This 1994 Best Buy Ad features 90s Dream Technology

I bookmark a lot of websites. So many that it can take me months or even years to re-stumble upon something I thought I needed to share. In 2015 this 1994 Best Buy Ad was posted on Imgur. I drooled over it for about an hour back then, but moved on. This week I rediscovered it and thought I would dive into this gem. So let’s travel back to the nineties and explore the best items from this October of 1994 Best Buy Ad. I am sure it is filled with all sorts of electronic treats and Halloween references.

In 1994, I was still spending some of my time working at a video store. Disney Movies were a huge money-maker for us. Sales on these things were no joke, and Best Buy is pushing hard on 4 Disney classics. The Return of Jafar might have the same clamshell box, but a classic it was not. That being said, it was very popular at our store. The first month we couldn’t keep it on the shelves.

That is a nice enough Packard Bell. I especially like that the monitor is included in this package. So many ads back then would mix and match monitor inclusion. It was often confusing and disappointing.

Odd, not leading with something related to Halloween.

Music? Can’t say many of the CDs would have caught my attention. But if you incline your head to the right, you will see the object of my affection, the Sega Genesis.

How are they enticing people to buy systems at Best Buy in 1994? A free backpack, of course! From that photo, I would say that the backpack almost looks too small. Unless you only want to pack 1 or 2 games. I guess if one of those games is Shaq-Fu, that is all you need. We really seemed to be into Shaquille O’Neil in the 90s.

Hmm, wonder why no attempts at a Halloween or horror game.

Page 3 of the 1994 Best Buy Ad is the high-priced audio equipment. Every one of these objects was out of my price range. Looking at them now, I am relieved I was cool with my sister’s hand me down equipment. That saved me a lot of money.

Yes! 31 inches of TV for a mere 800 bucks. That TV with no-name looks really familiar. If I am not mistaken, it was the style of TV we used in our video store. Something about the sound grill looks familiar. I am not sure if Sound Grill is a real word, but if not, I am coining it. We had those going 24/7 and never had a problem with them. So if that is the TV we had, $800 might have been a good deal.

Just want to add, it’s like Halloween is not even happening in this circular.

More television, all of them showing Snow White, which was, as I mentioned, a big deal at the time. I would always peruse the TVs in the circulars, but what I was really interested at this point in time were those video camcorders. For reasons I can no longer recall, I really wanted an 8 mm one.

Stop everything! 540 MB Hard Drive for only 300 dollars? I wonder what the failure rate was on the Conner Drives? Some other items of note: 14.4 modems for those weirdos who do the online and Best Buy’s lab coat wearing computer techs. Was anyone out there a Best Buy computer tech back then? Did they really provide lab coats?

I would like to go as a Best Buy Halloween Tech for Halloween this year. Did they wear any special badges on their lab coats?

Look at all the computers! I would have done just about anything for any one of these machines in 1994. I would like to take this opportunity to focus on the use of free software to help sell the computer. For those who complain about your computer being filled with all sorts of nonsense when it was installed, I think this is where it got started. While some of this stuff might have been interesting to play with, for the most part it went on a shelf or in a box and was never opened. It was just noise. Bloatware you needed to install yourself.

20 free pieces of Stoneware with the purchase of most of these large appliances! Wow. How can they afford to do that?

While I had very little interest in these large appliances in 1994 or now. For some weird reason, I have always found the Chest Freezer to be oddly compelling. Just think of all the ice pops and ice cream sandwiches you could buy on sale and keep cold with one of them.

They wait until the last page to post a pumpkin? Just a pumpkin?? This close to Halloween and this is all they could fit into the ad? That is disappointing. Oh well. Let’s take a look at the other stuff.

Almost $140 for a Discman! No wonder it took me nearly a decade to get one. That is not a terrible price for videotapes, but I could find them cheaper. As for the boomboxes, they lacked the style of their eighties ancestors. So I had no interest in them.

Conclusion

My family would keep circulars like these for years. It is a shame that at some point we cleaned house and threw them all away. Who knows what treasures we could be finding now. Still, it is nice that someone is making an effort to share and preserve gems like this 1994 Best Buy Ad.