Video Stores I

what does a physical store they have to offer? A shopping destination, a bit of nostalgia, just a memory Today. Ephemeral producer Trevor Young traces the rise, fall, and potential future of the video store. When I was about eight or nine, my mom started taking me to a local video store in Austin, Texas called I Love Video. Up to that point, my idea of cinema was Star Wars, The Phantom Menace. I've been wondering, what are mini chlorines?

The Iglorians are a microscopic life form that resides with an old living sounds. I don't understand, but I love video. I was exposed to a vast library of old timey classics. But what about us? We'll always had Paris horror flicks, ethereal dramas. Mr Malcolm, I think I can explain, Yeah, explain.

We operate a little business here that simulates for our clientele the experience of being you actually and all sorts of movies, so that by the time I was in high school, I had developed a deep love for cinema. I always credit I Love Video for that. The place meant a lot to me, and without a doubt, I'm not alone in my experience. It's hard to overstate the

importance of the space of the video store. Whether it was a shabby place, or whether it was a glitzy blockbuster, or whether it was a kind of quirky, artsy, fartzy place with memorabilia or whatever. The space of the store is hugely important because it's a social space and a physical space, creating this new sense of a physical relationship

of shopping with movies. My name's Daniel Herbert, and I'm an associate professor at the Universe of Michigan in the Department of Film, Television and Media, and i am the author of Video Land, Movie Culture at the American Video Store. Dan's book, Video Land taps into something many of us have likely felt at some point that going into a video store is unlike any other movie going experience. At

the movie theater. You would go and you know, you might shot up to the extent that you pick one of the four films that are playing in the theater, but then you buy a ticket and you sit down and you kind of have this consumption experience, whereas you

don't watch a movie at the store. The store is all about shopping and contemplation and interacting with the physical objects of the shelves and the tapes, interacting with the physical bodies of the other shoppers and the clerks, and interacting socially with whoever you're there with, your family, your date, other shoppers seeing what they're watching. In terms of transforming movie culture, it made movies shoppable. Come to the warehouse, movies you want what do you want them? With? The

warehouse movie Rebel Garotte. The retailing of movies creates a public forum for that kind of evaluation of movie taste, and sometimes that's announced right when you're talking. So much of that was also invisible that you'd like walk and you look at a tape and you say that's not for me, And that's like this momentary, ephemeral interaction with an object in a store like me. Dan also has fond memories of his childhood video stores, even if some

of them were a little readier than others. I grew up in a small kind of working class town on the south side of Detroit, and we got a video store there actually quite early, like eight three, eight four, and this was a classic junkie mom and pop shop and a totally beat up strip mall. That particular place had carpet on the walls and it was just gross, and the shelves were like, you know, handcrafted wood with

stapled carpet on him. And I remember like it was totally fascinating and amazing to go in there and to see all the boxes, especially because in those days horror films were big, cheap action films were big, and those things had crazy lurid covers. The following movie is rated. Are so just to being a kid with very protective parents seeing like slasher movie covers and like action movie covers, I was like, this is a world of amazement my family,

Like every other family, movie rental just became habit. Every weekend, two or three movies, if not on week days. I'm gen X and I grew up in a suburb without an art house theater. So like my introduction to like quality cinema, specialty cinema, indie stuff, foreign films, like my kind of cinephilia was fed by videotape rather than by an art house theater. When I saw things like eraser Head, Oh you are ship? Or drug store cowboy guys got

new blues? Well, no, you know how odd it is to get blues these days, David, how about some morphine? I got some good old morphine, and I first saw the glimmer that film could be more than just Arnold Schwarzenegger. All right, everyone, You know that's set a trajectory for my whole life, making me think, like eventually that I could study films as a kind of serious thing. You'll hear Dan mentioned David Lynch's a racer Head a few times throughout this episode, and there's a reason for that.

A racer Head demonstrates one way in which home video was so valuable to film culture. I mean, it's a super weird movie, like even by weird movie standards. I had an operation on my arm here. Doctors said I wouldn't be able to use it. What the hell do they? Know, I said, And I rubbed it for a half hour every day, and pretty soon I had my arm back again.

