Renting vs. Buying

We sometimes have discussions around the office about people who rent movies versus people who buy movies (I know: we sound like major party animals over here).

Before I started working here, I had always assumed that most people rent the majority of the movies they see, and buy the ones they want to watch over and over. That’s how I roll, and I hold myself up as the standard for movie consumption normalcy. A sampling of my DVD shelf: The Godfather, Almost Famous, Casablanca, Super Troopers, Better Off Dead, Band of Brothers.

But it turns out there are people who rarely rent movies. A former coworker would actually go to the store every Tuesday and buy a couple of new releases. If there wasn’t a new release he wanted, he would buy an older title. He just had to feed the monkey. So he owned thousands of movies. And most likely a house the size of the Taj Mahal.

So there’s people like me who balance renting and buying but lean towards renting, then people who almost exclusively buy movies. And I’m assuming there are some people who only rent and some who mainly buy but rent occasionally. It’s all very confusing. And I guess there are those who don’t like movies (aka weirdos), and neither rent nor buy them.

So my question for you is: what kind of movie consumer are you? Let me know via Twitter.