That may explain the sudden disappearance of Cowboy Bebop from one HMV store. One day they had a big pile of box. The next nothing and I really doubt they sold them all judging from the piles of everything else they had in store. This habit of withdrawing stock seems rather backwards.
Withdraw stock, pay $2 to ship it back and forth plus $1 for the actual disc.
Make a habit of clearancing stock, and good luck ever inducing your fanbase to pay more than $50/series again.
There's an old truism that your product is worth exactly how much people will pay for it. For something like anime where 90%+ of the value is entirely notional, destroying that notion seems to be fatal; the anime market in the west has been trained to value anime, all anime, because it's anime and big eyes are their own little shibboleth. (and is all equally so, barring a few French, American, and Chinese coproductions!)
Since almost all shows are seen as substitute goods for each other, elasticity is extremely high for any given disc. However, due to the presentation as a social importance and the collector/database animal impulse that seems to be widespread among fans, elasticity is extremely LOW for anime as a category; the broader the definition of a good the less elastic the demand is, and for the average fanboy "anime" is defined as broadly as the man in the street would define "TV and movies", if not entertainment altogether. (Outside of an extremely limited core fanbase of perhaps 10,000, there is also almost no elasticity for the mass market, who if interested wants his Adult Swim favorite or sufficiently badass ninja cover art and will brook no substitutions.)
In layman's terms, there's effectively a set amount of money available to buy anime. Cutting prices comes at the expense of a genre competitor rather than increasing the size of the market.
And the final kicker, why it's suicidal now in a way that it isn't in most other fields:
There's perhaps three or four major record shops still in business. Fewer major anime DVD publishers. If you are one of them, rather than attracting more spending, firesale mode just means you have to mark down the rest of your products to compete with your own bomba until you're shipping little Johnny Weebo four discs per lawn mowed rather than one, at four times the overhead cost.