But I also think the history of that film in terms of its being so exclusive, right, like it played in midnight screenings in l A and New York, and then you know, it's this kind of underground thing, like how do you get access to it if you're not in a big city, if you don't have like a midnight movie screening, And with home video you could see

a racer head if you lived in suburban Detroit. There's lots of cases to from the eighties, even where you have things that were failures in theaters, but home video provided this lifespan. Officer k D six Stash three dot seven. Let's begin, ready, we sell your base and blood and black nothingness began to spin like we would not have Blade Runner if it weren't for home video, because Blade Runner did not do well in theaters, but home video kept it alive. We create a cushion pillow for their

emotions and consequently we can control them them memories. You're talking about memories, and then then you have a director's cut, so there'd be a new home video release and so you have a film that was absolutely a failure in theaters, but whose legacy has been enormous, and that's entirely because of home video and the way home video can increase reputations even for films that did badly in theaters. But nowadays you can probably find a racer Head and Blade

Runner on some online streaming service. It's likely a surprise to no one. The video stores have been closing down left and right for over a decade. According to USA Today, between two thousand seven and two thousand seventeen, the number of US video stores dropped eight from over fifteen thousand to just two thousand. Dan saw this coming a while back and knew that someone had to document this. Two nine, it was clear that the industry was changing dramatically. Netflix

had just begun streaming in two thousand eight. One book came out, a very good book by Joshua Greenberg called from Databacks to Blockbuster. But I knew that, like, I could do a very different kind of book, and I wanted to do a very different kind of book. So I don't know that I knew immediately that I was kind of documenting something that was on its way out.

But I had the sense that it was like timely, and so then by like two thousand ten or eleven, when I really did know that this was going to be a book. By that point, you know, Hollywood Video Movie Gallery went on a business, and so I did know that in fact, what I was doing was documentary, something that was still vibrant but certainly didn't have a lot of life left. So there was an urgency to

the research. Urgent because it was clear that like everything was changing very dramatically, and people were adopting streaming more and more, and video stores were just disappearing. Dan's research went all the way back to the beginning of home video. It all started with one of the first home video formats, Beta Max, which came around in the mid seventies. But

home video at that point was something very different. In those early days of Beta Max and then a couple of years later with vh Yes, those things were marketed and conceived of as being for television, for recording television

programs and playing them at your own convenience. People could watch soap operas in the evening rather than during the day, or one could watch Magnum p I, you know, on a Saturday morning rather than on Thursday night and you can fast forward to the commercials, which, of course is one of the reasons why Hollywood was so upset by it,

because it disturbed a business model. The manufacturers didn't necessarily think of these things initially as vehicles for delivering prerecorded movie content, but quickly entrepreneurs in the United States thought of that. One of those entrepreneurs was Andre Blair. Blay is often credited as the father of home video, and as it turns out, Blay lived and worked in a place not far from Dan Incidentally, very strange that I up in the same town that Andre Blais was operating.

Actually here in southeast Michigan, in a town called Farmington, where I lived. He had already been in the business of kind of magnetic tape like duplication for like the auto industry, doing like educational videos and things like that. Now, let's see what would happen when driving under the influence of alcohol. Let's imagine you're driving and haven't taken alcohol. Watch out for that deliverymand Your rapid perception of the situation and quick break reaction prevented what could have been

a fatal accident. Part of his insight was that he was already in the business of selling prerecorded content to a certain market, but that prerecorded content was not Hollywood movies, and the market was not general consumers. In seventy so, the same year that the VHS format hits North America, he approached all the Hollywood studios saying, I'd like to put your movies on tape and sell them to individuals, like private consumers. The only studio that I heard from

was twenty century Fox. We had a nice conversation then he hadn't been a list of a hundred motivase and said that we've cleared the home video rights to these. I made them. We had fifty titles, and we released all fifty titles at once. He paid like hundreds of thousands of dollars for the right to put a bunch of old Fox movies on tape, and he tried to mandate that people could not rent them because he really wanted to kind of keep control of the sale and

make it a a kind of a direct sale thing. And these things were like eight hundred bucks. But still people kind of defied him, and video stores immediately appeared in southern California and New York City and in southeast Michigan, there was a place called Thomas Video, and they remember driving across town and getting tapes directly from Blade. It's fun to think about what the first video store was.

