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An Ode to Blockbuster and Other [Video Rental Stores]
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Hey I could spend 8 bucks to rent this here movie for a day right after it released, so long as I get it before everyone else rented it...or spend seven more bucks and own it day 1 at Best Buy.
Hell BB ended up eventually eating up its own back catalog rentals doing the same thing with its used DVD sales. Hmm, rent it for 3 dollars or a week or own it for 5...HMMM....
We had a Beta VCR. Well, actually we had several Beta VCRs. Some broke. About 5 got stolen. Once it was the only thing stolen from our house before the robbers fled. And almost all of them were well after the time where if you said you had a Beta people would say "WTF is that?" I love to imagine the guy who stole them getting such a confused look on his face when he realized it. But then he probably was able to sell it to a knowledgeable pawn shop or electronics guy if he knew one. I was pretty tickled when I was watching Cowboy Bebop with my friends and the episode where they found the Beta cassette came on.
We had a pretty huge collection because we inherited a bunch of boxes of movies and recorded TV shows from some of our friends from church when they moved to California, and then when a local video store stopped carrying them we got a few more boxes for like $5 apiece.
There is a video store in Dallas, Premiere Video, which is really awesome. I just checked and according to google anyway it still exists. It was in a really small space, but the movies were super densely packed, their selection was really good. They didn't typically have more than a couple copies of anything, but you could find most any movie you wanted, and if they didn't have it, and you mentioned it to them, they'd probably have it the next time. Their anime and foreign selection was really good as well. And the staff was super knowledgeable about film. They apparently had to set up a dropbox in Oak Cliff because there were enough driving 12 miles through shitty Dallas traffic to get movies from them it was worthwhile to at least make it easier to drop the movies off.
It's places like that that I feel may be the only B&M video stores to survive the Netflixaggedon.
It was Kurt Russell, and it was called Soldier.
Was it?
Steam/PSN/XBL/Minecraft / LoL / - Benevicious | WoW - Duckwood - Rajhek
I do credit/blame it for two particular things in my life. One, it made a few interesting contributions to my library. One of the other employees had a habit of ordering stuff from the internal catalog but dragging her feet on actually buying it once it arrived. After a particularly nasty (unrelated) exchange with the manager she quit and went elsewhere, leaving us sitting on the merchandise; including, of all things, Tenchi Muyo, Armitage III, and the Azumanga Daioh collection. They sat on the shelves for a while before someone decided fuck it, it's just taking up space, who wants it at a discount.
Thanks to Toonami-slash-Adult Swim I'd familiarized myself with the concept of anime, but the thought of this as something you could actually buy and own was somehow foreign to me. Those weren't the only things I picked up from this curious sale (woo, Hard Boiled!) but they required more explanation to passersby.
The second is instilling me with a lifelong, seething hatred of sales and retail. Around mid-2001, most of the staff that I knew had moved on, and the manager was replaced after a fight with the DM. The guy that replaced him was a bit more by-the-book, which isn't inherently a bad thing (he did finally get the light fixed from the aforementioned chicken incident). Bigger problem was the company was pushing harder to make sales - more premium membership, more used copies, more biographies of that one guy from Viacom that we had for some god-only-knows reason - and he was all too happy to comply.
And then there was the micromanagement of what we said. We had to start saying specific things every time a client entered and left, or whenever the phone rang; with the latter, plugging whatever sale we were running at the month, which was often a bit of a mouthful. We got a lot of people who would cut us off midsentence, because they wanted to know our hours or if we just had such-and-such in stock, but god help you if you didn't say the DirecTV line when another store was calling. There were other such nuisances - tighter dress code restrictions, less leeway on fee waivers, that kind of thing - and 'nuisances' are all they would have been individually.
We bled people pretty quickly after that, and it wasn't until my next job that I realized this attitude was basically everywhere in sales/retail. Even now, working as a bank teller some twelve years later, I'm seeing the exact same ideas recycled: canned phrases, tracking meaningless stats (the number of people who leave smiling? Someone was paid money to think that one up?) and chewing out employees that fall behind on their numbers. Not a single original thought above the branch level.
But I digress. While I didn't set foot in a Blockbuster after college, I do miss video stores in general. Some stores kept a good selection of hard-to-find stuff that I would've missed out on, especially with games; snapped up used copies of Star Ocean: Second Story and Fatal Frame for peanuts. Good times.
Now playing: Teardown and Baldur's Gate 3 (co-op)
Sunday Spotlight: Horror Tales: The Wine
'DVD'? That sounds very sophisticated and trendy. What is this 'DVD'?
Oh, now you're just being coy.
'Digital Video Discs' were an optical media format developed by Philips and Sony in 1995. DVDs could hold much more data than a standard compact disc, and while the first generation of DVDs were dual-layered (much like the Laserdisc format), single-layered eventually became the standard as the technology improved.
