Good Riddance Hollywood Video!

Many moons ago, my neighborhood had a small video store that was independently owned and operated in an old decrepit mall called Gateway, which I believe was actually one of the oldest in the United States. This store was called Pot O' Gold Video and I spent a good portion of my youth renting from this unique little spot that was full of old VHS titles, video games and other assorted goodies. During the pog boom of the mid-1990's it was even the destination for serious collectors to purchase slammers!

Despite the store's awesomeness and close-knit relationship to the community, it had outlived its usefulness at the mall and for whatever reason decided it needed a change of scenery up the road and ultimately folded shortly after. Part of the reason for the store's exodus from the mall may have had something to do with the mall being torn down and replaced by a bigger, kinder, gentler outdoor shopping plaza complete with an abundance of big name retailers, and most importantly, a shiny new video store that carried DVDs! A change in format a lot of independently-owned stores had trouble transitioning over to.

This new video store, complete with expensive snack racks, was called Hollywood Video. A corporate entity bigger and better than any mom and pop store in every way, shape and form. The community loved it. Sure, it cost more to rent from, and the minimum wage employees changed with the wind, but it was bright and shiny with pictures of celebrities on the ceiling.

And so it sat, for nearly a decade. Until technology caught up, the economy tanked, and consumers strapped for cash showed the same amount of mercy on their beloved store that the store itself showed on the little guys they bulldozed out of business years before, NONE.

So now, thanks to their competitors like Blockbuster with their fancy little DVD vending machines, and NetFlix with their order-as-you-go-with-no-late-fee policies, a place like Hollywood Video has become an inconvenient dinosaur. And good riddance. Their expensive per-night rentals, their idiotic late fees, the overpriced used DVDs they plop up for sale, and the crappy selection of mainly name brand titles deserve to be put into the ground. If I cared about movies as much as I claim to, I should have grown the balls to throw a molotov cocktail at this dump years ago. But I had a sneaky suspicion that economic Darwinism and the greed of consumers would eventually kill the mighty beast.

Anyways, glad to see this place dead in the dirt and I hope their investors lost a ton of money on this dump.