My favorite physical CD-buying emporium is Record Collector, in Iowa City. It's not huge, but it has a wide and varied selection (one of the few places to get vinyl records), and being in a university town, there's always a decent rack of used CDs, sold by some student looking to ditch his avant-garde phase of musical listening for some beer money.
I buy CDs there often, especially used. Found many gems, picked up some duds based solely on cool cover design. Oh well.
Now, in a corner there's a box which contains free stuff. These are things that the store won't buy from people, who say "well, I don't wanna carry this crap back to my apartment or car" and just ditch it there - or old unreturnable stock that's never going to sell, whatever. Usually what you find there is old vinyl that someone foolishly assumed was worth something just because it's from the 60s or 70s - cf my earlier Salvation Army post.
Packrat that I am, I often take some albums from the box, sometimes great big wads of stuff. And CDs show up too - promo items some label dumped, used CDs that languish even at a dollar - and sometimes, CDs which are popular but just not in good enough condition for the store to buy.
The other day, I picked up four free Pet Shop Boys albums.
I'm not a huge Pet Shop Boys fan, but I do like some of their songs well enough, so when I saw the CDs sitting there, I nabbed them - just in time, as another guy started sifting through the box as I was sitting there, plucking out some Rick Astley album in the pile. So now I am the owner of Discography, Introspective, Disco the Remix Album, and Very. A year or two ago, I found a free copy of the album Alternative in the box. For not being too rabid about the band, I have a lot of their albums now.
My own inspection of the discs reveals no flaws to speak of. Either Record Collector is a far fussier CD buyer than I am, or they don't think they can sell the discs (no demand?), or... they just don't like the Pet Shop Boys.
Well, my gain, then. And the Very album, you know, even if the music is crap: Day-Glo orange Lego-style CD case for the win.