Barb and I, stepping our toes in the waters of life after Covid and heart surgery (me not her), took a brief getaway to Des Moines, where we’ve often gone to relax at a favorite hotel (the Wildwood), indulge in some favorite restaurants (Noah’s Arc, Ohana Steakhouse), and shop at some of our favorite brick-and-mortar stores.
Master Chef Cy Gushiken at our favorite Des Moines restaurant.
Unfortunately, Barb’s favorite of that latter category (Von Maur at Valley West) has moved to upscale Jordan Creek mall. West Des Moines/Clive (they are adjacent) has a very nice Barnes & Noble that is still open and apparently flourishing, despite a second B & N opening a while back at Jordan Creek.
The dog in my hunt, chiefly, is the West Des Moines Half-Price Books. I go to the Cedar Rapids Half-Price frequently, but I always considered the somewhat larger Des Moines outlet an outstanding one. This time I was less enthusiastic.
Now, let’s take a brief side trip into the competing worlds of streaming and physical media. Physical media has taken a bad hit – Best Buy has all but phased out the home video that was for decades their chief loss leader/draw. They dropped CDs several years ago. The younger world (the same one inexplicably drawn to vinyl) has done its best to convince everyone over thirty that physical media has gone the way of the dodo and dinosaur. That we will be able to get every, movie and TV-wise, that we could ever want from the streaming services.
Right.
What we really have in streaming is a combination of charging for everything (even the oldest content) or foisting commercials on us, and gradually…well, not so gradually…dropping the movies and particularly TV shows you were paying to get.
Thank God for physical media.
And thank God for Half-Price Books, right?
Sure, they rape you when you sell stuff to them, and pretend to care about the environment by eliminating plastic bags (and selling you five-buck cloth ones, if you insist upon transporting your purchases to the parking lot without encountering bodily harm). But at least they are the home of physical media.
Right? Right?
My visit to the Des Moines Half-Price Books began by the book/video buyer informing me they were now paying less (!) because so much was so easily available from the streaming services (!). Muttering, I trundled off to the wall of movies and TV shows on DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K to drown my sorrows in cinema.
What greeted me was indeed a wall of video. But it was also an ungodly video mosaic – DVDs were now interspersed with Blu-rays and 4K’s. No separation of titles – like Criterions, or classic cinema, or foreign, or any classification. Everything and anything that could be considered a “feature film” was lumped together – Bambi and Night of the Living Dead sharing only horrific death scenes. A secondary wall of TV series also consisted of interspersed DVDs and Blu-rays.
A few classifications remained, outside of the feature film area. In the Entertainment book section, you could find a row of interspersed opera DVDs and Blu-rays. And in the sports area was a row of wrestling DVDs. No opera-singing wrestler videos appeared to be on offer.
Here’s the thing: Blu-ray/4K collectors generally do not also collect DVDs. Nor do most people still buying DVDs want to be bothered with them uppity Blu-rays and 4K’s. And few of us in either group want to go through hundreds upon hundreds of unsorted (if alphabetized) mixed formats. I do not care to go through the entire inventory of a Half-Price Books looking for the five or six titles I might pick up. Nor do they benefit from people who come in looking for a title, check its alphabetical position, and find it, or not, make a paltry purchase and exit. Impulse buying? We don’t need no stinking impulse buying….
This unsorted morass is courtesy of (a) a generation or two who have contempt for physical media, with (again) the inexplicable hipster obsession with the delights of snap, crackle and pop common to Rice Krispies and vinyl records; and (b) corporate decision makers who don’t know what the fuck they are doing.
Imagine if the books within Half-Price were similarly rearranged – mass market paperbacks intermingled with hardcovers, cats and dogs living together, no separate sections for fiction or nonfiction, no categories like mystery or science fiction or true crime or humor. Madness. Lazy madness at that, with a complete disregard for customers.
I must add that the staff at the buying counter agreed with me whole-heartedly and hated the new corporate policy of shuffling the DVD and Blu-ray decks. In fact, they beamed when I complained, eager to hear (and pass along) the criticism. It was like sending your food back at a restaurant and having the wait staff say, “Damn right! This is shit!”
Some stores – Cedar Rapids included, so far – have ignored this idiotic policy.
There are three major mystery writers who were born in Muscatine, Iowa. My wife Barb is one of them. I am another. But arguably the most famous is Ellis Parker Butler, who wrote the very funny comic essay (published as a short book) Pigs is Pigs. Read about Butler at Wikipedia.
While Pigs Is Pigs is Butler’s most famous work, the second most famous is his detective character, Philo Gubb. (Butler’s Philo pre-dates Philo Vance, incidentally.) You can read about Gubb at Wikipedia, too, right here.
Philo Gubb, Correspondence School Detective is one of Ellery Queen’s chosen best and most important mystery novels (though the book is a short story collection, really); it’s number 61 on their Queen’s Quorum. Here’s what Queen says about Philo Gubb:
It would seem Philo Gubb is more an ancestor of the Barbara Allan detectives, Brandy and Vivian Borne, than Nate Heller or Quarry. Like Barbara Allan (the Barbara and Max Allan Collins writing team), Ellis Butler Parker was noted for his stories being funny, even laugh out-loud funny. Not bad footsteps to walk in.
