A week or so ago, there was a story about how Walmart, Amazon, and Target were in a price war over books. Best sellers were getting the most attention and were selling for a lot off of the cover price of the book. While this price war between the retailers is still going strong, there is a new price war that is heating up.

Now the retailers (the exact same three: Walmart, Target, and Amazon) are trying to find out how low can they go on DVD prices.

Target started by lowering the price on 10 DVDs which include the newest Star Trek movie, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood, Prince, and Julie & Julia, all for $10. These were some of the summer’s hottest movies that are now well under what everyone was paying for the same movies just a few weeks ago.

Walmart followed suit by lowering prices on the same highly-anticipated movies to $9.98. Amazon is also offering the movies for $10.

Of course, the prices are simply promotional prices rather than actual long-term prices. The retailers are certainly paying more than $10 for each DVD (new releases anyway). Typically a new release DVD costs between $15 and $20.

At these prices I would be more willing to pick up the movies that I really want. I always shy away from DVD purchases because I don’t watch them often enough to justify paying $20 for a DVD when I can rent it at RedBox for $1 per night.

In an effort to try something new with their customers, Target, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy are all trying something a little new to boost sales.

I’ll start with Best Buy: It is opening a store in New York, but it’s not just any store. It is a 24 hour store. This way, people can go get their electronics at any time of the day or night. The store will be opening in New York City’s Union Square. It will be open from 8 a.m. Monday through midnight on Saturday. On Sunday, the store will be open from 10 to 8.

Don’t expect this to be something that all Best Buy stores will implement. The Union Square store is meant to offer electronics to all the nearby residents and colleges.

At Wal-Mart, you can now buy over the count medicines, makeup and even diapers to be delivered to your house. Wal-Mart is trying to step up its competition with other online retailers such as Amazon.com and even stores such as Drugstore.com and Walgreens.com to offer the kind of items that are becoming more and more popular choices for online purchases. Prior to this, you could only see the items online and see if they were available in the store, but not available to purchase online.

Target will now be selling digital magazines. This is good for not only Target but also for magazine companies who have had sales dwindle in the past few years.

All of these companies are after a market they previously haven’t been serving. Hopefully these are all good moves for the companies. I would personally really like to see more to be able to order online from Wal-Mart; anything that would make trips to the store quicker or get to the point where I don’t have to make as many trips…that would be great!

An article written by Ethan Trex for Mental Floss brought up a few really interesting items that, over the years, Wal-Mart has banned from its aisles.

The first thing on the list was Midge, Barbie’s pregnant friend. Midge was part of Mattel’s “Happy Family” set. It’s not like she was trying to promote some kind of immoral family life either; Midge came with a husband and a son. When people started to complain that there was a pregnant Barbie, the doll got pulled.

A pair of underwear also found itself under fire when a cheeky saying on the pair “who needs credit cards…when you have Santa” got people fired up. Wal-Mart pulled the panties soon after they were released around Christmastime in 2007. With this one, yea, I can see how this could be particularly awful. Like the original poster said, this would be better on a t-shirt; harmless. But on a pair of Juniors’ underwear it’s a bit too much. It’s like seeing “sexy” costumes on Amazon for pre-teens (those get pulled as soon as people start noticing).

Even though 1995 was nearly 15 years ago, it’s not like it was before the Women’s Movement. In the Miami area, there was a shirt with Margaret from Dennis the Menace on the front. The shirt said “Someday a Woman Will Be President” and it was pulled from shelves of the Wal-Mart stores. Luckily, after some idiots got it right, the shirts were put back out on shelves, but not until they had been sitting in stock rooms for months.

Wal-Mart has always been known as a family-oriented store; or at least it has tried to be known as a family friendly store. So, it censors albums and even some movie titles (they required that Zach and Miri Make a Porno be shortened to simply Zach and Miri). Well, for reasons other than the movie being a bit raunchy, Wal-Mart did not sell the movie Superbad in Hawaii. Why? They pulled the movie from shelves after the governor asked them to because the movie came with a little fake ID like “McLovin’” had in the movie.

Wal-Mart really has some strange rules and while trying to maintain the company’s family friendly persona it has really made some interesting choices as to what it will and won’t stock. You can find some other really interesting things that the store has decided are too risque for its shelves at the source.
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