So I was on a walk to my town's downtown, and along the way I spotted this really low-key retail store with 1950s architecture with just 1 car parked in a parking lot that could only fit 3 cars. It had the world's smallest logo but I could barely read "video store" and I had to double take. Like it makes sense that some still exist in the world in the day of streaming and online rentals, but it was still kind of weird seeing a store dedicated solely to DVDs and Blu-Ray. Like, that's the kind of thing you see in the discount section at Walmart.
I did some digging and found their website, and it kind of makes sense that they're profitable. Their website apparently lists all their videos that are in stock, and almost none of them are good or well known movies. I'm sitting here scrolling through their catalogue and I can recognize maybe two movies out of a good hundred or so. In the "new releases" category the newest released blu-ray is a movie called "Cross of Iron," which was apparently a German WW2 drama from 1977, released on blu-ray in 2011. Yeah… pretty new. I definitely recognize some of the names of these movies. Roger Moore is in one, so is Christopher Lee. Neil Patrick Harris is in a christmas made-for-tv movie from 1998.
I'm just so bewildered that not only does a DVD/blu-ray only store exist, it only sells niche poorly-reviewed movies. There's no way a company like that is staying in business unless it's a front or unless these blu-rays cost way less than I think they do.
As a commercial business, hard to see the profit. The old dvd version of netflix worked in a large part due to it getting rid of the per-item model with the late fees of the older video stores. Now that the ‘pay for acess to a library’ model has become the norm maybe that’s just what they have here.
Though I don’t have it out any more, there still is some odd satisfaction of physically looking through a shelf of actual media rather than searching on a screen. In some ways I’d compare it to people who use mechanical keyboards despite the noise and excess costs, it feels like your doing something rather than just viewing it