For many people of my generation, the golden age of record stores is best encapsulated by the 1995 film Empire Records, where an ensemble cast full of tomorrow’s stars (Liv Tyler! Renee Zellweger! Um, Anthony LaPaglia?) managed to lovingly re-create every music-obsessed stereotype that has ever existed – that is, back in the days when music was an active hobby, something that you had to leave the house and seek out, rather than something that was you could lie back and have flung at you every minute of every day (not that that’s a bad thing!). I never worked in a record store, but I did spend several years in another relic of the analog days – video rental stores. Since it’s going to be a while until someone chronicles their last days in an eloquently nostalgic way, I thought I’d try to do it myself.
My history with the medium of videotape starts back in summer, sometime in the mid-80s, during a routine visit to my parents’ small hometown in Ohio. My cousins’ family, while they lived on and maintained a farm outside of town, were often the first to have the latest of that decade’s revolutionary tech… They gave me my first post-Atari home video game experience with their Commodore 64. I heard my first CD at their house (the overture to Phantom of the Opera, which really impressed me), and they were the first I knew to have a VCR. It was a gray-and-red, top-loading Sherman tank of a machine, about the size of a small microwave. My brother and I would watch the pre-Special Edition of the exploding Episode IV Death Star over and over (because we *could*!), along with an inspired bit of Terry Gilliam animation from a Monty Python film, where a humming man nonchalantly applies shaving cream to not only his chin but his entire head, which he then (equally nonchalantly) cuts off with his straight razor. It was the most hilarious thing we knew of at the time, and we exercised the rewind, freeze-frame, and slow-motion with impunity. It was a watershed moment… us kids suddenly had some kind of interactivity with the movies that had been like a parade until that point. We had only been able to wait for and watch go by passively, and now we were in control.
Back in those days, like most families, we didn’t actually own a VCR like my cousins. Instead, every other weekend we’d withdraw $200 of cash from our savings account, trot down to the local video store and put down a deposit for a VCR for the weekend, along with about five movies. Once we got the forty pounds of machinery home and figured out how to rig it to our television, we had reached a state of breathless anticipation. And it wasn’t until the first movie logo came up on the screen, that it felt like the weekend had truly begun. I remember only a few of the movies we all watched that summer: Romancing the Stone, Return of the Jedi, and a filmed Broadway performance of Pippin are the few I can clearly recall. But my affair with movies was well underway.
The next step in my film education came in early 1988, shortly after my sixteenth birthday. You see, in those days you had to have a driver’s license to get a rental card from the local video store. Once you had one, they generally didn’t try to enforce the no-R-movies-unless-you’re-seventeen rule, so getting my hands on am-I-sure-I-can-handle-this? “hard-R” movies like Hellraiser and Robocop was suddenly something that was casually possible. I remember walking into my local store and looking at the long rows of seemingly every movie ever made, so stuffed to the gills that most of the movies were turned diagonally on the shelves so they all could fit.
The place where I started my exploring was called Video Watch, part of a chain of about seven stores spread throughout the Ann Arbor-Ypsilanti area, run by Iranian immigrant Ray Sumon and his brothers (I know this because I eventually was in their employ for a total of about three years). I started watching everything I could get my hands on; the genre hardly mattered. What also helped matters was that Amy and I started dating not long into 1988. Watching movies became our thing, and we did in almost ridiculous amounts. I wanted her to watch all my favorites, she wanted me to watch all her favorites, and there was a steady stream of new releases coming out all the time. It was two new worlds opening up at the same time, and it was thrilling.
I originally applied for a job at Video Watch because I was out of money. In early 1990, I was living at home while in my first year at the University of Michigan, and at the end of the previous summer I had quit my high school job shelving books at the local library in order to focus on my studies. I lived the poor-student life for a whole semester, learning such facts as a Wendy’s junior bacon cheeseburger and a water could get you a decent meal for $1.29. But being used to having spending money, and still wanting to go out with my friends and girlfriend made it impossible to resist the temptation to get another job. I applied for a job at the closest Video Watch to my house and started almost immediately.
Suddenly I was working every day in a place where I had staggered through as a slack-jawed spectator only two years before. The hours were late (VW made a point of staying open until midnight every night of the year), but the perks were great… two free rentals *every day*, with the caveat that you had to wait until the newest releases had been out for two weeks. In the five months that I worked there, I got a quick education in how small businesses worked.
