RIP, Blockbuster stores
I don’t think I’m alone in missing you
I was one of the lucky ones. I’ve lived nearby an actual physical Blockbuster store for the past few years when these species became few and far between. This week, it, along with the rest of Blockbuster’s company-owned US stores, closed.
Technically, the store is not closed until the liquidation sale ends, and word is a handful of about 50 franchisees are keeping their stores going — the maginot line for video stores, destined to fall as the days of running to the video rental store are now officially over, and I have to admit to feeling sad and nostalgic about this.
I was twelve years old when my dad retired. (He was staring 50 in the face when I was born, so yes, I was the only kid I knew growing up who had a dad — not a grampa—who fought in WWII.) He retired after more than 30 years with the same company, which is something people used to do. He received a pension, which is something people used to get, and a small sum of money with which he could choose a retirement gift. He chose a newfangled doodad called a VCR, which he bought at a new shop called “Tapes to Go” where you could rent VHS and Betamax tapes of movies for ten cents an hour. Ten cents an hour!
My son is twelve now, as Blockbuster sinks beneath the waves, and I find it’s really hard to explain to my kids what a mind-blowing concept it was in the early 1980's to be able to bring a movie home and watch it as many times as you wanted. How you could tape shows so you wouldn’t miss them when they were on. I bought my Dad two blank videotapes as a retirement gift, which we’re on the order of 9 or ten dollars each at that time. I remember recording the opening ceremonies to the 1984 Olympics in LA. I got up at each commercial break to press the pause button (no remotes back then) so I didn’t record any commercials.
The first film I rented at Tapes to Go was Rocky. My intention was to rent it, watch it, ride my bike back to the store, pay my 30 cents or so and then move on to Rocky II, and then (oh yeah!) Rocky III. To my 12 year old mind, since I was paying hourly, it didn’t make sense to rent all three Rocky’s at once, because then I’d be paying rent for hours I wasn’t watching the other two! Depending on how long it took to rewind (yeah — remember the extra fees if you didn’t rewind your tape?), and depending on how fast I could ride my bike, I figured I could watch the entire Rocky trilogy for less than $1.50.
Things never work out like you plan when you’re 12.
Because when I returned Rocky, just three and half hours after renting it, I learned that there was a minimum charge of $1.50. It was my first time getting screwed by the fine print, and looking back across the years, I wonder at the Mom or the Pop behind Tapes to Go, building a business model around a dime an hour. That might work for parking meters or pay phones (something else I have to explain to my kids), but for videotape rentals? That sounds kind of skeevy, in hindsight. I mean, if a hotel is renting rooms by the hour, most of us know to keep on driving.
Not long after Tapes to Go opened, video stores began popping up all over town. I was partial to a place called Movie Madness, because it was walking distance from my house, and also they had a Defender machine in there.
Not many years later, just as VHS was defeating Betamax as the tape of choice, franchised video stores began replacing the Mom and Pops, and for many of us, Blockbuster was first among them. These were great places to work if you we’re in high school, and to this day, when I see old friends who worked in a video store, I tend to ask them about movies. I guess I just assume they still know as much now as they did then.
At its nadir, there were more than 9,000 Blockbuster stores. Until this past week, only a few hundred remained. When I mentioned to some friends last fall that I had picked up a film at Blockbuster, they outright called bullshit on me, until I texted them a photo of me, in the store, with the clerk, holding up recent movies. The last photo I sent was me in front of the yellow Store Closing banner.My friends were finally vindicated, the dreams of my 12-year-old self finally crushed..
The last film Blockbuster rented out reportedly was This is the End, rented from a store in Hawaii. Seth Rogen, one of the films’ actors, noted this occasion on twitter, remarking “in high school, I would hang out at Blockbuster every day,” and calling the closing “sad and nuts.”
I know what he means, and although I didn’t hang out at Blockbuster (indeed, video stores never seemed to develop a thriving subculture like record stores and comic book stores have developed, and helps keep them vital), going to Blockbuster was very much a regular experience in high school and college. I’m remembering long trips there with too many opinionated friends, all of us unable to agree on a film to rent and ending up with some regrettable choice that was mutually distasteful to all of us. This is where I first learned to distrust decisions made by committee. They tend to result in things like Superman IV: the Quest for Peace or Over the Top.
I’ve still enjoyed taking my kids to the video store the past few years. I like browsing the aisles, picking up cases and reading about films I’ve never heard of. For some reason, for all of the tech and logic that goes into services like Netflix to help us discover content we’ll enjoy, it never quite matched up to visiting the store, where there seemed to be more serendipity to the experience.
And I liked when the clerks, who knew me by face, if not name, would recommend a film, or see me considering one and give me their quick take on it. Short, brief feedback — never pompous, nor over the top. In recent years, when I had a plan that allowed me to have one film out at a time and trade it out at the store, they would always ask me what I thought when I returned it, and I would aim for concise but illuminating feedback of my own.
Hell, I’ll even admit that I always secretly considered Blockbuster as a sort Plan C career option for me, something I might do when I retire (should that ever happen), or sooner, if I got all American Beauty about my life. “I know alot about movies,” I’d tell my wife. “Plus I think I look good in that shade of blue.”
There are all sorts of reasons for Blockbuster’s decline, and I’m not interested in detailing them here. I’m sad today not just for the closing of this store, and for the people who will soon be out of work, but for the end of the video store era. I watch my twelve year-old-son dialing up whatever he pleases on his iPod and wonder what it will be that truly blows his mind in the same way that the idea of renting a movie to watch in my own home for ten-cents-an hour did for me. What will his “watch all three Rocky’s for less than a buck fifty” scheme be, and how will it work out?
Will he even remember, when he’s 42, the few years of his childhood when his normally quiet Dad would take him to the video store, where he’d chat with the clerks and smile, and let each kid pick out a movie to take home, and sometimes even some candy?
