Where to Buy a VCR

When my husband and I bought a new surround sound system and HDTV for our living room, we decided to move the old TV, DVD, and VCR player into our exercise room in the basement. I had a small 13 inch TV/VCR combo that I used for my exercise workout tapes and replacing it with our old 27 inch TV was going to be a real treat for me. I had about 20 tapes that I had accumulated over the years and had just recently purchased my first workout DVD, so I really needed both the DVD and VCR player.

My eight year old grandson was watching me hook up the DVD and VCR player and testing each one as I went along. The DVD hook-up and testing went fine. I connected the VCR to the 27 inch TV, put in a workout tape, and turned it on. The player started to play and then shut down. We hadn’t used the VCR much over the past two years, so I figured it just needed to warm up a bit. I turned it back on, ejected the tape, put it back in and tried again. Same thing, except when I ejected the tape, three feet of tape came out of the plastic case. Never having this happen to me before, I was at a loss as to how to get the tape back in the case. My grandson said he could fix it and because I thought the tape was beyond repair and figured he couldn’t hurt it any more, I gave it to him. He quickly showed me how to open it and then proceeded to wind the tape back inside. At least the tape wasn’t broken. Not wanting to chance losing any good tapes, I turned on the VCR and put in an old tape. It turned off again and never came back on, leaving the tape inside. Realizing the VCR was broken; I decided I would buy a new one. I thought buying a VCR would be less expensive than replacing all my videos with DVDs.

Expense was not the issue; finding a VCR to purchase was. That Saturday I went to K-Mart, Sears, Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Big Lots, and Value City. No store had just a VCR player. They had the duel DVD/VCR players, but I didn’t want this as I already had a DVD player. Surely someone still sold VCRs. I decided to try on-line.

I went home and started searching the Internet. I first checked all the stores that I had visited. Just because VCRs were not sold in their stores did not mean they did not sell them on-line. Wrong. None of the stores I had visited offered VCRs on-line. I decided to do a Google search for the words VCRs and buy. I received lots of hits and the first one was a link to eBay. I didn’t want a used or refurbished one, I wanted a new one; preferably one with a warranty. I took a look at the VCRs offered for auction on eBay anyhow and as I expected most were used, broken, missing parts, or refurbished, with no warranty. This was turning into a real challenge.

I decided to try on-line stores only, such as Amazon and Overstock. Amazon had a refurbished one for about $70.00, while Overstock had one for approximately $40.00.

At this point I had finally accepted the fact that I was not going to find a new single VCR player and would either have to buy the duel DVD/VCR player or buy a refurbished one. I decided to go with the one listed on Overstock, the Emerson EWV403, as it came with a one year warranty and shipping was only $2.95.

As the record was replaced with the 8-track, which was replaced by the cassette tape, which was replaced with the CD; the video is being replaced with the DVD, which is now being replaced with the HD/DVD. Along with these medium changes, out goes the original instruments that once played them.

Sources: K-Mart, Sears, Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Big Lots, Value City, Amazon, Overstock