DVDs had much better image and audio quality than cassettes, did not suffer from magnetic tape signal degradation and, most importantly, could be mass produced at a fraction of the cost. Although the format itself was short-lived, being superceded by Sony's BluRay format, the emergence of DVDs completely changed the home entertainment industry. VHS, the once peerless juggernaut of home video, was considered a dead technology just after 5 years in competition with DVD.
On the eve of December 31st, 2008, the last truckload of pre-recorded VHS tapes was shipped out of Palm Harbor by their largest distributor in the United States
DVD changed the cost structure. The reason video rental was a thing was VHS's were damn expensive. I remember when VCRs came out and everyone owned like maybe 3 movies for it. Renting was more cost effective. DVDs were made much cheaper. And they lasted longer creating a big secondhand market.
Don't blame the customers, blame dinosaurs who were unable to compete.
GET ON MAH LEVEL CANADA
I prefer to blame all of these over-privileged punk kids and their whirlygig contraptions. You could've left well enough alone, but nope!
Gotta make things more 'convenient' and 'cost efficient' and 'improve the user experience'.
Bunch of bullshit. I want my dollar Tuesdays back!
*crosses arms*
Hell there are probably more things still planned in 2013 with DVD only releases.
And when I got a little older and realized there were entire stores full of video games...
So for two days my Nintendo collection went from around ten games to over one hundred.
I like having physical copies of some of my favorites. For example I have The West Wing, Star Trek TOS, and most of The Office and Parks and Rec, and some older films that don't get Netflixed often (Caine Mutiny, Mr Smith, etc).
Netflix is good, but sometimes I want a DVD.
I disagree; if you look at the adoption rate, Blue-Ray is actually performing better against DVDs than DVD did against VHS for the same period of time. In Japan, Blu-Ray recording and playback machines are already outselling DVD counterparts. It's also worth noting, of course, that Sony is pushing the Blu-Ray format - meaning that it's marketing weight is no longer behind DVD.
It's certainly true that streaming media & digital distribution may eventually kill physical media altogether, but within the physical media arena, there's very good reason to suspect that Blu-Ray will take-over DVD's space (though trends can always change, of course).
And Blu-Ray readers are replacing DVDs in computers at a good clip. Even at a cheapo Walmart special you can get a blu ray player for a negligible increase in price.
I think the point is that Blu-ray will never reach the peak of ubiquity that DVD has. I don't think it'll ever be the case where pretty much every home will have several devices capable of playing blu ray discs.
Like, I don't own a blu ray player, and I don't think it's likely I ever will, given that I already primarily get most of my entertainment through streaming services. There are all kinds of organisations and services pushing streaming way harder than anybody is pushing physical discs.
This is probably true.
Only Family Video didn't get the message. They actually built a new store near my house two years ago. I thought they were completely insane.
Fast forward to a few months ago. I get addicted to Downton Abbey, but no one has the second season available for streaming. So I finally set foot in Family Video.
....the place is PACKED. It's to the point that getting in and out of the tiny parking lot almost resembled a game of bumper cars, and I had to wait 10 minutes before someone was free enough to sign me up for a membership. But the selection is great and the prices are reasonable. Hell, since I haven't been in a couple months they called me up and offered me a free video. I have no clue if the company is making any money but good goddamn they've got foot traffic.
I guess there's just enough luddites out there to make it extremely worthwhile for some video stores to stay in business. And since finding a movie that's popular and older than four months old is a dicey proposition at best thanks to Redbox's churn and Hollywood's War on Streaming, there's definitely a niche that can serve you even if you're wired to the gills.
DVD might always stick around, but it's easy for manufacturers and distributors to gradually phase it out if they want to. That's they beauty of BD. With VHS, you needed a totally fuckawesome new format to properly compete. Laserdisc looked beautiful in comparison, but it was expensive and unwieldy and there was no reason for a non-enthusiast to give two shits about it, not if it meant starting your movie collection over from scratch. It took something that was beautiful and convenient and had bonus extras and wasn't too unwieldy to get people to commit to throwing out their old movies.
With BD, though? You can keep your DVD collection. If you never want to rebuy Tango and Cash or whatever, that's fine. No reason to get another copy of that 30 year old romcom? Fine, keep the old one, and just get the new, pretty releases on BD. It's a format that you can just gradually get more of until holy fuck, when was the last time I even bought a DVD? Welp, guess I'm a BD devotee, now.
A few funny stories:
The Blockbuster I worked at in college was in a rather wealthy area. Arguing with someone over a two dollar late fee and then watching them get into their Mercedes in a huff was always a good time. On the other side were people who would pay $50 dollars late fees without blinking. Every single weekend.
