I moved to where I now live in 09, and back then the shopping center where my local grocery store is had a Blockbuster (it has since become a dental office) and everytime I buy groceries I think about the good times I had at Blockbuster growing up. At least once a month we would order pizza and go to Blockbuster to rent some movies. I remember when that Blockbuster went out of business in 2010 and they had a hug going out of business sale with PS2 games as low as 3 dollars and I bought a ton of games that day (wish I had never given up my PS2). I also remember when I was little it seemed every store or gas station had a corner for video rental.
As a kid working at a video rental place always seemed like such a cool job and as a teen, I was busy with sports and when I did work it was at restaurants or temp agencies. I'm curious if anyone had ever worked there or any other video rental?
Also, you think that model could ever work again with some being more interested in physical media? I could possibly see a rental place but they would have to have some other stuff, but I do know some VHS collectors so you could make it work.
I worked at a video game rental store for 4 years. It wasn't blockbuster.
It was actually pretty okay. We didn't have a lot of annoying customers, plenty of repeat customers who would come in to rent a bunch of movies or games, and have fun on the weekend.
I worked right around the transition from VHS to DVD. Although we still kept a sizeable VHS amount. A lot of people at the time felt that DVDs would scratch too easy, sort of like CDs. Where a tape could just be physically taped if it got garbled or snapped, and you'd skip only a second or two of video, whereas a scratch could ruin a whole movie on a DVD.
The biggest part of the job was just the maintaining. Things need to look nice. The movies and games need to be displayed properly. Popular rentals need a few more copies so that it's not out all the time. You had to make sure inventory was there to rent, or made to show that it was already rented with a tag.
Do I think that model could work again? On a small scale yes. But as a big country wide chain like blockbuster? No. That store right now would need a second or third thing to remain afloat. There would be a wall of funko pop, anime and figurines, posters, that sort of thing. And while that kind of stuff was at blockbuster, it was a tiny little spot, not a third of the store like it would need to be now. Look inside a game stop/eb games if there are any near you and you'll see what a rental store would look like. Mostly games or movies, but a lot of extra stuff.
There is a small chance people might get fed up with chasing streaming services to watch what they want to watch, and they'll take going to a store to get it again rather than just continue chasing them on a service, or break down and physically buy whatever tv show or movie they want one at a time and get it delivered like from ebay or amazon. But that's gotta be a small fraction of people.
I think some of the nostalgia of it all had to do with the state of the world. Being a kid in a pre 911 world, you were free to spend money on a lot of stuff. You felt like you could go out and have some fun, maybe it meant being at blockbuster for awhile and experiencing some of the movies or games you liked.
And while I'm waxing nostalgically, Blockbuster is the reason why NES and SNES manuals are rare. Nintendo sued blockbuster saying that the manuals were intellectual rights of theirs, and had to be destroyed, not distributed with the games. So a lot of mom and pop places just stopped handing theirs out with the games so they wouldn't get sued too.
So that's why some of the harder to find games are less valuable than their instruction manuals, and why Hagane in particular has a 99.9% chance to not have an original one at all. It was a blockbuster exclusive game.
Sounds like a lot of fun. I tend to agree with you about trying to do that now. It would have to be like the third or fourth item available