Different people claim that, but they all pop up very quickly, one after the other instead seven, and then that sets the whole thing in motion. So it was certainly an exciting thing, and people were opening video stories left and right. But the industry really exploded in a D three after the VCR prices they dropped from like seven dollars to three dollars, which, of course in a D three was still very expensive, but affordable to a middle class, working

class family. While video stores were starting to spring up, there was still debate about which video format to use. Most of us think VHS when we think about video tapes, but in those early days of home video, Beta max was still dominant, if only for a short period. Beta tapes were smaller than vhs, and the first Beta tapes were only an hour long, kind of conceived of to again record television programs, but they put movies on them and you would rent and it would come with two

Beta tapes. VCRs were these top loading things. The thing would like lift up in this clunk and then you put it in and then it's like sync down into the machine and it was like, you know, almost like a real to real playing inside there, spinning the dials inside the tape. The format war between VHS and Beta was real. And so you go into a video store in those days and they might have a thousand videos total.

Four hundred would be BEATA and six VHS. It was a real kind of debate for store owners and for renters, and certainly for people who were dropping hundreds of dollars on the machines trying to guess, like what format is the right format. Thanks to Sony's revolutionary Beta Max deck, which hooks up to any TV set, now you can automatically videotape your favorite show even when you're not home, and watch it any time you would. Good morning, gentlemen,

I'm going home to watch the Light show. Beta Max was a higher fidelity visually and sonically right, so the picture quality was slightly better than VHS and the and the sound quality was better, and that was part of their claim to fame. But eventually VHS just kind of took over, and then the network effect kicks in and more stores have more VHS tapes than data VHS, the

four hour system from Panasonic and other leading companies. If you're a consumer, you're thinking, well, I'm not going to buy a beta tape because I only have these options as opposed to VHS, which has these options. The video store market took off fast. According to the Associated Press, there were over fifteen thousand video stores in the US alone. Home video the VCR and having a movie on tape transforms the movie viewing experience in incredible ways. One it

puts it in the home. Of course, people have been accustomed to watching movies at home on television, but movies didn't appear when you wanted them necessarily, and so home video exploded. The idea that consumers had this kind of amazing control over what they watched, when they watched, and the convenience of watching it at home in the video store plays into that because with the rental model, these were kind of temporary transactions but offering tons of choices.

If it had been a cell through model only, then people would have been like kind of stuck with whatever hundred tapes they bought. But with the rental stores, you know, even the worst video stores had five hundred titles or more. This week, the warehouse guarantees you can rent a Big Crocodile, Dundee Too, and Cocktail starring Tom Cruise. If we don't have a copy available, we'll give you a coupon for a free rental for one of these three hit movies.

That sense of catering to individual tastes and desires that really comes about with home video and the video store being the literal market for taste. Consumers could get what they wanted, when they wanted, where they wanted. That was a transformation, I mean your transformation. Not only did video stores offer a new sort of convenience, they were also unique spaces in themselves. The early video stores, they were just reflections of the quirky personalities of the people who

owned them. High Video Sam's got exciting news for you. You can now rent a video over night and high are these great movies from only nine cents Video Sam's libraries and convenient to you. They were just small, little retail shops, often rapidly put together by people who might

not have had any previous experience in business. Now there were lots of things that tried to professionalize the business, and like there's a whole industry around people who made shelves for video stores and sold it to individuals, and there were people who you know, specialized in security systems for the doorway and things like that. The point is is that prior to Blockbuster, there was a huge range of what the stories would look like. Some were super clean,

kind of corporate looking. Others were just totally funky and weird. You've come around ALREADYO per parad or neary you are, and so it really depended on the individual owner. You have those independently owned stories that really did try to foster eclecticism as its own special value. You know, those art house video stores would hold everything from ed Wood a fiend I am a soldier of our planet, I

a fiend to Felini. It's about those stories that had huge selections, way beyond Blockbuster, and not just huge, but intention the outside of the mainstream alternative I guess. And that alternative might be highbrow, and that alternative might be super low brow. But it would only be a matter of time before corporate movie chains entered the business. For a short period from the late seventies to mid eighties, independent video stores were thriving but then the most iconic

