Do you miss video rental stores?

I do. But I guess it's mainly for the nostalgia factor. It was also good "knowing" what you were actually renting. I'd spend less time at the rental store than I do trying to find something to watch on Netflix. :P

Yes absolutely I miss walking in them smelling the popcorn walking down the aisles seeing all the movies on the shelf. I still have some vivid memories of renting certain movies from BlockBuster. I could be wrong but the last movie I ever rented there was Inception I remember watching it around Christmas of 2010 with my family.

@warmblur: Totally agree with the popcorn smell too.

No. I prefer Netflix DVD, the classic Netlix. Don't have to get out of my apartment and they have a far bigger selection to choose from than one store can manage.

i can google movies now and know way more

Someone made a 3D visualization of Blockbuster video looks awesome.

http://www.gamoola.com/portfolio/blockbuster-store/

Someone needs to make that a VR game. :)

Yes and no. I have a lot of fond memories of browsing video rental stores. Blockbuster was never my favorite, as at their peak they were "the man" in terms of video rental stores. They were very corporate, their selection was all about mass market appeal and the more indie/foreign stuff was harder to find there. At the peak of their power, movie studios even created R rated cuts of NC-17 films like Requiem for a Dream so they would be carried at Blockbuster (who had a policy of no NC-17, regardless of whether the NC-17 rating was for sex or not). I used to browse Blockbuster to get movie ideas, and then go get the film somewhere else.

Hollywood video was a bit better, and we had a local one called VideoStation that was amazing. They had about 43,000 titles in their inventory. Back before anime was easy to get, this was the place that you went to get pretty much anything. Obviously the shift to online and digital eventually killed them but they hung in there until 2017 which is impressive unto itself.

https://www.denverpost.com/2017/03/01/boulder-video-station-closing/

Don't get me wrong, I like it was better now. Anyone can get anything they want almost instantly, but I still will occasionally see an old horror film pop up in a feed/YT video and think to myself "Ah, I remember that one. I've never see it but I remember the VHS box from the video store".

-Byshop

The nearby rental store when I was growing up is now a vape and pawn shop. True story.

To some length they were good days going to a video rental store in my youth and it brings up lots of nostalgia; however, at the same time I'm not losing sleep over rental stores going obsolete. They were nostalgic for its time but we have superior ways now to stream movies.

Nope. Streaming, digital distribution and online retail are far more convenient, and therefore far superior. Emotional attachment is nostalgia, which I consider to be a form of delusional utopianism, a human flaw.

Progress should be evaluated for their merits, and embraced when they have proven those merits.

We still have several Family Video's where I'm at. It is kind of nice going once in a while because you do see and rent some stuff you might not ever hear of otherwise. That said I still very rarely go there and it astounds me they're still open. It won't be a huge loss to me personally if they ever go out of business.

I have some great memories renting movies and games from rental places, we had a few smaller mom and pop types and a bigger franchise (West coast video) close to us growing up. My parents would take us to one every Friday night and let us rent 2 movies and a game. It helped my love of movies and gaming that's for sure.

My brother ran into the one mom and pop store owner and he still has all his nes, snes and genesis games and might be willing to sell them soon.

Still got a Family Video store near me. They team up with the Marco pizza joint right next door. Buy a large pizza and you can get a free rental movie delivered with it. You need to return the movie yourself, but it's still a novel idea.

I thought it would be fun to take the kids to the video store so they could look around and they were like.....yeah....what's so special about this place? We can just stream movies from home.

The novelty of the place didn't take with them and, let's be honest, it's no Blockbuster store that I used to frequent several times a week before Netflix came along. I loved the used movie deals they had - 3 for $20 or sometimes 4 for $20. While the idea of visiting them is still an awesome thought in my head, the nostalgia of it is what makes it fun. Remembering what it was like when I was little, renting VHS movies or Sega Genesis or SNES games. I was stoked when Jurassic Park came out on VHS. Seeing it 4 times in the theater wasn't enough, I had to rent it a handful of times as well and watch it over and over again.

Today, the video store is kind of unnecessary. The Family Video store near me feels run down and dirty, I can't really justify myself to drive the 5 minutes to the store to walk around in a "Walmart" feeling store when Blockbuster felt cleaner/friendlier, like "Target". If I really need to rent a movie, I can generally drive to one of the 6 Redbox locations that are closer to me than Family Video.

My thoughts exactly I would love it!!!

Na, thanks to amazon you don't really need to converse with anyone anymore.

I think it's sad how we've been transitioning into an all digital and streaming media distribution. Soon we'll be asking the same question about game stores. People are prioritizing convenience over everything else, like we're becoming so lazy that we don't even want to leave our homes for entertainment purposes. I get that there's certain advantages for digital distribution, especially for gaming, but simply navigating a menu screen to pick what movie you want and streaming it just isn't satisfying or fun. Going to rental stores was a fun pass time on the weekend or whenever you were bored. You may say it's just nostalgia, but the reason it's nostalgia is because it was a good, fun, and enjoyable experience we had as kids. It's an experience that todays generation of children will never be able to have.

Libraries are similar to rental stores.

Hell no.

I do, but if there still around I wouldn't use them due to Netflix/steam.

Like several other highstreet stores that have died over the years there just inst much demand for them

i enjoyed going to them at the time but you can't beat the convenience of streaming..

for example, when my wife and i started getting into 24 years ago we'd rent a season or two on dvd from blockbuster but they didn't always have the seasons / parts we needed in stock. on a few occasions we had to drive to multiple locations to try to find the dvds we needed.

streaming is an order of magnitude better

It was kind of nice being able to go out somewhere, with a couple of friends to go browse movies together. But video stores kind of killed themselves when they were charging $6 for a movie rental for 5 days. It wasn't until the streamers started killing the physical video stores where they started lowering their prices for like $3 for 3 days. I didn't need a rental for 5 days, 3 was usually good. The rentals got expensive, especially if you wanted to do a movie night/weekend with 2-3 movies was now $20.

But now streaming is kind of a bummer because content is locked behind certain providers, and old movies just are not available as they used to be. The popular classics movies are easily available (Godfather, Casablanca, hitchcock films, etc), but the lesser known classics are not as easily available.

I remember going to video rental stores and just looking at the different box cover designs and movie descriptions. I miss doing those kinds of stuff.

God no. Stock issues, late fees/times, price, line ups, traffic, parking, unattended children, cleanliness, rude employees - POOF!, all a thing of the past. I don’t have nostalgia for it at all. It was a pain in the ass.

Last I heard, Family Video was rocking it financially (nationally speaking). I'm not sure if they've experienced a downtrend since then, though.

@Sevenizz: My thoughts as well. Don't need that b.s. aggravation any more. Love digital ❤️?

I don't miss late fees and stuff not working because people can't treat discs or tapes with the respect they deserve.

There is a little rental section at gas station nearby. But I don't really miss the heyday of such places.