The Lost Civic Life of Movie Rental Stores

ffacundo_olano about 2 hours ago 54 commentsRead Article on thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

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steveBK123•about 1 hour ago

The end of interest-based 3rd places is one of the many things contributing to the compartmentalization / socioeconomic bubble of modern society.

People used to frequent in person things like specialty retailers, arcades, hobby clubs, religious groups, etc. When you meet real life people in person based on shared interests, you make connections across socioeconomic groups.

I just don't see nearly as much of this in todays society as 20+ years ago.

People with kids sometimes experience this via all the activities they take their kids to, but even there a lot of kids activities have become economically stratified. Instead of playing in the local $50/year rec baseball league, there's tiers of travel teams to meet any budget.

afavour•about 1 hour ago

> People with kids sometimes experience this via all the activities they take their kids to

This is something welcome I didn’t expect to come from parenthood. Like many others I had thought to myself “how do you even make new friends in your thirties?!” and then once I had kids… bam. New friendship groups.

For us the local park and playground are a great equalizer in terms of economic stratification. But when the weather turns bad it rears its head again as people head to $50 a go trampoline parks and the like.

Public school is another unifier, of course. I’m in NYC and our preschool was very obviously not a reflection of the neighborhood or city around us. But once my kids entered the city-funded Pre-K they started to meet a ton of kids from different backgrounds. It’s very different from the childhood I had but I’m very glad my kids have it.

pstuart•41 minutes ago

I kind of experienced that but the relationships were more superficial than I'd have liked. If the "shared interest" is happy kids together it doesn't directly translate to the adults shared interests. But then again, maybe it was just me being me.

brightball•32 minutes ago

Yea, agreed completely here.

I spent so many hours at our local mall with my friends growing up. It had an arcade, a movie theater, book store, game store, place to eat. Our parents could just drop us there for hours. Skating rinks and bowling alleys were also a solid option.

It's one of the things that make it worth the time investment to follow sports, even if you're typically not interested in it. Getting people together to watch the game, go to games, tailgate, etc is huge.

01284a7e•about 1 hour ago

Putnam's "Bowling Alone" (2000) is about this, and it is something that has been in decline since the 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone.

Cthulhu_•about 1 hour ago

The internet has largely replaced / substituted this, which has been a mixed thing. Like minded people in smaller niches have been able to find each other online for example, much more than IRL, and much more at long range / internationally. It's made the world a smaller place, at the cost of knowing people closer to home.

steveBK123•30 minutes ago

I think its made relationships more short term and superficial.

We may recognize a handle on a forum, but most of the time we don't know anything about the other person other than a narrow part of their interests.

kstenerud•3 minutes ago

> That same time-traveling video renter might find herself startled by the employee offering to recommend a movie, or by the knot of customers hanging out by the counter, shooting the breeze and discussing film.

What universe is this person from? I must have missed it...

bix6•about 1 hour ago

More housing and fewer spaces for gathering seems to be the trend. Any open space near me became condos or protected habitat space (can’t even walk in because people trash it). There are practically no town squares. Parks are all gated by HOAs. Even the beach is encroached on by housing which means there isn’t enough parking. Where are people supposed to gather now and just enjoy the day? I see libraries, coffee shops, bars, parks, and beaches as the main zones. Not bad but there aren’t enough (or enough time to enjoy them).

pseingatl•5 minutes ago

Libraries are daycare for the homeless. At one city's public library, one of the librarians was mopping up vomit and was heard to comment, "I didn't go to library school for this." Washrooms double as a place to shower, reading rooms a place to sleep.

panzagl•about 1 hour ago

Article should be titled 'The Lost Civic Life of Mom and Pop Stores'- no kid making $4.50 an hour is cultivating a third space atmosphere at Blockbuster, whereas any Mom and Pop place can do that, no matter what they sell.

steveBK123•about 1 hour ago

I was thinking about the loss of local shops a lot recently. There's definitely a confluence of factors at play, and it's not just price economics vs online & big box.

One thing I think is that theres just never enough time. Everyone is so over-scheduled. The white collar work day really has expanded vs what I remember my dad doing 30-40 years ago. There's more two income households than in the past. Parenting is far more active for both parents than it's ever been, and kids are being shuttled between events all weekend.

Most local shops are not open past 5pm or at best 6pm, and often closed Sunday. Who is off work by then to stop by?

