Twelve years ago, I was surprised to discover a new video rental chain was moving into town. I was so surprised, in fact, that I wrote a fairly unkind blog post about it. I haven’t always been the most tactful writer, and even though I was a bit confused by their business model, it wasn’t very nice of me to wish them bad luck. Sorry, Family Video.
Although my insults against Family Video may have been overly dramatic, my confusion was honest and sincere. In 2009, Family Video was moving into a market dominated by Blockbuster, a company who itself was struggling to remain relevant in a changing market. The brick and mortar rental business model was already struggling to compete with Redbox (who were adding unattended rental kiosks on every corner) and Netflix (who, at that time, was primarily mailing physical discs to customers). It seemed to me that Family Video was entering the market by boarding the wrong side of a sinking ship.
To prove my point back in 2009, I mentioned that my family had recently rented a video from a Redbox kiosk in one city, watched it on the DVD player in our minivan, and returned the DVD it in another city. That, I thought, was the future!
What a difference just a few years makes. I was an early adopter of the DVD format, and over the past 20 years I’ve purchased more than a thousand movies on DVD. My kids, in contrast, have purchased exactly zero. By the time my daughter was born in 2005 I had already built a PC-based DVR (Pivo!) and was experimenting with streaming digital content, but watching digital video outside the house was not yet a thing. In 2009, a few months after I wrote my original post about Family Video, I bought my first iPod Touch. By 2011, I, Susan, and even Mason all owned iPhones with unlimited data plans. In 2008, Netflix was the fastest growing customer of the US Postal Service. By 2010, they became “the largest source of Internet streaming traffic in North America in the evening,” according to Wikipedia. It wasn’t the death of DVD rentals that doomed Family Video; it was the death of DVDs.
When Family Video first opened in Yukon it cost $2.99 to rent a new release for 24 hours. For the price of two rentals, you could pay for a month of Netflix, who were offering unlimited physical DVD rentals through the mail (three discs at a time, I think) and along with streaming.
Despite being a national chain with more than 700 locations, Family Video portrayed themselves in the media as a friendly neighborhood rental store, just like the locally-owned video stores you might have rented video tapes from decades ago. “We know all our customers by name,” said one manager in a Chicago Tribune article about the company published in 2019. “There is something about physically touching the movies, about flipping it over and reading the back,” said a customer in the same article. Nostalgia was a big part of Family Video’s marketing and persona. And, for a time, I think it probably worked.
One problem with using nostalgia as part of your business model is that many customers only need that nostalgic itch scratched once or twice. I don’t know anything about the movie rental business, but I know a lot about retro video and arcade games. So many times, I’ve had friends stop by the house and through the course of conversation mention an old game they remember from their youth. I’ll show the game up on one of my retro systems, and they’ll have a crazy good time revisiting those old games and memories. But by the time they leave, they’re over it. They may have had a fun evening, but few of these people go home and figure out a way to keep playing those games at home. They had a nostalgic memory, and by playing the game they got it out of their system. Sadly, the same goes for the resurgence of retro arcades. A few rabid nostalgic fans (like myself) do our best to frequent these locations and help sustain these locations one quarter at a time, but for many people it’s a once-a-year (or less) event. I would love to revisit a brick and mortar movie rental location (one with VHS tapes would be amazing!), but I probably wouldn’t rent anything, and I probably wouldn’t go back.
The bigger problem with banking on nostalgia is that for those without a nostalgic connection, there is no draw. I actively rented movies throughout my high school years, slowing a bit when I entered college. Today, my kids are the same age I was back then. Neither one of them have ever been inside a movie rental store. They’ve never owned a DVD, and they don’t want to. They don’t even like watching movies that much. When my kids do watch videos it’s usually on YouTube and TikTok. When they do watch Netflix, it’s for watching (and re-watching) their favorite television shows. Dragging my kids into a movie rental store would be like your grandfather taking you to visit his shoe cobbler.
Of course there were other parts to Family Video’s business model. By buying their own property and owning their own buildings, the company was able to sublet space to other companies. Some of those relationships like the one with Marco’s Pizza seemed symbiotic in nature (“Take home a pizza and a movie!”), but others, like partnering with CBD oil distributors, reeked of desperation and seemed in direct contrast with that image of “family rental store” they had cultivated. By building in mostly rural communities, Family Video targeted clients perhaps without the internet bandwidth to stream movies. Personally, I’d had high speed internet for a decade when our Family Video opened in 2009, but granted, not everybody did.
Which takes us back to that blog post I wrote in 2009, back when I thought renting movies from Redbox kiosks and having DVD players in our cars was the future. Within a year or two of that post we took another road trip; on that one, everyone but the driver (and sometimes the driver) had their noses buried in their cellphones. The fights were no longer about what to watch — everyone was watching something different — it was now about whose turn it was to use the charging cable.
The greatest thing about those independently owned rental stores back in the 80s and 90s was that behind the required row Hollywood blockbusters were rows of videos you couldn’t find anywhere else. Just a few aisles behind half a dozen copies of Titanic sat beaten up copies of Chopping Mall and Master Ninja. There was no internet, and those movies had long fallen out of cable rotation (if they ever even made it there). The coolest thing about Kaleidescpe Video (the rental store next to my first apartment) or D.V.D. (Digital Video Depot) wasn’t their movie selection; it was the guys behind the counter who would recommend movies to us based on what I was renting. I sincerely doubt teenage kids were walking out of Family Video with copies of Faces of Death pr Troma films in tow.
In this 2019 article, a reporter from Detroit throws some shade toward Blockbuster when he mentions that Blockbuster is down to a single location, while Family Video is thriving with more than 700 locations. Today, in 2021, there are more Blockbuster locations than there are Family Video locations. And there’s still only one Blockbuster location. By the end of 2019, the number of Family Video stores had dropped from 700 to 600. In the fall of 2020, another 200 stores closed. In January of 2021, all the remaining locations closed.
Did I really wish for Family Video to fail? No, not really. Hopefully they made a lot of money during their 40+ years of business, gave a lot of people jobs, and turned a bunch of people on to a bunch of great movies. Now that I think about it, that doesn’t sound half bad. Maybe I should take a stab at it myself — and lucky for me, there are a couple of former movie rental buildings near me for sale.
It’s interesting that Family Video came to your ares so late in the game. We’ve had those stores around here since the mid 90’s. There was one just minutes from my first apartment and I was in there quite a bit back in the day. I’m really surprised they survived for so long for the exact same reasons you mentioned. I don’t exactly live in a rural area, but you have people like my Dad who hated all technology and refused to “learn” how to use his DVD player.