There are two rival DVD stores within a few blocks of my apartment. These are in addition to the street peddlers with little piles of DVDs laid out on blankets, or the semi-permanent vendors with their disks on carts or inside tiny shopfront booths. I prefer the stores because they'll warn you about DVDs that have dubbed-Russian soundtracks (a surprisingly large number, suggesting where a lot of the illicit copying is done) or were shot by someone lurking in a theater balcony. On those, you can hear other patrons coughing or munching popcorn through the show. The stores also have an in-house display machine on which you can try a disk and see whether it works before you shell out your 7 kuai, or 91 cents.
(Ethics note: I'll happily buy a legit DVD if I ever see one.)
These aren't their real names, but my two local stores are called something like "Movie Land" and "Even Better Than Movie Land." I walked by one today to exchange a disk they had said was good but that turned out, once again, to be Russian-only. The shutters were pulled down, the store was dark, and the door was closed with a padlock. A little note on the door said: We are closed until March 14. Across the street, at "Even Better," the story was the same. For some reason, in the midst of post-Chinese New Year bustle, these two stores, only, were closed for the same few-day midweek stretch.
Maybe the owners are going to a DVD Retailers' convention together? Or -- just guessing -- perhaps some foreign delegation on the warpath about intellectual property protection is visiting Shanghai?
I'll ask when I swap my disk in two days.
