Best Buy Will Stop Selling DVDs and Blu-Rays

Movies

Physical media is being phased out, and a big retailer has just done its part to hasten that demise. Best Buy, the biggest electronics store in America, has announced that it will no longer sell DVDs and Blu-Rays in its stores or on its website; the discs will be phased out by early 2024, with sales continuing through 2023’s Christmas Season. They will still sell physical copies of video games. A Best Buy spokesperson made the following statement to Variety:

“To state the obvious, the way we watch movies and TV shows is much different today than it was decades ago… Making this change gives us more space and opportunity to bring customers new and innovative tech for them to explore, discover and enjoy.”

I get it; physical media doesn’t sell as well as it used to, and a store like Best Buy probably figures the increasingly limited space it devotes to DVDs and Blu-Rays can be better used for something that moves more units. That includes the money they spend to buy the discs. But for the consumer and the culture, this is a bad thing. Physical media is essential because it’s a tangible product that you own, something that cannot be taken away from you. Forget streaming services, which lose licensing rights all the time; if you buy digital media, the platform that hosts it can take it away from you anytime it wants, despite the money you spent and the phony label of ownership. They can also alter the movie or show, censoring it without telling you; look at what recently happened to The French Connection, which had a scene edited out on the Criterion Channel (presumably by Disney, who stopped selling physical media in Australia and New Zealand). They can’t do that to your Blu-Ray or DVD. Owning physical media is one of the few ways to preserve art, and it’s something you can do on a personal level. With Best Buy out of the game, Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target will be the biggest Blu-Ray and DVD retailers in the country; I recommend online retailer Kino Lorber, which has tons of older movies available, stuff Best Buy wouldn’t stock in a million years. And FYE is still around, too. I recommend you buy anything you want to own while you still can because it may not be long before you no longer have that luxury.