The Video Store Era: Friday Nights at the Rental Counter

Friday night, somewhere around 1990. The car pulls into a strip-mall parking lot and the whole family piles out. Inside, it's bright and smells a little like popcorn. There's a wall of new releases, and every copy of the one you wanted is already gone. So you wander. Comedy. Action. Horror, which you're not allowed to rent yet. Somebody finds a movie nobody's heard of with a great cover. Twenty minutes later, you're at the counter with two tapes, a box of candy and a promise to have them back by Sunday.

If that sounds familiar, you were part of one of the great American weekend rituals. Here's a look back at the video store, how it grew so fast and where it went.

How the video store boom started

Once VCRs showed up in living rooms, people needed something to put in them, and renting was the easy answer.

The numbers grew fast. According to Mental Floss, the number of video rental stores in the U.S. went from about 7,000 in 1983 to 19,000 in 1986. Many were small, independent shops: a corner store with a few shelves, a mom-and-pop place with a hand-lettered sign, a rack of tapes at the grocery store.

VCRs kept spreading too. MeTV, citing the Washington Post, reports that about 66% of households had a VCR in 1990, and VCR ownership peaked at about 90% of households in 2005.

The rise of Blockbuster

In 1985, a Dallas entrepreneur named David Cook opened the first Blockbuster. Mental Floss notes that Cook had a background writing inventory software for oil companies, and he brought that thinking to video rental.

Blockbuster did a few things differently from a lot of smaller stores:

• The tapes were on the shelves. In many older stores, the shelves held empty boxes and you traded them at the counter for the actual tape. Blockbuster put the tapes right out on the floor.
• The stores were big. Mental Floss describes stores of around 6,000 square feet with thousands of titles.
• It looked the same everywhere. The blue and yellow colors were easy to spot from the road.

The chain grew to more than 400 locations by 1988. At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster had more than 9,000 stores across the United States, according to the Oregon Encyclopedia.

Be kind, rewind

Ask anyone who rented tapes and they'll remember the sticker. Rental tapes came back wherever the last viewer stopped, which was usually the end credits. Stores put reminders on the cassettes asking customers to rewind before returning them.

The Texas Standard profiled a collector who saves the stickers video stores put on their tapes, including plenty of rewind reminders. As he points out, those stickers are sometimes the only trace left of a store that's gone.

Rewinding wasn't just good manners. MeTV notes that renters could be charged a fee for returning a tape that hadn't been rewound. That's how a lot of households ended up with a little plastic rewinder sitting next to the VCR.

Late fees, the part nobody misses

Everyone has a late fee story. You forgot the tape under the couch, or it rode around in the back seat for a week.

Those fees added up for the stores. Mental Floss reports that in 2000, Blockbuster brought in about $800 million from late fees, around 16% of its total revenue. In 2004, it announced an end to late fees, though the details drew complaints of their own.

What it was like to be there

The video store was more than a place to pick up a movie. The Texas Standard describes a few of the things people remember:

• Browsing the aisles to find the perfect title, sometimes for longer than the movie itself.
• The candy by the register, the posters and the cardboard displays for the newest releases.
• The people behind the counter, who often knew movies well and could point you toward something good.

For kids, the video store was where you negotiated. One movie for you, one for your sister. Maybe a video game if you'd been good, since by the mid-1990s game rentals were a real part of the business.

How the era ended

The decline came from several directions at once. The Oregon Encyclopedia points to video streaming, DVR technology, and DVD services like Netflix by mail and Redbox kiosks. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2011 and was bought by DISH Network that year. The last company-owned stores closed about two years later.

Mental Floss reports that the last official Blockbuster closed in November 2013. The last movie rented there was This Is the End. And yes, the customer still had to return it.

The last Blockbuster on Earth

One store held on. In Bend, Oregon, a local owner had licensed the Blockbuster name back in 2000. By early 2018, only three Blockbusters remained in the country: two in Alaska and the one in Bend. When the Alaska stores closed that summer, Bend became the last Blockbuster in the United States, according to the Oregon Encyclopedia.

It turned into a tourist stop, with visitors posing for photos out front. The store's manager told the Oregon Encyclopedia that regulars still came in weekly, valuing the personal interaction a video store offers.

The tapes that never went back

Here's the part I think about. The rental tapes went back to the store. The tapes that stayed in the house were the ones families made themselves. Christmas mornings, birthday parties and school plays, recorded on the same VCR that played those Friday night rentals. Some of those home tapes even have a few minutes of a TV movie or a commercial break at the end, where somebody recorded over the rest.

Those are the tapes still sitting in closets and basements today. They don't last forever. If you're curious how long they hold up, I wrote about it in How Long Do VHS Tapes Really Last? And if you've found a stack of unlabeled tapes and aren't sure what's on them, How Many Hours Fit on a VHS Tape? explains why a single tape can hold more than you'd expect.

When you're ready to watch them again, I turn VHS tapes into digital files you can play on your TV, phone or computer, and the original tapes always come back to you. No late fees, either.