I was aware of Ellis Parker Butler, but only recently did I start collecting him. At an estate sale here in Muscatine, held at the Art Center where my band Crusin’ was playing (I was on a break), I picked up nine books by him, and have since ordered several more from e-bay and ABE Books.
Have to check out the competition, you know.
We have yet another Amazon deal for those of you who are e-book readers.
Thomas & Mercer team has announced that Fate of the Union will be promoted via Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Kindle book deals in the US, starting 7/1/2023 and running through 7/31/2023 at 2.99 USD.
Also, the Amazon Encore team has informed me that True Detective will be promoted via a $3 towards this selection of Kindle books in the marketplace, starting 7/1/2023 and running through 7/31/2023. This promotion offers customers the opportunity to purchase books at a discount within a curated selection using a promo code offered to them in an e-mail. Customers who have purchase history within this genre will be presented this offer. Not all customers will be offered the coupon. But if it turns up in your e-mail, have at it.
Ordering info plus sample chapters and examples of Fay Dalton’s magnificent art for Fancy Anders For The Boys is right here. It’s a novella, remember, not a novel. Available in both e-book and physical (yay!) media.
I should note that I usually post a link to these updates on half a dozen Facebook sites where these missives might seem to have relevance. But last week I wrote almost exclusively about my weekend of playing two gigs with my band Crusin’, and ran a bunch of photos thereof, so I thought perhaps I shouldn’t bother people whose interests are old paperbacks, and noir mysteries and films and so on.
But if you’re reading this but missed last week, and think you might have been interested, just keep reading.
M.A.C.
Tags: Barbara Allan, Deals, Fancy Anders, Fancy Anders For the Boys, Fate of the Union, Nate Heller, Reeder and Rogers, True Detective
I have entirely quit shopping for movies at big box outlets. They just don’t have what I’m looking for. I don’t mind dvd or blu-ray, as long as it is a movie I want to see. 4k is a waste of my time though. Too expensive. Thrift shops and yard sales are where most of my movies come from these days. I pick up a few every weekend. Oh, I did buy a copy of I, The Jury on Amazon lately, but that’s a rarity any more. Streaming is a shifting landscape. One day your favorite movie is on one provider that you pay for, the next day on a completely different one you don’t. Not reliable.
I am not a DVD snob — I buy or trade for a lot of hard-to-find gray market titles (I’m a big fan of the J4HI.com site) on DVD — but I have acquired pretty much everything that was released on DVD that remains unavailable on Blu-ray. Same is true of laser disc — I still have a huge collection of ’em, and pick up titles now and then. But for new titles it’s strictly Blu-ray and 4K for me, and having them segregrated from DVD at stores like Half-Price makes shopping possible as opposed to a pain. I struggle with whether to upgrade from Blu-ray to 4K. My collector brain wants the best version, which is generally the 4K; but I am not convinced that Blu-ray isn’t perfectly “enough.” It’s a sickness. As for Half-Price, more troubling is the disappearence of categories — for example, “New Titles,” where recent releases can be found. Classic Films is one place where I might well pick up a DVD, and certainly 4K (and 3-D) should have their own sections; foreign, Criterion, and so on. Makes shopping easier and encourages purchases. This current policy is self-defeating…but maybe Half-Price Books would like home video to die. Kinda sorta seems counter to what they profess to be.
Back again, after way the hell too long:
Let me get this out of the way first:
I just pulled out my copy of Queen’s Quorum (in front of me as I type this), whose subtitle identifies it as a listing of short-story collections, which means that Philo Gubb is correctly classified as such (# 61, in between Uncle Abner and John Russell’s The Red Mark [which I’ve never read, but I always need to back stuff up]).
OK, nit-picking ends here.
Physical Media, and why I now have to hunt for it:
Actually, this thinning-out of availability predates COVID: the Big Boxes had already started cutting back on floor space for DVDs and such as streaming took root, and I became more and more dependent on Amazon et al. for my supplies.
This also includes books: the last couple of times I went to a Barnes & Noble, I found that the stores in question had closed down, and the buildings “repurposed” (wince); frankly, I’m kind of afraid to try any of the ones I still remember (awful memories of how Kroch & Brentano’s and Borders gradually vanished before my eyes, just as I was gearing up for my retirement).
So Anyway, I’ve become an almost full-fledged recluse lately; I live in a mini-clump of stores and eateries where I can meet my immediate needs, and internet ordering takes care of the rest.
Thank Goodness (or Whatever) that you and the Collins Group are still putting stuff out for us; I live in constant hope that the rest of the USA will one day catch up with The Rest Of Us.
I don’t even want to get into Streaming – hell, I couldn’t if I wanted to; technoslavian instructions defeat me every time.
Movies? I haven’t been a paying customer in some time, subject to two rules:
(1) I really have to want to see the movie;
(2) If the running time is more than 90 minutes, intestinal factors take on added importance (*when ya gotta go …*).
