Saturday, October 19, 2013

The Sad Passing of the DVD Rental Store

The missus suggested getting a movie (DVD) from the shop this afternoon. Good idea. It's a rainy weekend and we don't watch a lot of TV. We haven't been into the shop for some time, we don't watch many movies either, and just wandering around it gave the appearance that they were closing down. Grabbed an overnight rental, Side Effects, and a weekly rental, 3:10 to Yuma (I've not seen it). The manager of the store explained that as they were closing down we could rent the overnight vid but not the weekly which we would have to purchase. The $3 weekly rent would be turned into $5 to purchase and I couldn't actually rent it.

When I finally understood what he meant by that I was quite saddened. We've used the same shop for over 10 years since we moved to the area. The manager has been in the business for 33 years so I guess he is saddened a heck of a lot more than I. He explained that DVD rental shops had disappeared in Europe already - that surprised me. But, when you think about it, with the Internet as the distribution method it's not altogether surprising.

So, until all of the weekly DVDs have been sold you can still hire overnight vids but once they're all gone it's bye-bye renting movies.

1 comment:

Iris Flavia said...

Here you still find some video-shops.
But, yes, guess they won´t be around for long anymore. I´ve never been in one.