Video Rental Stores

It is not about old schoolness, it is about efficiency. When Netflix and Redbox came out, they revolutionized the ways movies were bought. It cut down on the lines and the waiting. It is basically a vending machine's version of a vendor. Think about you going to Disneyland and being served ice cream from a cart. Now you do not have to wait in line because a machine disposes it for you.

I agree, I miss that experience. I was actually sad when the last Blockbuster shut down in my area. The local places were already gone and Blockbuster was all that remained. It was nice to just walk around a place and be around people while looking for a movie, checking out the selection. And it was tangible, not like the digital experience of Netflix. There's something to be said for that. Now, it wasn't perfect of course. It was pricey and there was never much of an international selection. In that respect, Netflix is better. But I still miss the experience of walking around browsing the shelves. When I was a kid in the 1990s (long before Netflix became a thing), going to Blockbuster and Hollywood Video was one of my favorite things to do.

There is one video store about an hour drive from my place. I keep thinking of going for the nostalgic feeling. I miss walking through and reading the covers and picking up a box hard on cover art.

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I miss it badly. In the place I live now, there are no physical, bricks and mortar video stores at all. And Subscribing to things like Netflix would run me into trouble because unlimited data plans for internet here is too expensive, I'm on limited data usage per month, and streaming all the movies I'd like to rent a stream of would hit me with horrendous overage fees. It's happened already. Online streaming is not an option as long as there are data capped internet services and it's all some of us can afford.

There are still several in Berlin, and they seem to be doing ok. Until half a year ago I had a good friend in Berlin, and we would often go there and spent hours trying to agree on a movie, lol.

But where I live (smaller town) not one has survived, and I miss it a lot. I often think back to those times where I would go there with my sister and spend a lot of time looking at the covers and planning our movie night. There was one amazing rental store in Frankfurt that seemed totally chaotic, but you'd find a ton of interesting shows and foreign movies. That was way before tv shows became a big thing. But they had The X Files, Buffy, and lots of other stuff that I wouldn't have seen otherwise.

I will say the streaming services are very efficient and grant instant access, but there was just something personable about walking around a video store and actually holding that movie in your hands and being in the presence of other movie goers doing the same thing. What will they take next? Libraries? I mean you can download a book just as efficiently. I know that will most likely not happen, but its the same premise only with books instead of movies.

I live in a small town and there is just one video rental store left and it's a pretty small store so they mostly just have new releases and some older animated films. I miss the old days when there were 3 or 4 bigger stores with a huge selection of new and older classics and nearly every gas station and convenience store rented out videos too, now they've all stopped, they mostly just sell junk food, smokes and lottery tickets, it's a shame.