video store emerged. Imagine the perfect video store. It would have a great run right over, ten thousand videos, three evening rows, so no rush, no hassles cha, twenty four hour, quick drop return, open late every night. Well, the perfect video store. Blockbuster really hits the scene starting eight seven and then taking off through blow And they've got this kind of cookie cutter model that every Blockbuster might be slightly different in terms of arrangement, but they all look

the same. They've all got the same color scheme, they've all got the same sign and so this idea as we enter the ninety nineties that there's a kind of standardization of the aesthetics of the stores themselves. An individual Blockbuster store would have like six thousand, eight thousand tapes, so that's a lot of variation potentially, but still they kind of sold themselves as having that kind of middle

of the road, nothing too far afield. If you want the thing that everybody wants, then we've got that thing that everybody wants. But Dan says the sort of soulless perception of Blockbuster and other major chains wasn't entirely accurate. It's a weird thing the way that history is remembering Blockbuster as just only being this corporate store that killed video stores and movie culture, because in fact, when they hit the scene, they had way more movie options than

the typical mom and pop shop. It's because of financing. If you're like an individual entrepreneur and you're investing in tapes based on your revenue, that's limited. But if you're like a publicly traded company like Blockbuster and you can just flood a space with six thousand tapes, that's what they did. Nobody has the movie I want. Hey, if

it's on video, Blockbuster probably hasn't. I mean, we have over ten thousand videos, and so they sold themselves on having more choices, and Hollywood Video they had like ten thousand tapes. Only Hollywood Video has Star Wars the Fanto Menace for five days, so you can watch it again and again. Welcome to Hollywood Hollywood Video. I remember even there, this big corporate store had like a cult movie section and a foreign film section that was pretty impressive considering.

And no joke, there was a Hollywood Video in Albuquerque that had like a wall of anim a. It was like the place to go in the nineties if you wanted to watch Japanese animation. The historical record needs to remember that those places did actually offer lots of options. Contrary to what you'd expect. The rise of corporate stores wasn't all bad for indie stores. The more alternative stores. Actually,

a number of them pop up because of Blockbuster. When the whole video industry starts to really kind of grow more corporate and homogenized in the later half of the nineteen eighties, that's exactly when you see places like Videos open up, Scarecrow in Seattle opens up. They realized that, oh yeah, okay, Blockbusters kind of taking over the mainstream game, but they don't have eraser Head. We can actually do quite well right next to Blockbuster because we're doing something

pretty different. When you walking down the street and you see little ghost what you're gonna do about ghost pastas? What what? What is that? That's the Ghostbusters theme song. No, And that's how we're going to sell ourselves as the alternative to mainstream movie culture. That wasn't by I don't think that they were threatened by Blockbuster necessarily, because they

were effectively differentiating themselves based on product and clientele. Indie stores were also kept alive by the people Dan mentioned earlier who tend to frequent more quirky stores, the cinophiles, you know. La Tripe always said that, you know, the best scripts don't make the best films, you know, because they have that kind of literary, you know, narrative thing. You know that you're sort of a slave to. The best films, you know, are the ones that aren't like

tied to that slavishly. Some people who thought of themselves as having kind of distinctive tastes would still go to a Blockbuster on occasion, but would probably pride themselves on going to the cool store in town. And the cool stores definitely did all that they could to maintain that sense of loyalty, almost like a cult community, because yeah, if you don't have that, then you get out of business. And so there's no single way to characterize who cinophiles were.

What is true is that the kind of art house video stores were in places either in big cities or in places with highly educated populations, so college towns. Those environments helped build and sustain video stores that had more

kind of artistic leanings or eclectic tastes. Now we land in the nineties where things started to change the industry really hits a big excellent plateau from like ninety three through the late nineties, and there's ups and downs right and various changes, like increasingly Hollywood did actually priced tapes for a cell through audience rather than rental, pricing things at twenty bucks rather than eighty, and so people did buy tapes campveryone's just dying before Jason, and now his

latest stab at Terror has been slashed to just Roddy the thirteenth, Art seventh. The new blood, especially kids movies, right like Disney creating those straight to video sequels to their cartoons. They're the baddest, the wildest about funny. His characters in the Pride right now that we all know each other sad bare back and give the Lion King

too simplest Pride on video today. But DVD hits in this is d v D, and this is what happens what you watch d v D. And the studios all kind of knew that things were done, and so if you wanted to kind of be able to sell new hardware and re energize the whole home video business, it

was going to take a different format. Warner Brothers worked with I think it was Tashiba On the DVD launches in and two thousand it becomes the fastest adopted consumer electronics in the history of the planet up till that time, which tells you, or tells me, that the appetite for home videos was never diminished, It only grew stronger. And so DVD tapped into an excitement for home video that was already there and just said now it's even better.

