It may be gauche to say "I told you so," but we did, here and here: $7 is way too much to charge for a DVD that self-destructs after 48 hours. The sales pitch is to avoid late fees, but at $7 the late fee is already part of the price - muy estupido and greedy. These puds could all do themselves a big favor by reading Blogcritics.
So anyway, the disposable DVD experiment is going poorly:
- About 20 H-E-B grocery stores in the Austin area sold the EZ-Ds, vacuum-sealed movies that, once opened, play for 48 hours before a chemical reaction on the surface of the discs renders them unplayable.
Buena Vista Home Entertainment, a division of Disney, has been test marketing the product since September. More than 30 movies are now available in the disposable format, including Chicago, Freaky Friday and The Waterboy. The discs sell for about $7.
H-E-B stores will stop selling the EZ-Ds in the next two or three weeks, according to Susan Ghertner, environmental affairs manager for the grocery chain.
Ghertner said the decision was not made for environmental reasons; rather, company officials "made the decision strictly on sales."
"It just wasn't a good fit for us," she said. "It didn't turn out to be an item that our customers were looking for."
....The disposable movies are currently available in three other markets around the country: Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri; Charleston, South Carolina; and Peoria and Bloomington, Illinois. Stores that sell the movies include 7-Eleven, Walgreens, Winn-Dixie, Sam Goody and Cub Foods, among others.
Last October, Wired News surveyed a handful of stores that sell the EZ-D and found that the product hadn't really caught on with shoppers. [Wired]
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