Street date disaster

[jjc927]

I wonder if the woman came back today to buy it

[Sparky]

No ma'am, you don't understand. We have boxes and boxes of that video in the back, but the boxes are all empty. When the movie is released they magically fill up with the DVD and then we can open them and put the DVD on the shelves. If we open those boxes now, they just go "poof!" and implode. I've seen it! And usually the knife they used to open the box is sucked into the vortex. You could lose a hand that way! I've heard of people whose whole arm is ripped off.

[fma_fanatic]

Suncoast was notorious for putting stuff out before street date. I know that there were quite a few times where there were items we'd find, and if we were lucky, we could buy.

When it got close to when Suncoast disappeared the first time around, one of the employees told us that their corporate offices didn't care that stuff they were putting out was before street date.

[Grape The Cat]

When i worked for WM our managers were VERY strict about street dates., of course SCs would just say they could get the movie at our local flea market. Which i guess was supposed to make us cave, or something. We never, (as long as I worked there) did.

[Gizmo]

I have a friend who posted images on Facebook of him opening the shipments for one of the Halo releases a few days before the official date. That got him into a bit of trouble if I recall correctly.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

I should probably point out here that it isn't just movies and CDs that have street dates. Sometimes merchandise associated with a certain movie will be street-dated as well.

There's a new Cars movie coming out, and we've been getting in new Cars toys which come in boxes prominently marked that the contents cannot be put out for sale until May 16.

So we put the toys in a special section in the backroom, and put up signs indicating not to pull them until May 16. So naturally somebody went and pulled some of those toys and made a display of them on the floor.

Fortunately, somebody noticed those toys weren't supposed to be out, so we took them back to the backroom and put up and even bigger sign. Somehow those toys made it out to the floor again. And this time somebody tried to buy one, but couldn't because the register wouldn't allow the purchase (and luckily nobody tried to override it). So the toys were taken off the floor again, put in the backroom again, and we've actually had to tape off the section of shelves where they're located. Meaning if somebody's going to pull them again, they have to break the tape.

I don't know if this is due to somebody who cannot read, or if there's a glitch in the pull system and it's trying to push these toys to the floor even though we aren't allowed to, or a combination of both.

Added bonus: May 16, the day they can finally be put out for sale? That's right in the middle of inventory.

[BookstoreEscapee]

Our new releases come in several days before we can actually put them out. Maybe even a week in advance. Depends on when they get put on the UPS or FedEx truck.

The boxes have big, brightly-colored stickers on them saying not to put out the contents until the release date.

Heh, when I worked in the stores, we'd get stuff a couple weeks in advance, especially if it was coming from our distribution center and not drop shipped from the publisher. Every other month we'd have a wall of James Patterson (cuz we'd get like 72 cases) sitting in the back for two weeks, because the DC is 45 minutes away, but they distribute the titles to all the stores at the same time so they have to send them in time to get to, say, Alaska, in time as well.

We had a brouhaha recently about a book that was supposed to be strict on sale and someone from the publisher saw it in a store or something, and we had sold some online, because the publisher thought that telling us the pub date was the same as saying 'don't sell it before this date' (it doesn't work that way). So they had to tell all the stores to pull stock off the floor and put all the stock in the warehouse on hold to make sure no more web orders shipped out.

When I worked in Store1 I was on a bowling league for a while with a few other people from the store (including the music manager); usually we would stop at 7-11 across the street from the bowling alley to get snacks. We bowled on Monday night; new DVDs generally come out on Tuesday. Invariably the 7-11 would have whatever big DVD was coming out the next day prominently displayed on the checkout counter...

[Dreamstalker]

I was working at a bookstore for the first four Harry Potter books; we'd have midnight release parties with games, food and other fun stuff. The books would come in about ten days before; if one of us wanted to sign a copy out the receiver would open the case and co-sign the signout book (we were also given strict instructions not to have it out in public until release day, or at least remove the dust jacket).

Sometimes I would be sent over to the dark green bookstore chain down the street to see if they were knowingly breaking street date. Quite a few times not only were the books out but they would actually sell it to me (at that point in time we were engaged in 'store wars' so had no qualms about ratting them out).