It’s the early noughties. Very early because I recognised the perfect storm on the shelves as a new release DVD. Yes we had started to move to disk and my PS2 could manage it. Perfect storm was said to have so much detail. A giant leap from VHS. Technically I guess it was. Today we would call it Standard Definition. We had moved from RF cables to Scart Leads. Barry had started to move on. I recall a centre shelving area where the new DVD’s were.
Barry’s had faced an uphill battle in our household and I’m sure among many others. He had put his prices up a bit and we all had so many channels now. Sky digital had launched in 1998. Most of us now had the upgrade. With it Sky Box Office could now offer PPV movies on par with the DVD and video releases and the wait for TV was shorter than it had ever been (at that point).
I walked up to the shelves as usual but there’s no on loan stickers. Not on the games either.
Then in a bittersweet moment came the news.
“We’re closing down, everyone has Sky. The tapes are all a pound each if you want any”
Within the week the shop was gone. I had aspirations of having a VHS wall at Uni because I thought that would be cool..
Spoiler alert it ..wasn’t. We had all moved to disk so fast.
Another of those occasions where my feelings at the time don’t match my feelings now.
I now know I was part of the problem. Despite having no purchasing power as such at the time I had no complaints when we moved onto Sky. Quite the opposite. My friends all had Sky.
An early example of us moving away from the physical experience of going to a shop and choosing a film. Choosing convenient over experience.
Now as someone who has been self employed and in an industry where AI replacement and modernisation is on the cards I appreciate how hard it must have been to keep this small rental shop going well into the PPV era.
I rented a new release last night from sky. The price £9.99, The video shops £4 adjusted for inflation comes to about the same. Convenience won but the price never really changed
An era ended and no one even blinked.
The shop is still unused on the high street. Perhaps itching for its own legacy sequel.