Friday, April 9, 2010

Sunrise, sunset

The other day I saw that a local video store was going out of business. If this had been some corporate chain store I would not have thought twice about it but instead it was a small mom 'n pop store.

The loss of this store struck me, but why? It certainly wasn't the advertising. This was one of those places that didn't bother with fancy marketing and simply had a sign saying VIDEO plastered over the door. Instead the ramshackle approach to distributing movies a small store like that had was, in its own way, charming. There's something to be said for a store that not only stocked VHS tapes well into the 21st century but would put bootleg VHS tapes out on the shelves for rent without a hint of shame.

I also always admired independent stores such as that one for their glut of pornography. Because they couldn't compete with the big stores directly locally owned video places often went for other, more specialized approaches. Sometimes this meant trying to build up a quality collection of movies for all the cinephiles in town to enjoy. The lazier approach was to stock porn. My heart breaks to think that a store can strive to bring a plethora of the pornographic arts to a community and still somehow go out of business... wait, what the heck am I talking about?