Contrary to just about every other business I can think of, holidays were the busiest for us, Thanksgiving and Christmas especially, and we made it a point to be open when families gathered, ran down the checklist of whatever holiday traditions they had, and still had an afternoon and evening to kill. Also, the worse the weather got, the better business was. Snowy or rainy Fridays turned out to be especially lucrative. Unfortunately, our location was not conducive to bad-weather shopping; our tiny strip mall was up on the side of the hill, and the sloping driveway proved challenging in any season. I was in more than one almost-collision there myself. But we’d often clear $3000 in rentals on such days ($3, 2 for $5), and considering that the store was about the size of a bank’s branch office, the press of humanity was often impressive. The majority of people would come after 5:00 and wouldn’t trail off until well after 11, probably a result of our proximity to U of M’s North Campus.
The name of the manager who hired me was Dave, and he had been one of the first people the Sumon brothers had brought on when setting up their chain, probably due to his belief in the future of the industry. He believed that he had gotten in on the round floor of a career that would carry him comfortably to retirement. Ah, the days when videotape appeared to be the end-all of technology. And with business as strong as it was in those years, who could blame his optimism?
Another strange thing about the basics of the business was that in those days, when a video was first released, it would typically retail for $80-$100. This wasn’t due to any production or promotion cost that I could see… it seemed to be priced that way solely to drive the rental industry. This is my assumption, based on the fact that this pricing model didn’t start right away -- I believe 1986’s Platoon was touted as the first video to hit $100 retail. But early on, the movie studios and the rental stores must have staked out a symbiotic relationship, and it makes sense… why sell a video to a consumer for $20, when you can sell it to a business for $100, who can then turn around and rent it out dozens of times? We had a feature on our computer system that tracked each tape’s rental history and said how much money we made on it, and there were more than a few (and granted, they were mostly porn) that we had made hundreds, if not upwards of a thousand dollars on).
And that brings up a point… yes, aside from videos and Nintendo games, we rented pornography. It was a simple decision, really. Price points were lower, there were more turnovers per copy because it didn’t seem to matter if the titles were the newest releases, and our biggest competition (i.e. Blockbuster) didn’t carry them. At the time, Blockbuster wasn’t even renting unrated or NC-17 titles like Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. As a company, we took it as a point of pride not to dictate what people could and couldn’t watch in the privacy of their own homes. The “adult” section was in a separate, walled-off area near the back of the store, accessible only through a pair of creaky bat-wing doors. And that area made up about 75% of our traffic on weekdays up until about 3 in the afternoon.
Video Watch’s set-up was basically the same at all locations… there would be a ring of tall shelves that went around the perimeter of the store, which is where the “new releases” were kept. And by “new” I mean “there’s still room to put it here”. The only reason we would ever pull stuff off the wall, transfer the tapes from their transparent boxes into white clamshell cases with the sliced-up cover slipped beneath its clear covering, and exile them to the smaller “genre” shelves that filled the middle of the floor, would be because the latest release to come out simply would take up took much room. That made sense, too: the typical customer’s method of picking a film on a Friday night would be to wander up and down the new release wall. Eventually, they’d either stumble across something interesting they hadn’t noticed before, or they got especially lucky, and an employee with armload of just-returned stuff would appear (the feeling of being this particular employee, tailed while trying to put manage a stack of videos that could exceed three feet in height, was akin to being a dying coyote in the desert, complete with hungry vultures circling overhead). The genre shelves, meanwhile, were always loaded with bottom-of-the-barrel features (mostly Roger Corman and Troma movies) that came from buyouts of smaller stores, which was Mr. Sumon’s preferred method for supplying a store with its opening “seed” inventory.
Security was tighter in VW stores than anything I had seen before, and in 1990 was probably second only to banks. There were several factors that played into this… like I said, just about everything in the store had a retail value of close to $100. Along with this, weekend evenings were a constant flow of money changing hands, up to $3,000 on a good night, nearly all in cash – credit card and check transactions for less than $5 were the exception rather than the norm.
The store had one-way front doors, and the standard security “gates” that customers would have to pass through on the way out. Every tape had a thin metal tape strip affixed to it that would set off the alarm. It usually got attached to the inside of the plastic door that flips up to expose the actual videotape underneath. We also had security cameras, which were more for show than anything else. As far as I know, the footage wasn’t recorded, and the monitor (conspicuously placed behind the counter so all customers could see that we were watching) only rotated between views of the four or five low-res, black-and-white cameras at a time. It really wasn’t much of a security measure, evidenced by the fact that we’d often find torn-off security strips hidden in various corners around the store.
