I Miss Video Rental Stores

Don’t mind me. Just exposing my age.

Streaming services have made consuming media easier than ever before. Pick your service, pay the fee, them wham! You can watch whatever you want for however long you want whenever you want.

Back in the day, however, it wasn’t so easy. When I was a kid, you couldn’t just pay Netflix or Hulu if you wanted to watch Hollywood’s latest dumpster fire. You had to go to a store to rent it.

Ah, video rental shops. Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, the likes. Just saying their names conjure up memories of family movie nights. Walking down those halls, with movies and games lined up on the shelves all around, was truly mesmerizing to my tiny child mind.

Now let’s make one thing clear: rental stores were not actually all that good. At least not for a consumer. If you wanted to watch a movie, you’d have to hope that the store a) had said movie and b) that said movie was still in a working state. If that DVD or VHS tape (god, I’m old) was picked up by a rowdy, chaotic family that tore discs and tapes to pieces, well sorry bucko, but you ain’t watching that movie that night.

Of course, there was also the business of late fees. Hold onto a movie beyond your rental period, and you start building fees. Like a credit card, only instead of building credit for yourself, you’re just being judged by some seventeen year old making minimum wage for hogging a copy of ‘Donnie Darko’ for three weeks too long.

I can acknowledge that streaming is definitely a preferable alternative. Netflix murdered Blockbuster as brutally as it did for a reason. No one in their right mind would advocate for their return.

But there was a certain charm to rental stores that’s been lost. It was fun to just go in and wander around, grabbing whatever caught your eye. Especially when you go out on a whim and grab something you know nothing about. Would it be good or not? You wouldn’t know until you got home. But therein is the game!

In my final years of high school, I pretty much stopped going altogether. On the rare occasion I did go, I’d usually end up leaving partway through. In an effort to kill some time – and to avoid a parental scolding upon my homeward return – I’d wander around town. Sometimes I’d visit the art museum, sometimes I’d just lay down in the park and chill.

One day, I went downtown. There was a building block that used to have a grocery store, a Burger King, and a Blockbuster video. All three had been shut down over the years, so I couldn’t go in. Still, bored as my teenage self was, I still wandered over to have a look.

That Blockbuster had shut it’s doors around 2009. But looking through those windows nearly a decade later, I was amazed to see all the old decorations were still there. The shelves had all been removed and none of the games or movies remained. But the ghost of what that building once was still lingered there, abandoned and forgotten.

Was there a point to that story? No, not really.

…

You can go away now.