The Dark Night breaks all our records
Even though we’re still a small store by conventional standards, we thought we’d stock up on The Dark Knight for the weekend (just gone) .. just in case. We do most of our buying through our buying group, but we stock up from local retailers on the Friday for our lead titles. From the retailers (eg JB, K-Mart), we buy more copies than we need, and can return them (unopened) for next week’s big titles (we can’t do this with our buying group). It’s a sign of the times .. through our group Dark Knight costs $29, and we can pickup copies from K-Mart for $25. New releases have truly become a commodity product that anyone can get from anywhere. Piracy runs rampant on these lead titles as well. It’s the art-house & independent stuff that give us the best margin, and our back-catalogue. More than ever, video stores have to look past the new releases, past the hits to make a decent buck.
But, the hits do burn brightly for a few weeks and The Dark Knight smashed all our records :-). We ended up with 23 copies in our system and all rented on Saturday night. Not bad! Check it out .. it’s a great movie.