Easier to click buy on amazon, and stop by the big box store after dinner Saturday open til 9pm for anything you need sooner.

bix6•about 1 hour ago

Was just talking with an older colleague about this. Work used to end Friday afternoon. The amount of emails I get (and send) over the weekend means there is truly never any off time.

liveoneggs•about 1 hour ago

reading and responding to those on the weekend is your choice

threetonesun•about 1 hour ago

I don't think that's really what we've lost. Blockbuster was a third space not because of its staff, but because it was a place you could say "meet me here" and hang out looking at movies with no (or very little) expected monetary output. Same as arcades in the mall, or cheap matinee movies. A better framing might be where would a teenager, today, say "meet me here" to their friends. I think you'll find there's many fewer around you today than there was 20 years ago.

pseingatl•1 minute ago

We are unfair to teenagers today; give them no place to go and then we feign surprise when they act up. According to Harper's, there's a 20% decline in kids playing baseball--their noses are in their iPads. You can't take children to the mall because malls are dying. Too many parks are places where bad things happen. I don't know what the solution is.

everforward•33 minutes ago

That doesn’t match my experience if your bar is really as low as “won’t throw you out for not buying anything”.

Obvious anecdata, but within an easy walk or bike radius of me (a couple miles) there are 3 public libraries, something like half a square mile of parks, a few public basketball courts, a few public tennis courts, a public baseball field, a bar over the baseball field that welcomes children (it’s one of the veterans things and has board games and what not), at least a dozen other businesses that don’t care if you buy anything, and your usual litany of Walmart kind of places that can’t be bothered to track who is buying and who isn’t.

I don’t have any issues finding places to hang out for free, and I use them, but they’re pretty sparsely used so it’s not as 3rd space as it used to be.

Eg I walk my dogs most mornings, and I rarely see more than 1 other person at the park or dog park at 7 or 8am.

It feels to me like 3rd spaces are disappearing because people don’t use them, rather than people don’t use them because they don’t exist.

pimlottc•22 minutes ago

Definitely, and renting a video itself was often a communal activity. You'd be hanging out with your friends or family and get the hankering to see a movie, so you all pile in the car together and see what they had. You'd argue back and forth about this movie or that movie, and you had to be flexible since your first pick might not be in stock. Strangers would give you suggestions or you'd see what was recommended by the staff. Lots of times you'd end up taking up something completely different than what you had planned.

triceratops•about 1 hour ago

Malls still exist. As do public libraries, community rec centers, gyms, and pools.

autoexec•30 minutes ago

Malls have been in decline for decades. Public pools barely exist anymore either. (https://www.poolmagazine.com/pool-news/america-is-losing-pub...). If you're in a wealthy city you probably still have a decent community center. Libraries are probably the most common space avilable, but they are also under constant attack by republicans. In wealthy cities you can find all kinds of services there. Smaller libraries will have some areas for reading and meeting.

threetonesun•43 minutes ago

Malls barely exist, at least compared to the way they did 20 years ago. I wasn't arguing all third spaces are gone, but even of the ones you did note I'd bet in most communities their funding/availability has decreased in that time period.

msisk6•about 1 hour ago

Whenever I see these sorts of stories I think about the civic life we're missing out on by not socially gathering with our neighbors to hunt down woolly mammoths with sharp sticks so we don't all collectively starve to death.

The way things are going maybe we'll get back to those wonderful days. ;)

bix6•about 1 hour ago

Sounds a lot more fun to me than sitting in front of a computer all day.

Cthulhu_•44 minutes ago

Availability and legality of wooly mammoths aside, what's stopping you? Pointy stick hunting sounds like a great weekend activity.

pimlottc•37 minutes ago

Places don't need to be curated to have value as civic spaces, although it certainly helps. Seniors hang out at the local McDonalds, car modding enthusiasts gather in strip mall parking lots, singles meet at the dog park...

Any place you have to physically go to provides a chance for social interaction. To debate your friends over what movie to pick, to comment on your neighbor's selections, to ask a clerk for a recommendation. Are these pretty slight? Sure, but life is made fuller by these minor brushes, and you never know which ones will unexpectedly bloom into something more.

liveoneggs•about 1 hour ago

half the article is nostalgia for the blockbuster job

rdiddly•24 minutes ago

I feel like this overstates the point a bit. The video store was always just a means to an end for me, the clerks always sullen, the process of agreeing on a movie always long & difficult. Maybe I missed out on the phenomenon he's talking about.

reaperducer•18 minutes ago

Maybe I missed out on the phenomenon he's talking about.

You did. It was a fairly widespread thing.

Although "The video store was always just a means to an end for me" indicates that you excluded yourself from this, rather than missing out on it.

comrade1234•about 2 hours ago

Just as long as you pretend to not notice your neighbor come out of the curtained room...

thebigspacefuck•32 minutes ago

It seems like the library has more movies than my local video store ever did at this point. But you can’t really talk there, and they don’t show movies on the screen. Maybe they should set up a separate section to give more of a 90s Blockbuster vibe with a dedicated movie librarian, that would be fun.

criddell•26 minutes ago

That's a really good idea!

