The Internet as Bargain Bin

In his essay “The Death of the Bargain Bin” in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, Kevin Lincoln writes about the pre-Netflix days when he’d go to a store like F.Y.E. or Tower Records and find bundles of DVDs in the bargain section — 40 of them for $15 — and learn about films like Robot Monster, a 1953 science fiction movie about a robot alien who sets out to kill the last remaining humans on Earth in a dystopian future only to fall in love with a scientist’s daughter.

The bargain bin was a place of contained chaos. It was often a white plastic crate filled with the physical effects of entertainment, DVDs and CDs piled at awkward angles, all plastic edges and incongruity. You’d dig through it and find nothings for cheap, occasionally stumbling on an item that actually had value to you: something that sounded vaguely familiar, tripped sensors in your brain. And you’d buy it and watch it, and it would probably be awful, but at least it was yours: your discovery, yours alone.

This sort of cultural spelunking is pretty much dead. Obviously, that crate was filled, probably according to a mixture of chance and literal rejection by customers, by some underpaid clerk at the store. But it didn’t feel curated the way the Internet often does. When you found those 40-packs of monster movies, they seemed like a discovery that you made, unabetted, without a guide.

The bargain bin hasn’t entirely disappeared today — it’s now digitized in the form of Netflix streaming in the countless little-known titles that Netflix has rights to stream but few watch if not for the personalized recommendations via Netflix’s algorithms. Beyond Netflix, we discover entertainment that matches our sensibilities through friends and strangers on social media, and on sites like YouTube and Spotify. The bargain bin is the internet, and the cost is $7.99 a month to stream, and X amount of dollars a month for internet access depending on which provider you use.

For a while, I spent more time watching videos on YouTube than I did watching streaming entertainment on Netflix. Watching popular cat videos would turn to watching videos of people receiving kittens for Christmas, and somehow, inexplicably, at the bottom of the internet’s bargain bin, I would watch a man in a freestyle canoe competition, paddling around on a lake to “Lady in Red.”

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