It's All About the Bottom Line

[farawayeyes4]

By now, everyone has heard of the SOPA/PIPA debate (unless they live under a rock or don't use the Internet). Both bills center around online piracy. The entertainment industry likes to often expound on how it is the cause of their monetary losses through out the digital age. There are losses certainly, but it can be argued that there are much more harmful factors to their bottom lines than that of piracy---online or physical.

And they only have themselves to blame.

For the purpose of this blog, no actual store names or confidential information will be disclosed.

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, here goes:

I work in retail. I am the receiver at a general merchandiser. As such, I am the one that handles all the products that come in and go go out. This entails acknowledging the trucks, checking in vendors, and such. Mostly, it entails the receiving of merchandise NOT brought on our trucks. Most of this comes via UPS or Fed Ex.

The things that come this way are books, movies, and music. ALL of our entertainment normally arrives in this method. It also goes out the same way. Doing this job as long as I have, you start to notice that independent studios aren't so "independent." Anchor Bay is actually Fox. Paramount and Warner belong to a company named Ingram. Sony and Columbia are one and the same.

We know that the actual cost of a DVD is not that high. They are easy to manufacture. Sure, the actual content put on that DVD cost a lot of money to make, but the actual DVD is cheap. Why, then, do we see such high cost for it and its eventual replacement, Blu Ray? Because they are using old data and old models.

I have, for next week, several movie returns. Most of the titles will comprise of TV Show Box Sets. One return is almost 800 total items. Another is approximately 500 more movies. It sounds like a lot, and it is. These will be sent back through UPS to the various vendors they belong to. What bothers me is the fact that I KNOW the majority of these will be shipped back into my store as early as next month for our Lowest Prices of the Season sale. It is an endless circle of doom that repeats often.

I don't really know how much money is lost on streaming sites such as the now defunct MegaUpload(MegaVideo), but I can only imagine the total monetary loss they incur just on shipping alone. It has to be billions of dollars. Billions. Just this week alone, about four movie titles I returned the week prior came back in with a new shipment. Our Electronics Supervisor brought them back to me, and once again today I returned them. I am not going to hold my breath on them NOT coming in next week or the week after that.

Remember, this is only one store. My chain is hundreds of stores, so multiply what I am doing by that. Multiply it again by all the other chains and all of their stores. The money we are talking perhaps equals if not exceeds the supposed billions lost on online and physical piracy alone. It is waste, plain and simple.

Music is a bit better, although not by much. Their biggest hit comes at Christmas time, when they send out thousands of Christmas CDs and then return at least half. The particular vendor my store uses seems to be a bit better managed, but I can't help but wonder sometimes when I scan out a CD and see it come in no less than two weeks later that perhaps something is woefully wrong with the picture.

And then there's books. Much like video killed the radio star, e-readers have severely crippled hard copy books. Or has it?

I could perhaps devote an entire blog to why I hate the book companies.

Yesterday, I returned almost 400 books. Hardcover is shipped direct back to the vendor from which they came. Paperback, on the other hand, is another story. Ever wonder why a book will say "The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without its cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as "unsold and destroyed." Neither the author nor the publisher received payment for the sale of this stripped book."

It means exactly what it says. They DO destroy the book after processing. Out of the 400 books I processed, nearly 300 were paperback. As per my corporate and their corporate, we threw every single one away. Every. Single. One. To even take one of these "stripped" books, even if one does not sell it, is a fireable offense. They will not donate them to places such as nursing homes, hospitals, or libraries, either. Essentially, if they can't make the money off of them, no one will have them.

That's not the worst part. Remember the circle of doom the movie studios participate in? Oh yeah, the book companies are exactly the same, if not worse. I have started a log to combat this, to raise alarm at the sheer waste of resources, money, and time. Just on the first return that I logged, I had 4 titles that were shipped in the same day I returned (and subsequently threw) them.

I received one title, at 40 copies. Upon their arrival, I became frustrated. I knew what was going to happen to them the moment I opened the box. I hoped that I would not be right, but no dice. I threw 20 of them away. HALF of them went into the trash.

When I confronted my rep's boss upon her visit about my concerns, I was told that it is due to a title being a "best seller" and that they send in that many to ensure enough being available to the consumer. My argument was that we are not a book store and to pretend that we are sets us up for situations like this. I've often said that if Jesus himself wrote it I still wouldn't need 40 copies. I'll only end up throwing half of them into the trash, anyways.

Some of the titles that were returned incurred no sales. Some of those titles had only been in the store a short two weeks.

If the entertainment industry is indeed serious about bleeding money, instead of looking at online piracy, they ought to look at their own business practices. From the outdated broadcast television model, to the shipping circle for all of its mediums, to the pricing of them, they are losing more money due to this than they really will from piracy.

Stop needlessly shipping items in an endless circle. Allow for books to be given away in donation or amongst a store's employees. Find ways to not waste so much in receiver's time. (Truth be told, it sounds like I'm trying to put myself out of a job, but honestly,  there's more to my job than simply scanning movies/books/CDs in and out. I'd have more time to do those things if I wasn't always doing these things). Stop throwing money at lobbyists in DC to combat something you can already largely stop and combat with several measures already in place.

After all, it's all about the bottom line.