Local video rental stores staying in the picture
David Sali,OBJ
Published on August 24, 2015
When movie buff Peter Senecal is asked if he ever feels a bit like Gary Cooper in High Noon, he chuckles.
Like Mr. Cooper’s iconic character in the classic 1952 western, sheriff Will Kane, Mr. Senecal is a virtual army of one facing long odds. He is the owner of one of the few remaining movie rental stores in town, Glebe Video International, and the long-term prospects for his industry would seem about as bleak as High Noon’s New Mexico desert backdrop.
The rise of Netflix and other online movie streaming services has killed off big-box competitors such as Blockbuster, not to mention most of the mom-and-pop rental outlets as well.
When Mr. Senecal bought Glebe Video from founder Robert Lecuyer two years ago, it was one of five such stores left in the downtown core. Following the demise of Elgin Video earlier this summer, it is now the last one standing.
But Mr. Senecal believes its days are far from numbered. While business isn’t exactly booming, it’s hardly dying, either. In fact, he says, he continues to sign up new members every day, including more than a dozen on a recent weekend.
“We have people who are in there daily, we have people who are in there a few times a week renting more than a few films,” he says during a conversation over a beer at a Preston Street pub. “This I hear more than a few times a week: we have, in their words, a precious resource.”
The old-fashioned video store still has several advantages over its higher-tech rivals, he argues.
For one thing, he says, Glebe Video gets new releases faster than most streaming services. And he claims Netflix can’t touch his store’s broad selection of foreign and classic films (he’s not sure exactly how many titles he owns, but says it’s somewhere around 18,000).
A lot of customers also rely on his staff’s encyclopedic knowledge of film to help them make their viewing choices, he adds.
In fact, so important are longtime employees Cal Cheney and Paul Green to the store’s success, he says he refused to buy the business until he was assured they would stay on. Newcomer Patrick Nixon-Irwin rounds out the staff.
“Many of our members, as they come through the door, they ask us for suggestions,” says Mr. Senecal, a former Grade 7 and 8 English teacher. “They want to be certain if they have two hours on a Friday or Saturday night, that they’re going to enjoy those two hours and get the most out of it. They might name a particular European director … or it might be more general in terms of new releases. What I hear from them time and again is, ‘You’ve never let us down yet.’”
And there are the less obvious attractions of renting movies the old-school way. He says people are abandoning streaming services and coming back to his store because they “miss the tactile experience of having that display case in their hand” and reading about the movie before renting it.
“It’s actually one of the reasons I have hope for the future of this business. I suspect the possibility of a revival of film rentals and DVD rentals in the future, somewhat analogous to the revival of vinyl (records).”
That experience of thumbing through movie titles and chatting about film remains alive and well at the small Bank Street shop. The DVDs, Blu-ray Discs and VHS tapes (yes, he keeps thousands of cassettes, and he says people still rent them all the time) are sorted in a range of categories, from new releases to country of origin and director.
Every genre under the sun is represented, from dramas to film noir. A treasure trove of classics from Mr. Senecal’s favourite era – the 1930s to the ’50s – includes timeless works such as Howard Hawks’s 1938 screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby and Fritz Lang’s chilling 1931 crime masterpiece, M.
In short, it’s nirvana to a cinephile. But Mr. Senecal says it’s something even more important than that.
“It’s kind of a community meeting place,” he explains. “When people come in, many of them want to kind of run the gamut from just joking around to talking about the weather to talking politics to discussing film to discussing recent books. It’s really charming how sometimes families will meet in there … and will spend an hour there discussing with each other before they decide on a film.”
In many ways, it’s a throwback to a different era, and customers say they wouldn’t want it any other way.
“We really like coming here because it’s a local business,” says Laura Bergen, who rents movies at Glebe Video a couple of times a month, often with her 14- and 11-year-old boys. “They’re really knowledgeable about their material. They’ve got a good selection, and we’ve been coming here for a long time. They’re a fantastic resource.”
A few kilometres away in Ottawa south, loyal customer support has also spared Movies ’n Stuff, another locally owned business, from suffering Blockbuster’s fate.
“We hold our own – always have,” says store manager Peter Thompson, whose parents Barry and Samira opened the family’s first video store in the early ’80s.
While the likes of Netflix and online downloading of movies have cut into rentals, he says there is still a core of film fans who prefer to browse the store’s 8,000 or so titles the way they used to.
“We still maintain a pretty steady business at all times,” Mr. Thompson says. “It definitely makes you feel like you’re contributing something to the community, which is good.”
Whether that loyalty will help the few remaining neighbourhood shops survive in a marketplace that brought much larger competitors to their knees remains to be seen. But one thing seems certain: like the hero of High Noon, they won’t go down without a fight.
“I can only tell you that we’re in the black now and there are hopeful signs with regards to the future,” Mr. Senecal says. “I can foresee myself doing this, as long as we can keep the business healthy, for the next 10 years.”
http://www.obj.ca/Local/2015-08-24/artic...o-rental-stores-staying-in-the-picture/1
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