So DVD and it doesn't totally wipe away VHS immediately, But you know, I think the last Hollywood tape released on VHS was either two thousand five or two thousand and six. One format displaces another in six years. I actually have had conversations with the guy at Warner Brothers who ran Warner Home Video at that time, and their whole plan was to create what he called it direct to consumer product. They just wanted more direct access to

that revenue, and that meant selling rather than renting. The DVD was designed as a sell through product that it was cheaper to manufacture plastic discs than the magnetic tapes on plastic cases, and DVD was promoted as being better visuals and better sound, which is true. The picture he is twice as sharp as VHS. The sound is infinitely clearer. It looks and sounds like you're at the movies, but you can experience it at home. We today in can

too easily say that Netflix streaming killed video stores. The first attack on video stores was the DVD because it really shifts the whole business model away from rental to direct sales, and that means people instead of going to Blockbuster are now going to Walmart and Target, and it displaces video stores significantly. Alongside the DVD came the Internet, the Net too long time users. Internet is a whole group of networks. The Net is made up of some

twelve thousand individual computer networks. And with the Internet came a little website called Netflix. In today's busy world, going to the video store is a hassle. With Netflix, you'll just make a list of the movies you want to see and you'll get your first DVDs in about one business day. Founded in, Netflix marketed itself as the first online DVD rental store. The Netflix model, you would get on a computer and rent things by clicking them, and they would get mailed to you and you could have

like three discs at a time. Or something like that. There's a lot happening with Netflix that's really innovative. One this idea of no late fees. You could keep the disc for as long as you wanted, You just couldn't get a new one until you mailed it back, keep them as long as you owned without late fees. Return one and this prepaid envelow and the automatically send you another movie from your list. To this kind of elimination of physical store as a shopping site. You didn't have

to go anywhere to shop for movies anymore. Well, this is the last time I grant here. Hey, you're not allowed to rent already now. The other innovation is a subscription pricing model. It's comparable to HBO. People paid a monthly fee for cable and having Hbo h no, let Hbo be your kick it to of those stars. But the idea that you would have a monthly subscription fee

for a movie rental store was kind of ludicrous. In one stroke, Netflix changes a lot of different things, and I think the thing that subscription models did is it removes the sense of value from the specific commodity, the individual tape or disk. Like at the video store, you would pay four bucks to rent a tape or three fifty to rent a disk. But subscriptions suddenly say you pay us fifteen bucks a month and it has nothing

to do with how much you watch. The individual movie loses its kind of value, and instead what they're selling is that sense of possibility and options, which I still think is why people subscribe to Netflix. How many people subscribe to Netflix and only watch one thing in a month. But it's this idea that it's like, oh, but I've got that on tap. Anytime I want it, it's there, and so that's worth whatever the prices now their team

bucks or whatever. Subscriptions really change the psychology of the whole endeavor. So what happens when we now have an abundance of films at our disposal and the act of physical browsing and choosing is removed from the equation In the old days of the video stores, you might have a relationship with the store. You might like some stores better than others because of the space, but in the end you also have like a relationship with whatever you

rented from that store. Like if I rented some check new wave film, I'm gonna sit down and set aside time to watch that thing. Whereas with Netflix, it's hard to speak for everybody because there's hundreds of millions of Netflix users. But I do think that, like the relationship is really about having Netflix rather than having a movie. It's so easy to kind of disregard the importance of any individual movie on the platform because they all seem

available eternally. Of course isn't true, but it's like, if I'm already gonna pay for this subscription service, I can fass forward through this or I can turn it off at any point. The relationship is less about with you in an intentional way with a particular movie, and it's more about your relationship with the possibilities. There as a somewhat final nail in the coffin, the introduction of streaming did away with the need for any physical media whatsoever.

