The allure of a video store experience

Your kids might never have heard of Blockbuster.

If they have, it’s likely they think of it in the same manner as a rotary telephone.

Maybe they even laugh when you insist that giant video stores were a way of life in another era — a place to see friends and, of course, pick out some movies for the weekend.

“What a goofy idea,” younger people would say. “It’s so much better to flip on the TV and find something on Netflix.”

Is it?

Kate Hagen, director of community for The Black List scriptwriters group, has written an article called: “In Search of the Last Great Video Store.”

Naturally, she follows the life and death of Blockbuster — although, yes, there is one franchise store still open in Bend, Ore.

At its peak in 2004, Blockbuster employed 84,300 people worldwide, including about 58,500 in the United States.

The company had 9,094 stores in total, with more than 4,500 of these in the U.S. Basically, Blockbuster shut up shop in 2013.

Those are all huge numbers, but the bigger surprise is that today, you can find about 3,700 movie titles on Netflix — if you take time for an exhaustive search — while in its heyday, the average Blockbuster had about 10,000 titles.

That’s a whopping difference.

Hagen laments another loss, which actually is a slice of American culture.

“There are far more movies being made now,” she said, “but about 85 percent of what’s on Netflix and Hulu is from the past 10 years, and 59 percent of what’s on Amazon.

“There is no Hitchcock available [except] ‘Psycho’ on streaming services. These are not obscure directors, these are not niche titles, these are popular and beloved films that an entire generation of film fans will not have access to.”

Hagen scrolled through a Netflix streaming list recently and found only three movies that were produced in the 1950s. Our classics are disappearing.

For many, many reasons. Hagen has advice for people of all ages.

“Go to a video store this summer,” she told an interviewer from Numlock News. “The world is on fire and one of the things we can do to counteract that is to go to one of these community spaces.

“Going to these stores, picking up a bunch of movies, hearing chatter, seeing what movies were on in the background felt so much more fulfilling than another night scrolling through Netflix or Amazon, not picking anything, and watching an episode of a TV show I’ve already seen.

“Go to a video store, talk to some friends, rent some movies. I think you’ll be way more invested in what you watch then.”

Believe it or not, you can still enjoy that experience — and you don’t have to go to Oregon.

There are three major video stores in Kootenai County, and they’re all purring right along.

Video Theater has stores on East Seltice Way in Post Falls and North Government Way in Coeur d’Alene.

You also can do your browsing at EntertainMart on East Best Avenue in Coeur d’Alene.

And of course, there are awesome video departments in local Super 1 Foods stores.

C’mon, forget the streaming monster for a couple of days and go hang out at a video store.

Talk about movies and everything else with friends and strangers.

Kate Hagen is right.

You’ll enjoy it.

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Steve Cameron is a columnist for The Press.

A Brand New Day appears Wednesday through Saturday each week. Steve’s sports column runs on Tuesday.

Email: scameron@cdapress.com.

Twitter:@BrandNewDayCDA