What did you do with your VHS tapes?

[Bluelady]

Those that grew up with VHS, what did you do with your tapes?

For the longest time I’ve been holding on to a handful of my favorite cartoon VHS tapes.
However, I’m at a point where I have to minimize my personal items. Is selling really the only option? It seems like a lot of work for so little gain. Especially in the county where I live in.

 

[Belle T]

I still have most of them in storage somewhere. Selling them or donating them to charity are about your only option for getting rid of them. But VHS tapes aren't rare and have little value today, so outside of limited run Disney releases, you will probably be lucky to make a penny for most of them. Best of luck with whatever you decide to do!

 

[LuchaSloth]

Most of ours ended up getting tossed. I was against it...but, my parents wanted them gone...and there were limited solutions at the time. - I did save some of my personal favorites, and gave a stack of others to my friend. We also saved all of the original Disney ones in the clamshell packages. (Obviously we had the foresight to realize that those ones will always have collector's value).

Unfortunately, it's just one of those things. Most people don't have space for a whole room full of outdated media. - In a perfect world, we'd all have the means to archive every single thing we own, but it isn't the case. - Honestly, this is one of the reasons why I get annoyed with most "typical" rich people. All that money...and most of them have sterile/empty mansions devoid of anything cool or interesting. Lol.

 

[Chris]

Mine went in the bin many house moves ago.

 

[Foreverfox]

I still have them, I can’t bear to part with them because they’re just super special to me. I even have a still working VCR!

 

[Mairmalade]

We used to live on a court, and about 15 years ago most would participate in the occasional "court yardsale" where we all hosted a yard sale at the same time to maximize traffic.

My mom (and I say that because she added a few things I would have kept) sold a lot of our VHS tapes, old toys, furniture, decoratives, consoles, games, etc. this way.

Now, if it's something I can sell for about $10+ dollars or know someone would buy it, I'll sell it locally. Otherwise, I donate to thrift stores (e.g.: books, clothes).

 

[Tao]

Threw mine in the bin.

There's not much else I would bother with.

You COULD sell them, but you're going to get basically nothing for most of them and be holding on to them for a while waiting for a sale. Unsurprisingly, there's not many people looking for VHS tapes when not only are they an outdated storage medium, physical storage itself is becoming less prevalent for a lot of people...Unless you have a "rare" VHS and something that hasn't been released since which, lets be real, is probably unlikely for most.

Donate to charity? Sure, you get your feel good points but from my experience (I've worked in these stores), a lot of places like this will just throw them away anyway because they're going to be difficult to get rid of otherwise.

Sometimes you just have to accept some of your stuff isn't worth anything and just trash it.

 

[xSuperMario64x]

I still have a whole freakin VHS collection and multiple working VCRs haha. I even still like recording things onto blank VHS tapes! there's something charming about watching shows and movies on a VHS tape, it's not practical considering pretty much everything is available digitally, but you just can't beat that VHS vibe

 

[Corrie]

My parents saved them throughout the years for us when we had kids but now with the way technology has gone, we can just google any movie and watch it so they either donated then or sold the whole box for like $10 on Kijiji.

 

[Flicky]

I wanted to keep all of them, but they just took up so much space and most charity stores in the UK won't accept them anymore, so most ended up getting binned. I still kept some - a few rare tapes that were never re-released on any other format, some from my childhood, and a few sealed tapes which seemed a shame to throw away. I think one of those sealed tapes still has a packet of unopened Yu-Gi-Oh cards attached to it.

One thing I did keep - the inserts. Just in case someone wants to buy one for their own collection, or maybe I could someday create a little custom item from them.

 

[Roxxy]

I have a few very special ones that I will keep forever. I do need to try and get them transferred to a playable format. My sister got her wedding video onto dvd. I have baby videos of my beautiful son which I need to see again Also recordings of a tv series that I was in the audience for ( I was a minor celebrity at work when a clip of me was shown on breakfast tv )

 

[LadyDestani]

I still have all of mine. I didn't buy a lot of VHS tapes back then, so they don't take up too much space and they're important enough to me that I want to keep them. I have the original (controversial) Little Mermaid VHS and a collector's edition of Gone With the Wind in a special box with bonus collectibles. I don't plan on ever parting with those two. Some of the others are great movies that I watched repeatedly when I was younger, but I could donate or trash them if I needed the space.

 

[Croconaw]

I didn’t have very many from what I remember, but they have all since been thrown away. I don’t remember which ones they were either.

 

[Kitsuragi]

my grandma has them, she keeps using some of them. she's not a fan of streaming services and what nots so she watches everything on cable, VHS or DVD.

 

[Wolfsbane]

I gave most of mine to someone who couldn't afford a dvd player but still wanted something for his daughters for when they'd spend the weekend at his house. Gave him all of my vhs animated/family friendly movies and the videocassette player. The other ones I can't remember. I might still have them in storage somewhere.

 

[whimsu]

My mom has them - lol.

 

[Tylerhelt14]

We still have all of our VHSes. They are on a shelf in our hallway near my parents bedrooms.

 

[-Blue-]

I bought a single VHS recently (as in last year-ish) at the Good Will for like $1 or $0.50. I just needed to test whether a VCR I found worked properly and would not destroy tapes if I put them in. It worked perfectly and so I converted a bunch of home movies into digital formats for older people. A lot of people think you can just shove a VHS, hook it up to a computer/recording device and it will automatically download it. It doesn't work that way chief. You have to let it play all the entire thing. So if some home movie was 4 hours long it needed to record for 4 hours.

After I was done, I tossed that VHS I bought. I also never bothered doing it again for anyone. It was too much effort and people never truly appreciated it for how much time and worked was involved. Technology really spoiled them and they couldn't grasp that vhs was not compatible with the digitized era without extra steps.

 

[oath2order]

I tragically don't have a VHS player anymore.

 

[nightglow]

My mom gave all mine away to younger kids who still had vcrs when I was a teen. (She had my permission) our VCR was old at the time and we didn't plan on getting another after it died. They were pretty much Disney. That was over a decade ago.

I know there's a way to convert home videos on tapes to DVDs I've heard of people doing but idk about actual movies and then the legal part. Plus old tapes will often have squeaky sound. I'd look online to see if there are DVD or blue ray versions of the movies you love. The sound should be better on them regardless anyway.