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Post Blockbuster: Will Northern Michigan Video Stores Survive?

Tom Carr

 

   At the first of the month, the iconic video rental chain Blockbuster will close its remaining stores near Detroit, Grand Rapids, Lansing, and across the country.

Many in the media are calling this the end of an era as digital downloads are expected to make video stores a relic of the 1980s and '90s. But Blockbuster left northern Michigan years ago, and the chain that stuck around, Family Video, has no intention of dying off.

Those that have survived over the years are likely to survive into the future.

The busiest Family Video store in the Traverse City area is the one at Chums Corner. People come in to the store in waves on a snowy Friday afternoon. It's almost a festive atmosphere as customers decide which movies and videogames to spend the weekend with.

The Illinois-based company says its stores continue to boom in spite of, and partly because of , the fact that there are only one-third as many video stores in the U.S. as there were five years ago.

"Actually, October and November were some of the biggest months for the company, so it's a booming business for us," store manager Kristen Cano says.

And that's from a chain that's been around since VHS tapes ruled the roost. It’s endured big market shifts as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon began to compete online with the neighborhood video store.

What’s more, stores these days even compete with an exploding number of vending machines. Machines like Redbox take credit cards and renters return the discs by inserting them into a slot on the machine.

Mark Fisher, CEO of the Entertainment Merchants Association in Los Angeles, says the surviving old-fashioned video stores are good at adapting.

"In some cases they've reduced their store size or they've introduced new complementary product lines," he says. "Those that have survived over the years are likely to survive into the future."

And Family Video, the largest U.S. chain of the post Blockbuster era, figures it's not a bad idea to diversify. They've begun adding pizzerias to some of their stores across the country.

And luckily, there are still customers like Ben Kenney, who picks out a few Christmas movies for the weekend, and episodes of the TV series “Nip/Tuck” to watch with his wife. He has adequate equipment and internet speed to download movies, but still prefers to drive the six miles to the store and pull one off the shelves.

"I can walk around the store and it's all available and not having to flip through their menu or whatever they've got, to me it's just simple, it's easy, it's right there in front of me," Kenney says.