I recently joined Netflix. I don’t rent nearly as many movies as I used to, so I got the monthly special for just $5.99. For that price you get two movies per month that you can keep for as long as you want. I might eventually upgrade to the $9.99 plan where you can get an unlimited number of movies one at a time. With both plans you create a list and as soon as you return the movie you have, they send you another one from the list. They say you get your movies in about one business day. My experience so far has been about two, but that’s still not bad.
The reason that I started using Netflix is that there seems to be a trend at the video store away from selection and towards stocking more and more new releases. I recently wanted to rent a copy of an older movie to show to some friends who hadn’t seen it yet, but there wasn’t a single movie store in town that still carried it. With over 65,000 titles in stock, Netflix had it and shipped it to me in a couple of days.
I started out renting movies when the VCR’s came out back in the eighties. I lived in a small town outside of St. Louis then and I remember the old Montgomery Ward store in town had a rack of videos in the corner. The video section grew and grew until, after a few months, the Montgomery Ward had been transformed into Rent N Go Video. Pretty soon it seemed that everyone was in on the video craze: the supermarkets and discount stores rented videos. They were at the Seven Eleven. The drugstore had them. The bait shop over on Highway F stocked them near the beer and night crawler cooler. If you knew the owner Andy at all, he’d show you his private stock in the backroom. You know, the ones not to be viewed by children.
When I moved back to St. Louis, a lot of the places that rented videos as a side business had removed them. They just couldn’t compete with the two giants: Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.
Blockbuster is definitely the Wal-Mart of video stores. It started in 1985, expanded at an enormous rate, and was purchased by Viacom in 1994 at a price of $8.4 billion. In the 1990’s, Blockbuster became a giant retailer hell bent on buying up all of its competitors. It bought its principle UK rival Ritz Video. In 2004, Blockbuster announced that it wanted to do a hostile takeover on its major U.S. competitor, Hollywood Video. To counter this, Hollywood announced that it would agree to a takeover by its smaller rival, Movie Gallery. Although Blockbuster has lost billions of dollars in recent years due to movie piracy and Internet competition, they still dwarf smaller rival Hollywood in both sales and number of units worldwide. They have recently entered into the mail order rental business to compete with Netflix.
With me, and I suspect a lot of other customers, where you rent videos is determined by two factors: location first, followed by price. At first I rented primarily from Blockbuster because it was literally the only one near me. But the cost there is prohibitive, well over three bucks for a new release, and the older movies are overpriced too. Then they opened a Hollywood video about the same distance from my house. The movie rental prices were a little cheaper and you could keep them for five days without paying a late fee, and that was a bonus that could save a lot of money for absent-minded folks like me. Then a couple of years ago a new boy came to town and it was right up the street from me. The name was confusing though; it was called Family Video. With the name and a sign that talked about free kid’s movies, at first I thought that they just rented G-rated movies. I finally checked it out and found that they were a regular movie store and had new releases for just $2.50 and free older movies during the week. The only drawback is that, being smaller; they are frequently out of the new release title that you are looking for.
Another movie renting option around St. Louis is to rent from one of those large red boxes that seem to popping up at all of the McDonald’s around town. New releases are really cheap at $1.00 each, but the selection is limited to about 20 movies.
If Family Video is kid friendly, then Movies Unlimited, located just outside the city limits and one of the few remaining independents, is on the opposite end of the spectrum. They probably carry more adult titles than anything else in the store, but they are kept in the back and require a key. Up front they have a small rack of new releases, but they are a cult and horror movie fan’s dream come true. If you can’t find it here, then you probably can’t without going online. They are consistently rated as the best video store by the Riverfront Times newspaper, and given the selection of movies, I guess it tells you where those guy’s minds are.
So, if it’s a new release that I’m looking for I go to McDonald’s first, then Family Video, then Hollywood, and finally Blockbuster. If it’s an older movie, it’s Movies Unlimited and then Netflix. Or, maybe I’ll just wait and catch it on cable.
