George Lucas is once again on the Forbes 400 list, coming in at a net worth of $3 billion. His portfolio of wealth has nowhere to go but up if the brisk sales of his latest Star Wars DVD collection are any indication.
According to a recent CBS MarketWatch article, Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) reported that the Fox (NYSE:FOX) DVD product helped to propel sales for the retailer in the week since its debut and assisted in keeping the 2% to 4% growth in same-store sales for the month of September on course.
It's not surprising since the cultural celluloid phenomenon has a lot of pent-up demand behind it. Fans were salivating like Homer Simpson staring at a doughnut, waiting for the transfer of the most famous trilogy in movie history to the digital format. Droves of hard-core devotees and eager mainstream consumers snapped up the box set with electrifying enthusiasm.
I was one of them. Over the weekend, I picked up my copy at Best Buy (NYSE:BBY). This company actually opened several of its stores at midnight last Tuesday to get a jump on sales. I'd imagine that Best Buy will see its comps for the month benefit from Star Wars just as Wal-Mart apparently has.
CBS MarketWatch's article also mentioned that Star Wars toy inventories felt a push from the DVD. This is good news for Hasbro (NYSE:HAS), which manufactures and distributes a wide array of action figures and play sets under license from Lucasfilm. Sony (NYSE:SNE) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) should also be delirious over the action seen in the Star Wars: Battlefront video game, with a release on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox platforms that coincided nicely with the classic trilogy.
It's easy to see why sales can be stimulated by a strong product in the marketplace. As mentioned, I visited my local Best Buy location and secured a unit. While there, I decided to purchase Stephen King's last Dark Tower novel instead of traipsing over to the bookstore -- you know, convenience and all. So Best Buy got two things out of me instead of a single item. Even though DVDs oftentimes sport low margins for retailers and are even used as loss leaders, there is an advantage to the traffic that is driven from attractively priced discs. Add-on sales can make all the difference.
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Fool contributor Steven Mallas owns none of the companies mentioned.
