Family Video, one of the last remaining major chains of video rental stores in the U.S., announced today that it’s going to be shutting down its remaining 250 locations, and will be liquidating their merchandise.
As recently as 2018, they still had 700 locations, but they had shut down another 200 or so stores last fall, and indicate that the COVID pandemic, and a dearth of major Hollywood releases last year, were contributing factors in this final closure.
(Note: I found the story below while looking at the website for my old hometown newspaper; I’m finding similar stories from a lot of local TV stations and newspapers, but nothing yet on the parent company’s website.)
I’ve never been to one of their stores but I read about them a while back. As I remember, because they owned the real estate where the stores were located and sublet part of the space to others, they were still a viable business long after others like Blockbuster went out of business.
It looks like the parent company also owns Marco’s Pizza; the two Family Video locations that I’m aware of (one near my parents’ house in Wisconsin, the other near my in-laws in suburban Chicago) both shared their buildings with pizza places – though, as Marco’s isn’t in either market, they were other brands (one a Little Caesar’s, the other a local place).
Aha! A month ago, I was biking around southern Wisconsin, came over a hill, and there was… a video store! I was surprised enough that there were still any of those around that I sent a pic to my best friend.
It was all alone on a corner, with farmland across the street… in a building with a Marco’s Pizza. I remember thinking “Well, even if you had to live on a farm, at least you could walk over and get pizza and a movie.”
There’s a lot of movies that aren’t streaming and if people were still renting enough DVDs to keep the business afloat for all these years, presumably there’s a market for them. Depending on how big their inventory is, selling them for $5 each could bring in a nice little chunk of pocket change. But they’ll probably just sell the whole lot to someone that’ll resell them on ebay.
This is actually part of the reason I stopped renting DVDs, both from Netflix and the Family Video at the corner. Maybe my DVD player was just too fiddly, but probably half the DVDs I tried to play would fail at some point. Never had a problem with my personal stock, just with rentals.
They shut down all their stores in New York last September. (At least I think they did. Their outlet in Elmira stills shows itself online as being open. Perhaps it’s a local owner who decided to stay open as a de facto independent.)
The process was they announced a date and there were no more rentals after that. But they kept the stores open for a few weeks beyond that date to sell off the inventory. They won’t be able to sell everything but there are businesses that liquidate inventory from closing stores and at some point, Blockbuster will sell whatever’s left to them. You’ll end up seeing the leftover movies for sale in places like Dollar General or Ollie’s.
There was one near me but they closed a year or so ago and are now a Dollar General. In the year before they closed, they went from advertising for new staff for new locations to spending more time advertising CBD oil on their sign than movie rentals. I hadn’t been in there in years although, when I last went, I found everyone to be super friendly and helpful and they had free kids movie rentals. You just didn’t have a ton of reason to go in the era of online streaming content. One of those places where it was nice to know they were there and you were a little sad when you saw they closed but also realized you hadn’t stepped foot in the door in five years.
I could have written this very post, except instead of being a Dollar General, the location near me is still sitting empty. If I think about it, I can get a wistful feeling when I drive past the old Family Video location. Ours closed even before the pandemic started, but it had hung on for a long time, and even though I never stopped in anymore, it was somehow pleasant to know they were still open even after Blockbuster had long since gone belly up. I do have some fond memories of renting movies back in my younger days, and Family Video was a better than average place, with good customer service and a pretty good selection.
I had suspected that the closing of my local store meant that they were in trouble generally, and I’m sure that Covid was no help. I’m sorry to see them go.
Our local one had a going out of business sale about a month ago. I think it closed a couple of weeks ago. My dates could be wrong since I don’t go to that part of town much.
2021, and I think there is. A lot of streaming films are constantly being taken off, or they charge you $3+ to rent it. If you own a DVD you never have to worry about the streaming service taking the film of the platform or jacking up the prices.
I don’t think they’ll have much trouble unloading the DVDs. People who collect DVDs collect a lot of DVDs – I know a couple people where their basement has a whole wall of floor to ceiling shelves of DVDs. Buying up more stock at a couple bucks a piece is a dream to them.