I’ve been reading more and more about the Demise of the DVD, which depresses me all the more …
… and now I’ve hit Defcon 5, and I don’t wanna talk about it any more …
Apologies for bringing up the whole thing; I’d love to see you and Barb in person again sometime, but I’m not holding my breath
(a phrase I regret even as I’m typing it …).
So while I’m here, Thanx for your friendship, and I’ll keep up with the support (from whatever distance) for as long as there’s support to give …
Another example of a big “who cares” shrug from corporate America. Long gone are the days when CEOs and boards of directors — whatever the company or industry — actually knew or cared about the services they provide or the customers they rip off. With the near-demise of mass market softcovers, the paperback shelves at HPB (at least the ones in the Austin area) and other brick and mortar used book stores are noticeably thinner too, except for PB romances and the “Patterson, James” section. But boy, do I love these estate sales and friends-of-the-library sales where odd old books sometimes unexpectedly turn up.
DVD, Blueray, and 4k living together? Mass Hysteria! (With apologies to Dr. Venkman)
Sounds like a great old used CD store I knew in the panhandle of Florida in the late 90s. It was run by one guy. Cash only. No genres, just “loose” alphabetization. You really had to work to find what you wanted, but sometimes the thrill of the find was worth the hunt. Maybe some of those gems came because people didn’t want to spend the time. Maybe because someone put Lenny Kravitz next to Spyro Gyra, maybe to hide it for their return.
When it comes to formats, I’ve been CD and DVD. Having had 8-tracks, cassettes, LPs, and CDs (and now digital downloads), I’m always loathe to invest in new formats. Blueray may now be here to stay, but then I got kids and don’t want to spend the dough to get nice things that they will trash. Maybe I have to wait for my retirement to spring for some hi-fi equipment and a nice player.
Enjoyed my recent read of True Crime. Million Dollar Wound might be the next MAC book I enjoy, but am just now finishing Westlake’s ‘Call Me a Cab.” I do like physical books, but if I come to bed late (or wake up early), I enjoy the Kindle reader as a way to not wake my sleeping wife while reading. Happy 4th.
“Have to check out the competition..”. Groan !
I can never tell if your tirades against young people are real.
I guess you are right, young people are killing physical media because they have no money to spend on it. Though, I’m not sure that is their fault. Plus, they do have plenty of other outlets by which to consume media which cost them much less. For the price of 1 CD, you can get access to a huge portion of all recorded music. For the price of 1 Blu-Ray, you can get access to a streaming service offering thousands of hours of entertainment. It is the economical choice given that their college debt is higher, they entering a completely inflated housing and rental market, transportation costs are through the roof, food costs are astronomical, and wages are flat.
But the choice to kill physical media falls squarely on the shoulders of the people who run these businesses, who appear to be mainly Gen Xers. Both Best Buy and Half Price Books are run by Gen X CEOs. Though, I’m not sure how these places are meant to compete with Amazon. To me, it is a wonder that corporate brick-and-mortar books/media/electronics stores still exist at all. The thing apparently saving Barnes and Noble stores is more local control (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/28/opinion/barnes-noble-amazon-bookstore.html), which I think sort of supports a point you made about certain HBP stores ignoring the rules. But also those Barnes and Noble stores wiped out local and independent stores all over the country, to only now essentially try to become them.
I still see young people in our local independent bookstore, The Book Beat in Oak Park, MI. Young people prefer actual books over ebooks
(https://lovepaper.org/why-generation-z-prefers-print-books/). And, anecdotally, I see young people starting their DVD and Blu-Ray collections and posting them in those respective subreddits all of the time.
My point is, I don’t think young people are the problem.
The last time I tried to find a movie at a brick-and-mortar Best Buy (and this was probably at least 6 years ago now?), the movie I was looking for was showing up in stock, but wasn’t out on the shelf. I asked someone if they could help me find it and they said, “Oh, we contract the movie section to another company, I wouldn’t know how to help you. They just come on the weekends.”
About the only places keeping physical movies alive are the boutique publishers (and with very limited runs, often at $30+ a pop). It’s not good!
It’s not the young people’s fault, which is to say the generation or so who have no grasp (and why should they?) of the former dominance of physical media. The Half-Price anecdote above applauds the youngish staff members who abhor the corporate decision to shuffle the deck of Blu-ray and DVD and genre. And it’s definitely not young people who tricked a bunch of generations into thinking streaming would make everything available to everybody (and probably for free). I do hope that people younger than me (and that’s most people) will understand the value of physical media. They don’t have to be insane collectors like me, but buying their favorite movies and TV show seasons and even CDs of favorite musical artists is to be encouraged. One thing about Half-Price Books is that physical media there is in more quantity than the few remaining brick-and-mortar outlets and at a cheaper price. It’s young people and future generations who are going to lose out and be manipulated. I do see a lot of young people interested in reading, and I thank the Harry Potter author (now cancelled, by the way) for having a lot to do with that. But Kyle, your very mention of reddit (where my son hangs out) indicates where a lot of reading is taking place now.