’t rent well, and don’t sell).
Also, some stores are franchise, and some are corporate. Franchise stores can set their own prices, policies, and order quantities (within reason). A franchise store MAY have been messing with people. Mine’s corporate.
there are knock offs of movies??
How About ” Frederick vs Jay”
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