A trip to Big Lots pays off big

Seven or eight years ago I was living in Vancouver (WA), and there was a Big Lots right down the road from me, dare I say, the greatest Big Lots store that has ever been.

It wasn't the biggest location, but it was well stocked (unlike most of their locations), and it was always full of people (also unlike most of their locations). Even though there were plenty of other businesses around, including a mall across the street, for all intensive purposes, this particular Big Lots was the place to be.

Most folks seemed to be going there for food items, and other household goods, but not me. No the draw for me was their DVD section, which was stocked on a weekly basis, and because of this, one could find me there on a weekly basis, not surprisingly, on the day that the new shipment of DVD's were put out. It became quite the routine for me, every week is Big Lots, followed by Value Village.

I can't tell you how many DVD's I bought from that store, but I it was a lot, as I rarely walked away empty handed. I would've been completely content to have continued this routine for the rest of my days (especially since Value Village was my absolute favorite place to go), but some genius at the Big Lots corporate offices had to go and muck everything up.

I can remember it like it was yesterday, I stopped in for my weekly visit, and there it was, plastered all over the windows, a big banner that said "Moving sale!". This was quite disheartening, to say the least. I would quickly learn that it was decided by some corporate jackass that they were going to consolidate this location with the much bigger store that was about ten miles away. There wasn't actually much of a sale either, as most of the good stuff just got sent over to the bigger store, and within just a few weeks, my, and everybody else in the area's, beloved location was closed.

Following it's closing, I had very little interest in traveling so far out of my way to go to the "superstore", but eventually I decided to give it a go, and surprise, surprise... it was terrible!

Sure, the location was multiple times bigger, but all of the shelves were half empty, and worst of all (at least for me), the DVD section was the sh*ts. Oh, and you could hear a f*cking pin drop in that place, there was nobody there, it was like being in a crematorium... except less fun :)

I think I ended up going to this giant monstrosity on three separate occasions over the next year or so, things never did seem to improve, and they certainly weren't stocking their DVD shelves on a weekly basis, so there wasn't much reason for me to keep trying to go there.

Fast forward a few years, and life has me moving to Tennessee, rural Tennessee. Almost right after moving here, I found, and went to, a Big Lots that's about twenty minutes away from me, it too sucked. And hasn't improved much over the almost five years that I've been here now. The shelves are rarely stocked, and the DVD section is abysmal, well, that is unless you want to own twelve copies of Borat (I don't even want to own one!).

Because of my history with the store, I hadn't really been on the lookout for any other locations, but I did notice earlier this year that there's a store just a couple of blocks from the Goodwill that I frequent, the only problem is that it's usually not open yet by the time I get out of Goodwill, and I'm not the sort to sit around and wait for somewhere to open. Earlier this year though, I did finally go in there, and it wasn't too bad. Decent amount of stuff, decent amount of Blu-Rays and DVD's, I think I picked up two or three at the time. I had fully intended to go back at some point, but hadn't had much luck in doing so, in fact I didn't go back in until two weeks ago.

I don't know if things have gotten better, or if I just went on the best day possible, because there Blu-Ray/DVD display, which is a four-sided multi-shelf type of set-up, was completely full, there had to be at least 500+ movies there. This certainly was a welcome sight, but was even better was that one whole side was full of clearance items, most of which were half-off. And if that wasn't good enough, they were also running some kind of sale, which I've already forgotten the details of, but it was something like "Buy 1 (or 2), and get the 2nd (or 3rd) half-off". Since I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, it didn't take long for me to start what would end up being a rather long search through everything, and I mean everything, I didn't leave a single case unturned. Thankfully this lengthy search paid off, as I did end up bringing a few things home with me:

The first thing that stood out (besides the fullness of the shelves) once I started looking through everything, was that they had a plethora of foreign films to peruse, especially those of the Asian variety. There was a time when my brother and I were seeing multiple films a week in the theatres, a number of which were foreign, with a decent amount of those being from the martial arts genre. But that was like 15+ years ago, and I really haven't kept up with the genre since then. When it comes to watching martial arts flicks these days, I usually just end up going with 70's kung-fu yarns, or a silly ninja movies from the 80's. That being said, I'm not opposed to the newer stuff, I just don't get a chance to see much of it anymore.

As an aside, I purposely photographed everything in today's post with the price tags showing, just in case anyone was curious about the clearance stuff, although as already mentioned there were other discounts applied to these as well.

I have high hopes for this one, if I hadn't been so busy lately, and wanting to keep the blog up to date, I would've already watched it by now. I'm only planning on doing two posts next week, so that should free up some time to watch it.

 

As you can see, I did take this opportunity to pick up a few of the newer martial arts films, and I would've gotten more had they all been discounted, $5 is just too pricey these days for something that I haven't seen.

I remember watching the trailer for this before it came out, liked what I saw enough to even contemplate paying the absurd amount money it costs to see a film in the theatres these days, but ultimately decided against it -- and boy (or girl) am I glad I did, because this was terribly disappointing. Since it's still relatively new I won't go and spoil anything, but I will say that if you've seen the trailer, than you've already seen all of the funny parts (yeah, it's one of those films). There was a bit of a twist at the end, which wasn't unpleasant, but it wasn't enough to make up for the rest of the picture.

Seeing as how we're approaching the futuristic year off 2020, I figure it might finally be time to upgrade my Jurassic Park VHS (multiple copies actually) to DVD. Looks like my Jurassic World movie ticket expired though, that's probably a good thing, I gave that one a go a few years back, only made it about fifteen minutes before I turned it off -- it was the kids, I just couldn't handle those kids!

Oh, and since everybody knows what Jurassic Park is about, I didn't think it was necessary to snap a pic of the synopsis.

You know how I was just talking about my brother and I going to see a sh*t ton of pictures? Yeah, well during that stretch we went saw both Ju-On, and it's American remake, The Grudge, as well. I enjoyed both of them at the time, but haven't seen either again since. And I don't what the deal is, whether it's that they printed off way too many DVD's, or if people just aren't feeling the film, but I've been seeing this everywhere for the last couple of years now, and it keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. I don't know if I was really looking to own it or not, but $0.94 was a little too cheap for me to pass up.

At this point I was done. What I thought would be a ten-minute stop at best, turned into a 38 minute marathon. But the DVD gods had other plans, because as I turned to head towards one of the main aisles. there it was, and cardboard display of DVD's... mostly of the horror variety by the looks of it!

This cardboard wasn't overly big, so didn't take me to too long to get through everything. There wasn't much of interest in there either, but this one here certainly made those extra couple of minutes of looking well worth it. I've seen Hammer's version of The Phantom of the Opera many times, but had never come across a physical copy of it, so finding this was kind of exciting. The stuff on this display wasn't part of the sale, but I'd buy any Hammer film that I don't already own for $3 any day of the week. Heck, I'd buy any Herbert Lom films that I don't already own for $3 any day of the week!

When all was said and done, between the time spent searching, and the drama queen that was ahead of me in line (I'm not even gonna go into it), I was there for a total of 52 minutes. Was it worth it? I'd say so. Will I be going back again soon? That's the plan, although I won't be expecting the next trip to be as fruitful, I just don't see how that could be possible.


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