Penny For Their Thoughts - a Mission Statement

"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb!"

~Batman, Batman: The Motion Picture

Amazon Marketplace is arguably the largest used media store in the world - their selection of products and prices is staggering, and if housed in one place would probably cover an area the size of the Mall of America.  As a frequent AM shopper I come across items of a huge variety of prices, and the most mysterious ones (aside from enormous prices most likely borne from a misplaced decimal point) are the items listed for $0.01.  $0.01 is the lowest allowable price on AM, and the thought that immediately comes to the mind of most shoppers is that these are items the seller can't even give away.  These are items the seller just wants to get out of their building as fast as possible and sees that it has little to no collector value, so Rock Bottom listing it goes.  Even with $0.50 items you can imagine it on the shelf at your local library's book sale or on the We Don't Care If You Steal This rack on the street in front of a Righteous Record Rodeo.  Pennystuffs, no dice - this is the Please Steal This box that inevitably gets kicked into the gutter by passerby.  A lot of this stuff is just overstock, and you can find pretty much any big studio movie made in the last 10 years on DVD for a penny just because thousands of the things were printed and they have to go somewhere.  The Penny Ranks are an online landfill with the benefit of cataloging, and collecting them all together would make an impressive library, though not necessarily a quality one.

Penny For Their Thoughts is a blog dedicated to reviewing movies, music and literature that has been purchased by myself for the paltriest of Amazon sums.  The one question is a simple "why?", and a few guidelines will help keep the proceedings interesting.  Firstly, I'm going to avoid getting a new, bestselling item simply to avoid overstock blitzes.  This will also keep things at least a few years old so there's a chance the reader will discover something new.  For the same reasons I'm going to avoid items for sale at a penny but not actually purchased by me for that price, because otherwise I could just review copies of American Pie and The Godfather, and where's the fun in that?  Because I have to actually buy the item, the last provision is that I'll only do things that I wanted to buy in the first place, things that at least seem interesting from the viewpoint of an internet shopper and aren't just outright crap.  When applicable I'll also talk about the condition of the item, because sometimes you get sent plastered with library stickers and sometimes you get stuff that looks like the previous owner drove over it with an RV.

If you too want to sail the Seven Seas of Thrift, here's an easy trick: find the category you want in the search bar and press enter with no text entered, or just the letter "e".  You'll be shown every item for sale in Music or Movies & TV or whatever.  Next, go to the "Sort By" drop-down list and select "Price: Low to High" and BAM!  You now have a very long list of items for $0.01 in no particular order.  The order will be different every time you do it, so if you go through a bunch of pages and find nothing just try again a little while later and you'll get a brand new trough to snort through.

Will it be a grand adventure or a mild dig through the donation bin at Goodwill?  There's no way to know but go forward, so join me on my journey through the media adorned with the Scarlet Price.  Suggestions are encouraged, of course, so your secret favorite album may end up as an article someday.  Above all, Penny For Their Thoughts seeks to make life a constant adventure of art and culture, and what better way is there to spend a penny?

~PNK