The Movie With the Marketing Failure

So, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Lots of people have been gushing over it because sexy crime thrillers are tittivating. Fernando picked up some copies for the store and, rightly enough, made brisk trade.

However, the marketing people must have undertaken ritual lobotomies, since they made the disc look like this:

It was only a matter of time before some brave soul brought the fact that it looks like somebody ripped the movie onto a generic Sony DVD up to Fernando as a shady business proposition.

One afternoon a girl rents the movie and her boyfriend returns it the next day. “Thank you much,” says Fernando when he enters to drop it off.

“I never knew you guys ripped movies. How much do you charge for it?”

“I...what? No, no, see, that would be a bad idea because, one, it's illegal; and, two, it would lessen what income I'd earn because nobody would rent the damn movies.”

“What? Really? Because this disc is definitely not a real DVD.”

“I'd imagine Sony-brand blank discs are available to most publishing companies and it would not surprise me that many movies are embedded onto them, just that the logo or image or whatever for the movie is question is airbrushed or painted on the disc's surface.”

“Oh.” At this point the gent switches tactics. “Well, this one didn't work in my player so I was wondering if we could, like, get a free rental or something.”

Fernando strides over to his DVD player and pops the disc right in. He does not turn on the television, not yet. “What didn't work about it?”

“Oh, you know, it just said 'no disc.'”

“Curious.” Fernando flips on the TV and notices that the title screen, bright and cheery, has appeared. “It seems to be working for me.” He peers at his shelves. “Unfortunately I don't have any other copies in right now, else I'd let you have one of those to see if that might work out better for you. But you're more than welcome to give this one another go for tonight to see if it works better for you.”

“Um, no, no, that's okay. Um, so, yeah, if you wanted to maybe just, uh, put a credit down or something, if that's okay, we can come in another time.” He hightails it out of the store before Fernando could respond.

Fernando smiles after him. “I'll see what I can do.” He replaces the movie on the shelf, puts the tag back out on the floor, and it is rented later that evening to no complaint.