Netflix Streaming first appears in two thousand seven as a kind of special service to people who were already subscribers to the rent by mail thing, and then quickly within one two years after that, suddenly Netflix the streaming library opens up to people just for streaming, and you don't even have to be associated with the rent by mail

system and the video library, although still pretty rotten. Ultimately it grows so that like suddenly there's five thousand move bes on Netflix rather than just whatever four hundred that they had had previously, And it just grows and grows and grows. And so this idea that like you had the convenience of shopping at home, consuming at home, and doing it immediately. At the time, there had been cable

on demand. Prior to that, you could have bought a movie through your cable provider, but Netflix streaming provides that with the subscription based pricing, it's already quote unquote free. I'm already paying for this, so it's a great service. Other media companies noticed the success of Netflix and quickly followed suit. Hulu launched in two thousand eight with content that was mostly free to watch but was filled with advertisements,

though Hulu did eventually launched its own subscription service. Next came Amazon Prime Video, which also launched in two thousand eight. Amazon Prime Video is a very different kind of model. It's really there as a kind of hook to get people attached to the shipping, the Amazon Prime fast shipping stuff. If you want to get your diapers in two days, you also get to watch look who's talking is Mikey, Who are you? I'm his father father? Are you the

sperm donor? I mean sperm donor I'm the kid's father. Netflix streaming really takes off two thousand eight nine ten, Amazon Prime Video becomes available to people. That's really just sealing the deal on video stores that had already been hugely disrupted because of those earlier issues related to DVD. So how did video stores survive throughout the Netflix boom of the two thousand's Some are surviving because they're in smaller towns or rural areas that don't have quick mail

or fast internet service or anything like that. You've got mail, but lots of stores try to come up with this idea of no late fees is a direct reaction to uh Netflix. Someday you'll remember where you were when you first heard that there are no more late fees at Blockbuster. If you need an extra day or two with your movies or games, you go right ahead. So it's like, we'll shoot if Netflix has no late piece, then suddenly

we look like the bad guys. Not only is it inconvenient for people to come to our store now compared to the easy rental of Netflix, but now we look like villains because we charge people for not returning tapes on time, and Netflix gets rid of the very notion of something being on time or late. The real thing that they push in the two thousand's was this idea of new releases. Because Netflix, you still had to wait, You were still in a line with other consumers or

other customers to get the latest thing. Whereas you know, video stores, especially by the two thousand's, new movie Wednesday, New movie Tuesday, right like, so there was like a release date, a street date for those tapes or those discs, and so even though the movie had been in theaters, if you wanted it faster than you could get it on Netflix, and faster than you could get it on cable, then the video stores were the place to get things

faster than other places. Movies are two for just ninety nine cents every Tuesday, a participating video update stores including new releases. Yes too for just nine cents, including new releases, but otherwise, yeah, a lot of stories got a business. Blockbuster flounders, Hollywood video flounders. It wasn't even about streaming

at that point. It was about the whole disruption of Walmart target selling movies and about Netflix, you know, changing the whole game, three hundreds of titles for the whole family from only six ninety nine at least, no a big a place for really loves and targets, epy DVD c how are excilent now? In the late two thousands and early Dan went on a pilgrimage, mostly for research for his book. He decided to drive to and visit as many American video stores as he could. I just

talked to UM and Video in fruit Port, Michigan. He's owned the store for about twenty five years, and that in his estimation, according to his memory, h it's the oldest independently owned video store in Moskegon County. I mean that was like probably like some of the best times in my life go on road trips and rather than like looking at the Grand Canyon with your dad, you could do look at video stores in weird places. I'm

in Knox, Pennsylvania, where there's market and video rental. I walked into the store and they did, in fact serve as a kind of small grocery store with packaged foods and a video store with a substantial number of VHS, tapes and DVDs. I went to like over twenty states, over two fifty stores. Looking at small town stores across the Midwest and the far West and the South, there were some stories that were just kind of totally depressing.

I'm thinking of one in particular in Kansas, where I showed up and I was just like, oh man, oh man, this is so grim. I gotta get out of here. But other places were still operating at full steam. Even if the owner knew that that was not sustainable, he offered to sell me the store. Uh. Several times, they were still buying stock and putting new stuff on shelves every week. The weirder thing about a lot of the small town stories is that by that point a lot

of them were not only video stores. They engaged in a number of other businesses because the video rental was diminishing and so they had to do something else. I saw places that sold, you know, second hand kids clothes. I saw places that sold porcelain figurines. There was a place in Idaho that was half laundromat half video store.

