The Rise and Fall of Video Rental Stores

Video Village, 1992

Before the Blockbuster opened on Route 31, there was Video Village. A converted house, basically - you could still see where the kitchen used to be if you looked hard enough. The front porch had been enclosed and turned into the entrance. The living room was NEW RELEASES. The dining room was HORROR.

Mr. Kim owned it. He knew everyone's name. He knew what everyone liked to watch. "You liked Predator, right?" he'd say when I walked in. "I just got Predator 2. You want first crack?"

That was the thing about local video stores that the chains could never replicate. Mr. Kim remembered. He cared.

The Mom-and-Pop Difference

Blockbuster had 8,000 tapes when it opened. Video Village had maybe 2,000, and half of them were old. But Mr. Kim would special order things. If you wanted some obscure movie he didn't have, you'd tell him, and a couple weeks later he'd call your house. "That movie you wanted? It's here."

The late fees were flexible too. "You're a couple days late," he'd say, sliding the tape under the counter. "Don't worry about it this time." Try that at Blockbuster and see how far you get.

His horror section was legendary. He had stuff that had never hit mainstream stores - Italian horror, Japanese horror, weird straight-to-video things that nobody had heard of but that were absolutely terrifying. I discovered Dario Argento in Video Village. That changed my entire relationship with movies.

When the Chains Came

Blockbuster opened in 1994. Hollywood Video came a year later. Suddenly Video Village wasn't the only game in town.

The chains had selection we couldn't imagine. Rows and rows of new releases, multiple copies of everything, the actual new movies on the actual day they came out. Video Village would get new releases a week or two late because Mr. Kim couldn't compete with the big distributors.

I felt guilty going to Blockbuster. But they had things Video Village didn't. They stayed open until midnight. They had video games. They had that seductive corporate consistency - every Blockbuster looked the same, smelled the same, worked the same.

Mr. Kim held on for about three years. Then one day there was a sign in the window: CLOSING SALE - ALL TAPES $5. I bought about twenty movies that day. Some of them I still have.

The Late Fee Rage

My parents had a account at both Blockbuster and Hollywood Video. They were constantly rotating which one had their money - you'd get banned from one for owing too much in late fees, switch to the other one, then eventually settle the debt and switch back.

Late fees were the business model, we now know. Blockbuster made $800 million a year on them. If everyone returned everything on time, the whole industry would have collapsed.

The worst was renting a movie, not watching it, and returning it late anyway. Paying four dollars for a movie you never even saw. That happened to my family at least once a month.

Browsing as Sport

The algorithm wasn't invented yet. Nobody was tracking what you watched and suggesting more of the same. You had to find movies yourself, by walking up and down aisles and looking at boxes.

This sounds tedious. It was actually magical.

You'd discover things you never would have found otherwise. "What's this one? The cover looks cool." That's how I found Buckaroo Banzai, one of my favorite movies. No algorithm would have recommended that to anyone.

Reading the back of the box was an art form. The descriptions were always hyperbolic and often misleading, but you learned to read between the lines. "Action-packed thrill ride" meant explosions. "Touching drama" meant someone dies. "Shocking twist ending" meant it was probably bad but trying to seem clever.

The Death of an Industry

Netflix launched their DVD-by-mail service in 1999. No late fees. You kept the disc until you were done, then mailed it back and got the next one. Revolutionary.

Blockbuster's CEO famously laughed at Netflix when they offered to sell for $50 million. Five years later, Blockbuster was bankrupt.

I remember the exact moment I knew it was over. I was standing in a mostly empty Blockbuster in 2008, the same one that had killed Video Village, and there were maybe twenty people in the whole store. The new releases section was half empty. The employees looked bored and hopeless.

Two years later, it was gone.

One Left

There's still one Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon. I've seen the pictures. It's become a pilgrimage site for people my age, a museum of a dead industry.

I keep meaning to visit. I want to walk through those doors one more time. Smell that smell. Run my fingers along the tape cases. Remember what it felt like when watching a movie required effort - getting in the car, driving somewhere, making a choice, committing to it.

Streaming is better in every measurable way. More selection, more convenience, less cost.

But Mr. Kim never said "Because you watched Die Hard, you might also enjoy..." He said "Hey, you liked Die Hard? I got something you're gonna love. Trust me."

I miss that. I miss being surprised. I miss the effort and the ritual and the community of it.

The last time I was in Bend, I didn't make it to the Blockbuster. Traffic, timing, other commitments. There's always next time, I told myself.

But there wasn't a next time for Video Village, was there?