The only problem is the library isn't open late and we usually showed up at Blockbuster at night (usually too late to get the movie we actually wanted).

brightball•38 minutes ago

I talk about this all the time. The experience of going with your friends to Blockbuster or similar, walking around, browsing everything, deciding what you were renting then grabbing pizza made for some pretty memorable weekends.

Just having everything listed on 50 different streaming platforms isn't the same experience. There are things we really lose with efficiency gains.

kkylin•about 1 hour ago

Where I live we still have a locally owned video rental store, though several years ago they put in a bar and now it's more a bar with a video section than a video store where you can get beer and watch movies. We do still rent when there's something we can't stream on one of the services we pay for; I much rather do that than give more $ to Amazon and the like.

mirmor23•about 1 hour ago

more romanticizing of the bygone era. late fees (due at midnight!), restocking fees, etc; some of these fees to the tune of a new dvd/vhs; good riddance.

julienchastang•about 1 hour ago

That's true and when the Netflix DVD service arrived, I thought it was really a situation where the consumer had finally won. (No late fees! Yay!). That said here in Boulder we had the Video Station which was a phenomenal place for browsing and discovery with a super knowledgeable staff especially for foreign and art house cinema. They survived for a surprisingly long time, but finally closed about ten years ago [0]. Not long ago, while cleaning out an old (manual transmission -- another artifact of a bygone era) car I found a Video Station receipt which I still have. Good times!

[0] https://www.dailycamera.com/2017/02/27/the-video-station-bou...

jjulius•43 minutes ago

Every era can be romanticized, and every era has its downsides. Just today, I could ramble on about the ever-increasing costs of streaming services as they reduce their available catalogs, ads forced upon users who have purchased the "ad-free" streaming bundle, UI/UX patterns designed to make cancelling difficult, things you've "purchased" no longer being available to you because the service no longer carries that studio's titles, paying up to $24.99 to "rent" a movie on Amazon for a mere 48 hours, the endless cycle of a service starting out "great" only to be enshittified, etc.

mirmor23•34 minutes ago

you are right, but that does not negate the friction that people felt at the time. my experience is with netflix, and i never found issues canceling, and as a matter of principle, i do not subscribe to services unless there are no alternatives (e.g. i pay for amz shipping, my own email domain). compare canceling a service sitting at home to driving to the video store, depositing dvd/vhs, and still having to check if they 'accidentally' overcharged. today it's so simple afaict.

ghaff•about 1 hour ago

A bit cruel and there were probably some indie stores that were different but I remember video rentals as a place where you went in, grabbed a movie, and left.

mirmor23•43 minutes ago

the big city that i lived in back then only had blockbuster or hollywood so my comment was about them; besides indie video rentals didn't have those kind of fees so, i was not talking about them. besides why cruel? market dynamics change and many businesses just don't make it..

jjulius•40 minutes ago

Indie rental shops in many areas did, in fact, have those kinds of fees.

cube00•42 minutes ago

This must be from a different era. In the 90s, people at our store used to stare at the shelves in silence. You certainly weren't striking up conversation with strangers there.

The screaming and explosions from the movie trailers playing full blast on a non-stop loop throughout the store over the PA didn't help.

redwood•39 minutes ago

Forever memorialized in Kevin Smith's Clerks

awfawf•42 minutes ago

this article is trash. the "how many angels dance on the head of a pin" of someone who had a TV for parents.

golemotron•about 1 hour ago

I wonder when we'll see articles on the lost civic life of social media? With increasing AI use, it is happening.

tripleee•about 1 hour ago

that already happened. The early days of Facebook as a user were much different than what they became later on.

reaperducer•13 minutes ago

The early days of Facebook as a user were much different than what they became later on.

Facebook jumped the shark when it eliminated customization and forced everyone to have the same personal page.

"Pieces of Flair" and a thousand other ways to express yourself were extinguished, along with any actual "social" aspects of Facebook.

blitzar•39 minutes ago

early instagram vs influencer instagram ... early twitter vs whatever that shit is now ... the list is long ...

you either disappear like tumblr or you stay up long enough to turn into a dumpster fire.

ghaff•36 minutes ago

I used to do a lot of chit-chat with folks I knew on Twitter during the work day. After Musk largely torched it and a lot of people just decided they didn't need that kind of social media any longer, that channel largely went away. I use Facebook some but not the same and LinkedIn even less so.