A Jolly Swag Man

I went to our semi-annual Returned Merchandise Sale at work today, and came away with a very nice box o' swag. This is where Columbia House employees are allowed to comb over thousands of CDs, VHS movies and DVDs that customers have returned for one reason or another. In most cases there's nothing wrong with the product. And the price is certainly right. CDs go for $3 (double CDs count as one); DVDs for $5. Multiple-disc sets are the best bargain. You pay the $3 for the first CD, and then each extra disc is a dollar, so a 4-CD boxed set would cost $6. For a 4-disc DVD set, you pay for the first three only. So that's $15. We're limited to 20 DVDs, and there's an overall limit if $200. We're allowed only one CD boxed set.

This is my fourth or fifth sale, and I still have boxes of CDs from previous years that I haven't listened to more than once (I gave them a spin to make sure there are no defects, but haven't returned to most of them, or even had time to file them in my CD rack). So this time, I was hunting DVDs. But my strategy is to first go for the CD boxed sets, since they tend to get picked over quickly. Fortunately, the tastes of the vast majority of my co-workers run more to the mainstream, so the stuff that I'm interested in usually gets passed over. Heh heh.

So here's the swag list:

CDs:

The Last Waltz Boxed Set (4 CDs) ($6!)
Son Volt - Trace
Pink Floyd - Dark Side Of The Moon (SACD)
Lou Reed - Transformer (Remastered)
Radiohead - Hail To The Thief

DVDs:

Bob Dylan, Don't Look Back
The Beatles, A Hard Day's Night: Deluxe Edition (2 discs)
The Last Waltz: Special Edition
Bruce Springsteen, The Complete Video Anthology
Pink Floyd, The Wall
This Is Spinal Tap (1 hour of extra, never-before-seen footage!)
Almost Famous: The Bootleg Cut (2 discs & Stillwater ep)
American Beauty
Brazil
The Hurricane (just because I have a walk-by scene as an extra)
Blade Runner: The Director's Cut
Apocalypse Now
Reservoir Dogs: 10th Anniversary Special Edition (2 discs)
Pulp Fiction
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
2001: A Space Oyssey
The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers
The Lord Of The Rings: Fellowship Of The Ring - Special Extended Edition (4 discs) (beautiful set for $15!)

All of this for a grand total of $108, which just gets taken off my next pay cheque.

Now, I just need to get myself a DVD player.