The Increasing Irrelevance of High Street Retail

Arguments about pricing aside, it seems that the one remaining good feature that high street shops have is convenience. You can know all the cheapest websites in the world but when it comes to a Friday afternoon or a Saturday morning and you want something to play/watch for the weekend, then I'd wager most would absorb the extra few quid and walk into a shop to pick up what they want there and then. However it seems more and more often that I can't even achieve that on the high street...

Take the recent release of Darksiders 2, a sequel to a game that I'm still yet to play. With the hype surrounding its release I thought to myself that I'd finally look into trying the original. A search of every available game shop for a copy proved completely fruitless. I didn't even expect to find a new copy but thought I might get lucky in the pre-owned section but alas it wasn't to be. It just struck me as bizarre that I have become so complacent with this state of affairs that I'd pretty much taken a tour of the shops just to confirm my suspicions. Say what you will about high street DVD and book stores but they sure know that when you have an exciting new release, you make sure there are copies of previous and related works available for interested parties to get a few more easy sales.

However later that same day, I came up against a ridiculous inversion of this idea in HMV. I recently caught part of the second Iron Man and while it might not be the greatest film, I felt the urge to watch the whole thing again. Being the only recent Marvel film I didn't have on Blu-Ray there was also that OCD completionist aspect of wanting to fill a gap in my collection. Now while I might not expect to find every film ever made in HMV, I certainly expected them to always have something as well known and popular as Iron Man 2 in stock. But looking around I couldn't even find an empty section for it, which was true for the original Iron Man as well, with dividers jumping straight from Intolerable Cruelty to The Island.

This seemed a little bizarre so we asked the guy behind the counter when buying something else. Looking very apologetic he replied "yeah, they've recalled all of the Marvel films - apart from The Incredible Hulk and others that weren't in The Avengers. They're waiting for that to come out so they can sell them all together". I just chuckled and shook my head, so often it seems those on the front line are as much at odds with the management decisions as the public are. I'm guessing there may be more to it behind the scenes but it just seems so bizarre to negate the possibility of any sales right now to guarantee you won't run out of stock later.

Writing this up has reminded me that I still hadn't picked up either but even on a Friday I can use Amazon Prime to make sure I can get something for the weekend, making that trawl of the shops even more pointless with just a bit of forethought. Though while Iron Man 2 was easy to find it seems that Darksiders is much more illusive, out of stock in most of the places I would normally try. This suggests to me that there's a bigger issue with finding older games in general than just the High Street...