The Last Video Store (Or: How Something Wonderful Disappeared While I Was Busy Getting Old)

I found out my local Blockbuster was closing the way most people find out things are ending, too late to do anything about it.

I'd gone in to return something. Ordinary Tuesday errand, the kind you do on autopilot. Dropped the DVD on the counter, nodded at the guy in the blue shirt, turned to leave. And that's when I saw it. A sign out the front. Closing down. Everything must go.

DVDs stacked in bargain bins. Posters pulled from the walls and leaning against the shelves with handwritten price tags. The whole place in the slow, undignified process of becoming nothing.

I stood there for a moment longer than was probably normal for a grown man returning a copy of something forgettable. And then I left without buying anything, not a DVD, not a poster, not even a final bag of overpriced counter snacks.

I don't know why. I think I just didn't quite believe it was actually happening. I wish I bought something…

What It Was

It wasn't a big store. Nothing glamorous about it. Shelves of DVDs organised by genre, the newer releases along the front wall, the older stuff filed further back where the lighting was slightly worse and the carpet had seen better days. A counter up front stacked with chocolate bars and chips that cost twice what they should have because you were already there and it was Friday night and you'd committed to the bit.

And the screens. Little televisions mounted around the store playing whatever they felt like that day, trailers, sometimes a movie in progress, occasionally something completely random that nobody had chosen deliberately. You'd walk in and whatever was on those screens was just part of the atmosphere, like the lighting or the smell of the place.

The smell. I can't quite describe it. A specific combination of plastic cases and air conditioning and carpet that has absorbed several years of Friday nights. If someone could bottle it I would buy it immediately and I'm not sorry about that.

The staff wore blue shirts. I can picture the shirts more clearly than I can picture any individual face. Which probably says something about how often I was in there and how little I paid attention to the people keeping the place running, the way you don't really notice something until it's already going.

The Ritual

By 2017 I was married, had kids, had responsibilities. The version of me that wandered video stores as a teenager, spending forty minutes choosing something and then wandering back to reconsider, that version had been replaced by someone with a lot less time and a lot more opinion about what constituted a good Friday night.

But the ritual was still there, just compressed. You still walked the shelves. You still picked things up and read the back. You still had the conversation, what are you in the mood for, no not that, something funny, not that funny, something we haven't seen, and eventually landed on something that felt like a mutual compromise and turned out to be fine.

That physical act of choosing mattered more than I realised at the time. The weight of the case in your hand. The back-of-box summary that was always slightly misleading. The process of narrowing down, committing, carrying it to the counter. There was something about having made a decision, a real, physical, this-is-the-one decision, that made you actually watch the thing. Properly. Start to finish.

You'd paid for it. You'd chosen it. You were watching it.

The Thing Nobody Warned Us About

Netflix had already arrived by the time my Blockbuster closed. I was already streaming. Most of us were. The transition had happened so gradually and so conveniently that there was no single moment where you thought I am choosing this over that. You just sort of... started doing one thing and stopped doing another, and it didn't feel like a loss because the new thing was so frictionless, so immediate, so endless.

That's the thing about losing something to convenience. It doesn't hurt at the time. It only hurts later, when you're standing in front of a sign that says everything must go and you realise that something you loved has already been gone for a while and you didn't notice because you were busy and life had moved on and there's a kid at home now and dinner needs to happen.

Nobody holds a funeral for a video store. There's no ceremony for the end of a Saturday night ritual. It just stops one day and the building becomes something else; a gym, a real estate agent, a café that does good eggs benedict and has no idea what used to happen there.

The Poster I Never Bought

That's the part I keep coming back to.

They were selling off the posters. Pulled from the walls, price tagged, leaning in a row. I stood there and looked at them and thought I should get one of those and then I thought I'll come back and then I walked out and I never came back because a week later it was gone.

I don't even know which poster I would have picked. That's the ridiculous part. It was never about the poster. It was about having something to hold onto. Some proof that it existed, that the ritual was real, that those Friday nights happened.

But I left empty handed. Which is probably the most honest ending to the story, that's how most things we love actually go. Not with a goodbye, just with a Tuesday afternoon when you had somewhere else to be.

What I Miss

Not the late fees. Not the slightly passive aggressive reminder sticker on the case. Not the drive.

I miss the limitation. The beautiful, frustrating constraint of these are your options tonight and you have to pick one. I miss the physical commitment of a choice made in a real aisle with real shelves. I miss the guy at the counter in the blue shirt who never said much but was somehow part of the whole thing.

I miss the screens playing something nobody asked for.

I miss returning something the next day and that tiny domestic ritual of the loop being completed.

And I miss the fact that when the movie was over, it was over. There was no algorithm waiting with seventeen more suggestions. No autoplay. No gentle nudge toward something similar. Just the credits, and the end, and the quiet decision about what came next.

Blockbuster's last Australian store closed in 2019. My local one in Crows Nest went quieter than that. August 2017, a sign out the front, everything must go.

I never did buy that poster…