Remember when The Sixth Sense came out on video? Everyone wanted to get it and it was almost never available. We had a woman walk up to the counter, skip everyone, and then yell and scream about how we didn't a have enough copies. The other person working motioned for everyone else in line to cover their ears. 'He's DEAD.' She got very quiet, realized that there would be no sympathy from the ten people in line she cut in front of, and left.
Remember when Titanic came out? It took up two VHS tapes, it did. Corporate when crazy over it. We had three full bays full of it on the new release wall and hundreds of copies for sale. There was enough demand for a midnight opening and I volunteered to run it with the store manager. We sold a shit load but not a single one was rented. They all sat there, on the wall, for weeks.
Setting the New Release wall on Mondays was always a bitch. First you would pull the copies to be sold used, then spend half the day shifting things around, trying to maintain some sort of order to make space for the two hundred copies of Eyes Wide Shut that no one would rent.
In between stints at Blockbuster I did a little time in a mom and pop CD Store/Video rental place. I swear they made most of their money off of the porn selection. People would ask for 'the wine list' and I would hand them a nondescript box full of note cards. Each card listed an adult film with far more information than anyone needed, up to and including a review written by someone who worked there.
...
No knocking laser discs. I had one. Blade Runner took up four sides and was fucking glorious.
...only with the slight side effect of causing the PlayStation brand to go from the industry leader to an afterthought, and lose hundreds of millions in the process. No biggie.
On the bright side, in a few years you'll be able to sell that to a collector like it's a 2nd century Roman denarius.
This year's Black Friday special at Wal-Mart was a $39 blu-ray player.
And yes, I bought one for my parents. Because someone has to drag them into the present.
However, I agree that blu-ray is becoming more and more a hobbyist's medium the more digital distribution takes hold, but I hope that blu-ray always exists in some capacity if only for preservation's sake. Digital distribution methods have a bad habit of being proprietary and hiding behind pay walls, and when I want to watch a crisp copy of Casablanca, I shouldn't have to keep going to places like Blockbuster.
Your last bit reminded me of this one mom-and-pop store I used to frequent in Charleston when I was stationed there. It was also a Comic, RPG store so they mostly had the classics like Robocop but the majority was Asian import movies and anime.
Scratch that, the majority was all the porn they had that covered about a 4th of the wall (halfway across, about waist high).
I didn't realize what they were (they were all either copies or had their labels/cases replaced to more generic slip cases) until I found the list.
It was a list of every title they had, alphabetical, with symbols marking which ones were personally recommended by the owner, which ones were those "he heard were good" and which ones were ok.
Viddery games and cimena are not relevant to my interests, but porn - real, honest to God porn - this is the grout & tiling of my life. How can we make this thread about naked people slapping the butts of other naked people?
Prior to the 1980s, the sex industry in the United States was very narrow in scope, mostly relegated to adult entertainment clubs, shady 'peep show' venues (often pay per view) and escort / prostitution services. With the explosion of video rental stores, moguls within the sex industry saw an opportunity to make a lot of money even with a small staff of performers by videotaping sex scenes, duplicating the tapes and selling them to local rental stores. Some even cut royalty deals with the larger chains.
This caused a 'gold rush' of sorts that ballooned the entire industry: not only could a single taped scene sell to many, many more customers than any traditional act, it was far easier and came with less overhead or regulations to just buy or rent a VHS recorder and film a scene in someone's home, apartment or hotel room. The strong demand for & sales of porn in early video rental stores became a core part of that business model.
They were amazing, except for their tendency to self-destruct ("laser rot") and needing to get up and flip the disc or change discs out if the movie was long enough and, oh, yes, they were bloody expensive. I mean, sure, you COULD rent them from a few stores, but it was much cooler to spend a hundred bucks on the Director's Cut of Aliens that had all the cool extra footage that the filthy VHS peasants didn't get to see.
This was not a sound financial decision, especially when buying domestic LDs wasn't nearly cool enough and I started importing Japanese LDs.
The last LD I bought was Card Captor Sakura: The Movie, which cost $108.00 and tax and which probably got watched twice before being replaced with a $20 DVD.
So everyone in here going "daddy, what's a laserdisc?", just count your lucky stars.
One of the few local places that rented LDs was also the "cool" video store, the one with all the anime and Hong Kong action movies and weird stuff and an inexplicable policy of never charging anyone to rent any movie featuring Brooke Shields (they actually had a sign: "We don't charge for Brooke")
They went under some years back, which was sad, but they donated their entire stock (minus the porn, presumably) to the local library, so now we have a library with an amazing and very very eclectic video section for checkout.
Yeah, if Brighthouse ever institutes a bandwidth cap I will be cancelling my Netflix immediately.