That was pretty cool. There was one place in Wyoming that you could rent movies, you could get whitewater rafting tours, and you could buy a gun I love the idea that you could like rent Rambo and buy a gun under the same roof. Could I could kill you here? It's me, don't push it. The small town stores were really quirky, not in a kind of artsy FARTZI way, but rather in a kind of the vagaries of capitalism

kind of way. It's like anything to make a buck, and the stores would reflect the kind of scrappiness of the owner of like trysts trying to do anything like selling lotto tickets. The number of stores that had tanning salons or tanning beds attached to them or in a back room that was a huge thing. Oh so when the summer comes, a lot of people can because they don't have time. You get the sun, but they'll come in a tan Okay. At what point does the rental

slow down till April? People? Okay? And was the tanning been here as long as the stories? Okay? When did he start that? Probably a year ago? Year ago? What made him things to do that? Just looking for something else to offset the video? You probably remember hearing Dan mentioned a few bigger nationally known indie stores video It's in l A or Scarecrow in Seattle, for example, for a variety of reasons. Most of these types of stores

are still going strong today. And the book I kind of refer to these places as video capitals, just meaning it's to kind of centralization under the video store roof of like movie culture, right, it's kind of that's condensed site for movies and knowledge about movies. And the owners were generally kind of cinephiles and believed in providing a wider range of movie options, almost like a public service. I mean a lot of them talked in this kind of almost like they were on a mission kind of way.

And the clerks were always cinephiles and film nerds who would largely talk, you know, film trivia all day. What are you doing this? Since stopped making picks, how am I going to know what movies to see? We have a wide variety of Gene picks Jane's trash, I'm gene. A number of them endured and still kind of endure even after the mainstream video business was falling apart, because even in the face of Netflix, even in the face of streaming, even in the face of DVD sell through.

You know, a place like Scarecrow, they offer things that aren't easily available on streaming Netflix or aren't available for sale at Walmart, etcetera. What do you think would be the next obstacle there? If people will put in our way, well,

as long as they can, think, we'll have our problems. Still, the problem is once the whole kind of ecosystem of video rental disappears and people in general lose going to the video store as a habit or as a practice, then it's really hard to even maintain that kind of core consumer group that even goes to the specialty store. Still, those stores are cultural staples in their respective cities. Video Drum in Atlanta where I live is a bustling hub

for film people to congregate and share film knowledge. That holds true for many of the video capitals dan is talking about. They were community hubs for cinophiles. The stores like Scarecrow and Videots did a good job of cultivating that cinephile culture in that area centered around the store.

And so one of the things that they've done is sell the very idea of community that in the face of a communitylessness of Netflix viewers, where we're all detached from each other, we don't even shop next to one another, shoulders shoulder. Then the stores like Videots and and Scarecrow can say, not only do we have a Felini film that Netflix never will, but we can provide you, as a consumer, the sense of belonging that Netflix never will, a sense of shared affinity for eclectic taste in movies.

And so they're not just selling rentals, they're selling the very idea of a cinephile community. But to stay alive, many of these beloved community stores have had to adopt a business model that may not be sustainable. Those stores, a number of them, have become nonprofit institutions. Now Scarecrows

Nonprofit Videos has become a nonprofit. The nonprofit business model that Videots and Scarecrow and others are relying on relies on the idea that you can get people to donate money to a retail operation because you've convinced them that

the retail operation is a cultural resource worth preserving. I do think it's just a really hard thing because even with all the nostalgia and all the kind of felt love, it doesn't mean that suddenly a new video store can crop up in ann Arbor because people are like, yeah, I love video stores, but I'm still not going to one. How do you turn that kind of nostalgia or love for an institution into a business model. I do not know.

