Continuing with the momentum from my AMC Stubs Card review, today I’m going to discuss another customer loyalty rewards card, the Movie Stop Director’s Club card and how you can it a return on investment (ROI) sooner. The card appears to have a steep price, but if you purchase and trade used DVDs and Blu-rays, or even enjoy Entertainment Weekly, it is a worth-while expense.
$19.99 can be rather steep for a customer loyalty card. However, the card comes with a $5 gift card that can be used on any other transaction, as long as it is not the transaction that you purchased the card. In fact, you can purchase the card alone on one transaction, and then use the card on the next transaction back-to-back to get your savings and use your $5 gift card. Essentially, this gift card brings the price down to $14.99
The card includes a year subscription to Entertainment Weekly which cost $25 on most of the websites that I have found, especially on Amazon. That is a significant cut from newsstand price, but in all honesty, unless you are die-hard popular culture geek, EW is not a quality publication, and a yearly subscription is not worth $25.
However, the cost of the Movie Stop Director’s Club after the $5 gift card is only $15, so there is legitimate value here. Personally, I feel that the subscription to EW is really worth about $8.
The real value in this card is purchasing used DVDs and Blu-rays at Movie Stop. The Director’s Club gives you 10% off all used items in the store. If we use the remaining $15 cost of the card as a base price, you need to spend $150 in order to receive a return on your investment. This 10% can be applied to some of their seasonal sales, as well as their military and student discounts which makes stacking rather lucrative.
That $150 figure drops drastically when you trade in movies that you not want or need. The Movie Stop Director’s Club will add 10% additional credit to your trade-in value. The company also has trade in programs where if you trade in 4 DVDs worth more than $1.50, or 2 Blu-rays worth more than $3 in trade in value, you can reserve a new release on the respective medium for free. The Movie Stop Director’s Club can help get you to that threshold with a little extra push. Lastly, trading in just once or twice can reduce the return on investment rather below the $150 amount even faster.
It might be difficult to see the ROI of the Movie Stop Director’s Club card at the time of purchase, but with this information, the card is actually a worthwhile purchase. A conscious consumer will quickly see that Movie Stop is providing a rather decent discount on Entertainment Weekly, which goes to show how much of a margin there is if the Director’s Club card is really costing you $15. Granted, you must at a minimum spend $150 without trade-ins to see an ROI, this customer loyalty program is perfect if you enjoy buying used items and trading them back in, treating the experience more like a rental than a purchase.
Movie Stop Director’s Club
- 10% off all used DVD and Blu-rays
- 10% boost on all used DVD and Blur-ray trade-ins
- $5 gift card
- 1 year of Entertainment Weekly
- Easier trade-ins and returns.
Disclosure: I am a former Movie Stop employee. This is not an advertisement, but a legitimate review of the Movie Stop Director’s Club discount card.
