No surprise: All jewel cases on clearance at Office Depot, shelves empty.

I figured this day would come, but I didn't know when. My wife and I hitched up the horse and buggy this afternoon and stopped in Office Depot. She needed a few things, but I thought I would grab a box of standard jewel cases. Nope. All shelves that had been dedicated to jewel cases, slim jewel cases, DVD cases, etc. were empty and had clearance signs. So much for that.

 

Ah. A sign of the times.

 

You'd think people were no longer buying CDs.

 

Well, in fairness, a place like Office Depot likely was selling a lot of their cases to people using them for office/business purposes: Storage of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs that originally came in large spindles; and for giving people copies of presentations and such. So the emptying of their shelves probably is more about the phasing out of optical drives on computers (not to mention the ubiquity of USB drives and cloud storage), than it is about music CDs.

 

I don't know anyone under the age of 50 that burns enough CDs or DVDs to even mention at this point. Most of my friends below 40 probably don't even own burners.

All the business I know shift stuff around on flash drives now if they need something portable...no spinning media. (And a lot has just moved to the cloud, but you do want hard backup if you're traveling and need to make sure you'll be able to present).

I burn CD compilations for friends and family who still listen to CDs in their cars. But that's the only media I burn.

I'm surprised they even had a shelf of this stuff left at the store until recently.