The idiots in l A closed temporarily with the goal of reopening a new location serving not just as a video store but also in art theater and film archive. Here's Videots executive director Maggie McKay speaking with Casey R. W. Last year. I do think people really need to sit in the dark with their friends and strangers and watch a flickering screen, and they need the human interaction that comes with a video store. And I think more than ever,

we're going to crave that. I think Videos has been very clever broadening it and saying when we say we're a cultural resource, we mean that because we're not just a video store. We're a center for movie culture in Los Angeles, beyond the transactional things that happened when you rent a movie from us, and I think Scarecrow, you know,

has imagined ways of doing that as well. I mean Scarecrow's big claim too, is that they're the largest single collection of movies under one roof, you know, in North America, which is important, but it's not like it's like a film archive. Either it's like it's a video store. With the closure of so many video stores, there's also one big unintended consequence, what happens to all of those tapes and disks They try to do these sell offs of their stock, whether it's tapes in the old days or

DVDs later, anything that's not being sold is landfill. For those of us who have viewed film as an art, as a kind of higher level experience that one can have on this planet, it is disheartening to realize that in the end, they are material commodities that when they lose their value, turn into lumps of garbage. Not that

you know, streaming television's any less poisonous. When I was wrapping up Video Land, this was two thousand fourteen, so this was when like lots of stories were going out of business and just the stores were unrented and the tapes were going into garbage bins. That was a real lightbulb moment for me in general, about how the life cycle of commerce creates material that has value for a time, and then when that value is gone, it is still

on the planet. We're stuck with it. There's yet another tragic truth when it comes to the downfall of video stores. In some ways, they created the conditions for their own demise, meaning that they created a sense that consumers could and should have control over their entertainment. In this sense of possibility and options and convenience that they accelerated and activated, and all of those things are exactly why we subscribe

to Netflix and Disney Plus. Oh miss Simpson here prode addition to the Disney family and soon appearing a Disney Plus I for one salute or new corporate overlord. It's like, oh, Disney Plus has these options, and it's super easy and convenient, and I can watch these things whenever I want. All those kind of expectations of what a streaming platform should provide or does provide, those expectations were initially set up by the video store. That's their bigger legacy is kind

of creating a sense of personalization, convenience, and control. Ultimately, they were outpaced by other devices and platforms. As I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, I got a ton of value out of my local video store growing up. I Love video in Austin has since closed down, and it strikes me as though I've lost a part of myself. I asked Dan what he misses most about video stores as a customer. I really do miss browsing physically. I have a hard time describing why it's so important or

was so important to me as an individual. But I loved walking through the store. When I was in grad school at in l A, there was a store around the corner called Video Journeys. It's a pretty good store. I would spend an hour browsing that store and I would walk out with nothing, and I was not unhappy about that. It was just a kind of like, oh, I'll go down to the store. I got to buy some groceries, and then I'll walk next to Video Journeys and just look around. Who would in their right mind say,

I'm just gonna look around at Netflix. Of course, there's tons of times that we do look around at Netflix and never watch a thing, but nobody sits down just to browse Netflix. Ever, those of us who had favorite video stores, I would put money on the fact that there was our favorite, in part because of the people who worked there. It was like, I get to see this one guy who's always got the right joke to crack, and he recommends horrible movies. But I love to argue

with him. So much of what I am saying really comes down to missing the people and the spaces in which one could shop for movies. And by that, by shopping, what I mean is contemplate a future of watching it and having a good time. There is a loss in the loss of the physical space and the social interactions that those spaces generated. And it's hard to put into words because it's visceral and it's embodied, and it's in your heart, and it's your mind, and it's in your

hopes for entertainment and and enjoyment. I say, there's no reason we need to lose those experiences. I urge you to frequent your local video store and keep that community alive. Maybe ask the store clerk about Eraserhead and see what happens. I'd like to rent breakfast statification. This is our someone has it out? Oh no, I've I've been the four other places. You're the only ones that have had it. Well. I can put her on reserve for you if you'd like.

Maybe we could call them and ask them to return. Dan Herbert is the author of Video Land Movie Culture at the American Video Store. This episode of A Feller was written and assembled by Trevor Young and produced with Max and Alex Williams. Music this episode from the artist Mon Plaisier. Learn more at Loyalty Freak music dot com.

Next episode, we'll take a trip to our local video store, Video Drum in Atlanta to talk to the owners, clerks, and customers, and we'll have a roundtable discussion with iHeart Podcast hosts Lauren Vogelbond and Annie Reese on their best video store memories. Let us know where you rent videos, past, present and future Ahem dot show. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio at Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.