“If I’m the last DVD store, am I something?” wonders Melanie McInerney, the ebullient owner of Network Video in Mount Hawthorn, Western Australia.
The DVD rental game isn’t exactly thriving these days thanks to online streaming, but she reckons there might be spoils for the final brick-and-mortar store left standing in the state.
And her strategy is right out of the Steven Bradbury playbook: just don’t fall next.
There are four rental outlets left in Perth, one in Fremantle and another half-dozen in surrounding WA. It’s hard to keep track: even the Australian Video Rental Retailers Association closed in 2016.
If that doesn’t send a shiver of pained nostalgia down your spine, it means only that you are under 30. But the rest of us have memories of roaming endless aisles to select the perfect film for date night; of fingers running over VHS blister packs; of trying to impress the cineaste behind the counter with our film trivia. Those moments, Blade Runner’s Roy Batty would say, will soon be lost like tears in rain.
The Guardian spoke with five of these remaining stores, which have each become protectors of the film industry by holding on to depleting physical stock. All feared for what would become of their loyal customers – such as the elderly, the lonely, and those from not-so-affluent suburbs – and many share the same quixotic hope of being the last survivor in the wild(-ish) west.
But, like Highlander, there can be only one.
McInerney’s vision for outlasting the apocalypse is a retro diner offering rentable DVD players with her 47,000 titles; a final destination for film-lovers seeking human connection or, at the very least, titles not available on Netflix. (“You can’t even illegally download this film!” she says her customers sometimes remark.)
“We’ve still got an age of people who don’t have computers, don’t have email addresses, don’t have mobile phones,” she says. “We’re cutting them off way too soon.”
That’s why she’s ignoring the advice of her accountant husband and holding on to her lease, which is now month-to-month. She’s trying to go viral on Facebook (making her teenage son dress as Spider-Man; thanks mum). And she’s reluctantly lifting prices of new releases for the first time. By a dollar.
Perhaps most tragically, she also got rid of the “bad 70s/80s porn section”, because there were only three guys rotating that aisle anyway.
“We’ve got some very delightful French movies I can find them,” she offers instead.
Over at Video Ezy Spearwood, franchisee Mathew Rolfe cuts more of an Omega Man-like figure.
“Being the last isn’t as fun as I thought it might be,” he says. “It’s lonely.”
There used to be more than 50 Video Ezys across the state. Spearwood is their only remaining stronghold, conducting a decent – for the times – 1,000 rental transactions a week.
Another former giant, Blockbuster Video, has its sole bastion in Morley. In 2012, a tornado tore off the roof. If this were a Coen brothers’ flick, you’d call it divine interference. But it wasn’t, so we should probably call it global warming.
By early next year, owners John and Lyn Borszeky expect to have the last Blockbuster in Australia. They average 30 new members a week, admittedly from the only demographic still renting: the way-over-30 set. Nonetheless, they’ve felt the downturn too, with Lyn calling Netflix “the nail in the coffin.”
Most stores said 2015 was when they started to feel the squeeze, and it’s no coincidence Netflix arrived in Australia early that year. (Roy Morgan research says there are about 10 million Netflix subscribers in Australia today.)
However, the stores also listed other unexpected obstacles, including the introduction of extended trading hours at supermarkets (which cut into Friday night confection sales), to stretches of sunny weather, when rain better suits a movie night in.
At Civic Video Malaga, co-owner Cassy McCulloch reflected on the salad days, when her store offered imported American snacks. In 2015, they downsized to a former pole-dancing studio, and now sell WoodWick Candles alongside DVDs.
“The candles sell very well,” she concedes.
Few store-owners can confidently see a future past February. Rolfe is getting his teaching degree. The Borszekys’ lease and franchisee obligations end in April. All have pivoted to new revenue streams.
You could call it rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Or rearranging VHS copies of Titanic in a DVD store.
“Innovate or evaporate,” says Rolfe, whose family owns 13 unmanned Video Ezy kiosks (basically, DVD vending machines), and whose store is half-dedicated to Funko Pop! figurines.
Starland Video’s James McKibbin has been holding down the fort in Freo since 1992, selling another form of obsolete media – vinyl records – to make ends meet, as well as reducing staff, from 14 in 2008 to one this year: him.
And yet Starland – which boasts more French films than Netflix – is on the cusp of closing (or remaining open) too. His greatest fear is what’ll happen to certain classics when they become unavailable on streaming platforms.
“I was kind of hoping people would realise what they’re losing, but they haven’t yet,” he says. “The future of history is going to be written by idiots from Netflix.”
Melanie at Network Video at least has a contingency plan for her 47,000 titles, should her dream of an encased-in-amber rental store not materialise.
“If I can’t do what I want, the Government should take my stock on and set up a DVD library,” she suggests. “I would push for that before I sell off all these at a dollar each.”
Until then, she’ll cheerfully serve her clientele, who are perhaps already in museum mode. Sometimes, she says, the door will open hopefully – only to reveal an apologetic parent: “I’m just showing my kid what a video store looked like.”
