From the Vault: Video Killed the Rental Store

This post originally appeared at my old blog in 2016 and appears here in slightly sofferent form.

Did you appreciate the video rental store while you had it?

Probably not.

Instead, you simply spent nearly every Friday and Saturday night wandering around inside its walls, looking for VHS treasures to rent. You’d browse intently, as if you’d never been there before, always on the lookout for something new or old that you’d missed the previous week—something that would change your life. Always chasing the dragon.

You tried to impress friends with your knowledge of cinema, something that any teenager can fake to another teenager because neither know a damn thing about anything yet. But you did know what movies you liked, even if you couldn’t express why, exactly. That would come later, with more critical viewings on your own, and in high school and then college film courses. For now, you only knew what films made you feel something—happy or sad or scared or excited or confused. Those were the movies you rented repeatedly.

In time, the sleek and shiny (yet semi-soulless) DVD crowded the ugly and clunky (yet semi-charming) VHS off the shelves. By then, the luster of the entire experience had waned for you anyway. You still loved movies but something about the video store itself had grown old, tired, perfunctory. Then one day—and really, these things never happen in a day but it tends to feel like they did—the video rental store was gone.

Oh sure, there are still some scattered about, servicing rabid movie hounds somewhere, god bless them. You might have one nearby, but you don’t really care to find out. Now you find your movies on streaming services or Blu-ray or, when you’re desperate and feeling the financial pinch, YouTube. Everything’s at your fingertips now.

You never mourned the loss of the video rental store; when it went away, you shrugged. It’s just one more in an endless line of experiences you won’t have again that you never appreciate when you’re having them. These experiences take place in public spaces that are huge parts of your life for years and then, suddenly, they’re no longer there. Usually you don’t know its happened until after the fact, and by then you’ve moved on, found new spaces within which to exist.