I’ve long had a habit of shopping at thrift stores which plays to key aspects of my personality. I’m cheap, I’m a hoarder, and I think we should reduce the volume of matter we put into the waste stream.
DVDs
I prefer keeping media on local computer storage over streaming. I am not super militant about this, but I feel I should be. Buying DVDs for a few bucks at the thrift store and ripping them is a great way to source video media. When I’m looking through the DVDs at a thrift store, the DVDs are rarely sorted in any way. There are just dozens to hundreds of DVDs randomly shoved onto the shelves.
This disarray makes it hard to find what I want and really bothers the part of my brain that loves sorting. I have loved sorting my hoarded items as long as I can remember. When I was a young child I had a collection of Hot Wheels™ toy cars that I loved to sort. I would get them all out, line them up, and sort them. Fist by length, then by color, and then by make. This is fundamental to my psyche, and a large part of how I ended up as a data wrangler.
I find when simply scanning unsorted DVD titles on the shelf, I will glaze over and not remember what I read. Three times now I’ve addressed that problem by starting to sort the DVDs as I browse through them. I enjoy doing it for a few minutes at a time and it holds my attention better than scanning the titles.
Join Me
I’ve decided to continue sorting the DVDs. Each trip I will alphabetize one shelf by title as I browse. That will engage my brain ever so slightly, soothe my soul, and leave a tiny piece of the world better than I found it. I’m encouraging other thrift shoppers to join me in my new DVD sorting hobby. If we all participate in a small way the results will snowball and it will become easier to find the DVDs we are looking for at the thrift store. We will build some society by crowdsourcing sorting DVDs by title.
© 2026 Paul McCombs This text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License
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