The DVD Shredder

The company has been negotiating to vastly increase copy depth for every movie. The studios aren't too keen on this, specifically because more rental copies means more previously-viewed copies are put on sale once the title doesn't rent anymore, and saturating the market with cheaper used copies devalues the new retail copies the studios profit more from.

So the company has agreed that a certain percentage of most rental copies will not be sold...they will be destroyed, and sent back to the studios as proof.

We've always destroyed stuff for this reason, but now it will be done en masse on a weekly basis. The tried and true methods for destroying movies has always centered around physical activity: tapes are held on either end and thrust into the corner of the counter, whilst DVDs are either defaced with box cutters, microwaved, or burned in the shrink-wrapping machine.

With the new regularity of disc destruction, however, a new weapon has been sent to us: the DVD Shredder. It is exactly as it sounds: a horizontal paper shredder that eats plastic instead of trees. To our dismay, the device did not actually shred movies into jagged ribbons. When a DVD is fed into the beast, it merely perforates both sides with tiny holes, rendering it completely and permanently unwatchable. While this sin ensures that unscrupulous employees cannot pocket doomed movies for later enjoyment or profit, it does provide an equal return of pleasure, as it is situated in the break room next to a box of last year's CBS Sneak Peek promotional discs.

Life is good.