Big Lots DVD Bin (aka The Chili Bucket)

Years ago, a friend and I would look through the bin of $5 DVDs at Wal-Mart which we affectionately called "The Gravy Bowl".  The idea was that swimming amongst wave after wave of crappy DVDs (ie: gravy) were a few cinematic gems worth owning.  Even some of the other customers who dug through the bin moved DVDs aside with their arms in a swimming motion.  The activity was less about ownership of movies and more about the thrill of the hunt and the satisfaction of discovery, searching for that celluloid diamond in the rough (eg: Blazing Saddles; The Goonies; et cetera).  However, with the advent of Netflix, my time diving into the Gravy Bowl decreased considerably.  With a library of cinema and television at my fingertips, I found less incentive to hunt for the classics.

One night very recently, my girlfriend and I decided to go to Big Lots and look at their DVDs.  We had gone there a few months ago to buy some DVDs for a Secret Santa exchange.  Big Lots is a store that buys excess or unsold inventory from other stores and sells it at a discount.  My girlfriend made the comment that their DVD bin was the Chili Bucket, the place where DVDs that didn't sell the first time have been repackaged and are placed on the shelf (hehe, I love my girlfriend).

We looked around for about fifteen minutes and found some oddities.  Some of the titles we found were Hollywood blockbusters in Spanish with English as the second option (great way to learn the language, I might add.  Office Space helped me pass an exam once).  There was not a lot of variety to the selection, unfortunately, but there was enough there to rekindle a little of the hunting spirit.  In the end, we walked out with three movies...

Eleven dollars worth of chili.

Men in Black, Interview With The Vampire, and America's Sweethearts.  We paid a grand total of eleven dollars for these DVDs (MiB was five alone).  All in all, not bad.  We drove home to watch Men in Black, one of the few movies we searched for and could not find on Netflix.  However, when we opened the case, we discovered something interesting...

There's a "Disc Two"?

The DVD had been completely repackaged!  Someone had taken the movie out of a two-disc set and packaged it for a budget DVD (well, reuse and recycle, right?).  All the same, it reinforces the idea that the chili bucket is the place where unsold DVDs are given a second chance, albeit with a few trimmings here and there.

We had found other movies we each wouldn't have minded owning but had to leave behind due to our budget.  Maybe next time when we have a little more money, right?  While looking through the chili bucket is not as exciting as swimming through hundreds of DVDs at Wal-Mart's gravy bowl, the experience was worthwhile enough to warrant at least taking a gander whenever we go shopping at Big Lots.