Be Kind, Rewind, Repeat: My Week as the Only Employee of a Video Store That Refuses to Die

The store opens at noon, which is the first clue that nobody here is pretending this is 1998. It's called Vidiots West — not its real name, because the owner asked me to change it, then spent ten minutes explaining why. "You write it down," he said, "and some corporate blog calls us a novelty act." He's not wrong to worry. There are maybe a few hundred of these places left in the entire country. Netflix didn't just win; it won so thoroughly that Blockbuster's last store in Bend, Oregon survives mostly as a photo op.

And yet, at 11:58 on a Monday, there's already a guy waiting by the door. He's holding cash. He has been coming here every Monday for eleven years.

The Interview Was Four Minutes Long

Dale — I'll use his real name, because he eventually gave up arguing — opened the store in 1994, when a video rental on every corner was as normal as a gas station. He survived the Blockbuster era by being smaller, weirder, and meaner about late fees in a way people somehow found charming. He survived streaming by doing absolutely nothing differently.

"People ask how I compete with Netflix," he told me, sliding a stack of returned DVDs into a cleaning machine. "I don't. That's like a trout competing with a jet ski. I'm not trying to go where they're going."

He hired me for a week because his usual part-timer had a baby, and because I'd written him a letter asking. He paid me in store credit and a very firm handshake. The job, as he described it: "Answer the phone. Wind the tapes. Don't let anyone talk your ear off for more than an hour."

That last rule lasted one afternoon.

The Regulars

By Tuesday I had the rhythm down. There's a morning crowd that skews retired — they come for the war movies and the British mysteries, and they treat the store like a coffee shop without the coffee. There's an after-school crowd of teenagers who, I cannot stress this enough, actually rent things. On purpose. With allowance money.

One kid, maybe fourteen, told me he comes because "the app just gives me stuff. This place makes me pick." He held up a battered VHS copy of The Iron Giant like it was a trophy. "I found this. Me."

Then there's Marlene, seventy-eight, who comes in Thursdays to argue with Dale about whether they've stocked anything good lately. They have not, in her view, since roughly 2003. She rents two films anyway, every week, and pays her late fees in exact change from a coin purse she keeps in a shopping bag. When I asked why she keeps coming if the inventory disappoints her, she looked at me like I'd asked why she keeps visiting her sister.

"That's not the point, honey."

The Browsing Problem

Here's what I learned by Wednesday, shelving returns: the act of walking the aisles is the product. Not the movies — the walking.

A man came in wanting "something like Heat, but not Heat." In ten minutes, Dale had him set up with a Korean heist movie, a documentary about counterfeiters, and — inexplicably — a nature film about octopuses. The man took all three. This is a recommendation engine with a pulse. It knows your last three rentals, your ex-wife's taste, and that your son is visiting this weekend. No algorithm has that context. No algorithm will ever have that context.

There's friction here, too, and that's the other point. You have to drive over. You have to be open during the hours it's open. You have to talk to someone, or at least nod at them. Every one of those small obstacles is also a small commitment. When you get home with the movie, you watch it — because you chose it, drove for it, paid four dollars for it. Compare that to the streaming shuffle: forty minutes of scrolling, something half-watched while checking your phone, the quiet sense that entertainment has become a room you pace around in.

Thursday, the Slow Day

Not everything is a love letter. Thursday, we rented six movies total. Dale spent most of it repairing a case with packing tape and telling me about the year 2005, when he nearly closed. "I had a buyer lined up," he said. "A vape shop wanted the space." He pauses like the man who told him still owes him an apology. "Then a woman came in crying because her husband had died and she wanted a movie they'd seen on their first date. And I thought, well. I can't close. Look at this place."

He didn't say what the movie was. It didn't feel like my business.

Saturday Night, Closing Time

My last shift was a Saturday, the busiest of the week. We rented out nearly everything in the new releases wall — yes, there's still a new releases wall, laminated and everything. A couple in their thirties spent twenty minutes debating between two films, asked me to settle it, ignored my answer, and rented both. A dad and his daughter did a lap of the children's section twice, her narrating every box cover like a museum docent.

At close, I asked Dale the question he clearly dreads: what happens when he's done? When he retires, or doesn't?

He locked the till and thought about it for a while.

"Somebody'll want the space," he said. "Somebody always does." Then, quieter: "But people still need somewhere to go where a person knows what they like. That doesn't stop being true just because it got inconvenient."

I walked out with two rentals I hadn't planned on, a late fee I paid in cash, and the strange feeling of having been somewhere that exists entirely because a few hundred people decided it should. The trout isn't competing with the jet ski. The trout is just still in the stream. Turns out, if you stick around long enough, that's its own kind of winning.