There was also a silent alarm, unremarkable beige buttons on the underside of the checkout counter that would directly summon the police. They were fairly new when I started working there, and more than a few times I was told the story of how Dave had them installed without informing anyone, and every shift that first day set them off by messing with them, wondering what they were. Again, they weren’t of much use, since they were set high enough to not be triggered accidentally, but you’d have reach up almost to chest level and across the width of the counter to set them off – clearly not something you’d want to do while facing an assailant.
In any event, the worst criminal activity we had at the Plymouth VW wasn’t even a robbery. It was a woman who came in and rented every copy of Super Mario Brothers 3 (at that time – and still -- the biggest-selling Nintendo game ever), under the pretext of taking them to a birthday party where the kids were having a videogame competition, with multiple NESes hooked up to multiple TVs. I was there when she checked them out, and thus was one of the folks the police had questions for. They even brought a photo lineup, asking us to pick out from five mugshots who the woman was. I failed to pick the right one.
There wasn’t really much we could do about scams like this… back then, all you had to provide to rent videos was an in-state driver’s license or state ID, phone number, and a credit card. Once you wrote it on a card, we’d hand you a card, and later on type your info into our computer system. If you walked out the door with hundreds in merchandise, and had given us fake information, we quickly reached the limits of what we could do. And of course, that’s exactly what this woman had done. Our sign-up policy was a calculated risk to get people renting as quickly and conveniently as possible, and there were so many honest customers that they far outweighed the bad.
A little aside on video security… the whole point of videotape was that it was recordable by just about every VCR (that’s what the “R” is for, right?), so it was amusing to see some of the various methods companies had to keep their movies from being copied. The “Macrovision” method was supposed to somehow have copies made from tapes equipped with it devolve into nothing but fuzz, or periodically go black-and-white, announcing to all viewers that it was an illegal copy. Disney was the most creative, though… they were particularly at risk because they had the habit (and still do) of making their films available only for a limited time, revolving through their library every seven years or so. This had the effect of making their videos even more valuable than usual while they were on moratorium. Disney, clearly afraid that people could disassemble their tapes and swap out the reels, instituted a new type of screw to hold the cassettes together, one that resembled a Phillips head, but only had three notches instead of four, in a triangular arrangement. I have no idea what the screwdriver that went with them would look like, but I do know that it made fixing the tapes impossible… with a Phillips and some Scotch tape, you could fix just about any mechanical problem a tape came back with (if it was a problem with the tape itself, though, you were pretty screwed).
I enjoyed my first stint at VW, but it only lasted until the end of the school year. At that point, I needed something full-time, and such a small store wasn’t able to accommodate that. So I moved on… but two years later, I called Dave back to see if he needed summer help. He certainly did: he had moved on to manage a much larger store that had just opened in a prominent location on the corner of Huron Parkway and Washtenaw. This large store, which took up the entire short end of an L-shaped strip mall, would be where I would spend most of my VW tenure.
Strangely enough, after Dave hired me, I don’t remember him sticking around for long. (My vague recollection tells me that he found a better opportunity in the video rental industry in Niagara Falls, NY, but some years later committed suicide – I assume his decision wasn’t related to the downfall of the industry, since it happened years before the video store apex was passed.) From there, the reins passed to the management team of Kim and Darlene.
I liked Kim as a manager. She understood that this wasn’t the end-all, be-all of jobs for any of us, and tried not to take it too seriously. Darlene the assistant manager, however, was much more of a stickler. It kind of made sense. She, after all, had a higher position to aspire to. Because there was no way to get promoted above manager in the company (all the executive positions being filled by Ray and his brothers), Kim had adopted a much more whatever-works attitude.
A good example of this was during one of our monthly staff meetings (since just about everyone was part-time and the store was open 14 hours a day, it was tough getting everyone together all at once). We’d been having a rash of instances where videos would be returned, but when we scanned the barcode to check them in, it would say that it was already “in store”. Meaning it hadn’t been checked out to the customer in the first place. And since none of the cash drawers had been having significant overages, that meant that someone was only pretending to check customers’ videos out and pocketing the money.
Kim brought this issue up at the meeting, and Darlene was quick to jump in and state that research could be done to figure out who it was that was doing it, so it had better stop. I couldn’t figure out what she meant… it was no secret that this had been going on for a few weeks, and I had been thinking about what a clever scheme it was. The customer was none the wiser, and if they kept the video out extra days but didn’t get charged a late fee, they’d be happy. True, your cash register wouldn’t pop open until after you had completed a transaction, but all you had to do was not fully close the drawer on a legitimate transaction, and you could just pull it open for the next one. Someone in a managerial position could even pop it open manually with a key. And as near as I could figure, there was no way to track who was doing it. No record was being kept, after all – that was the point of the whole deception.
When I heard Darlene state that she had a way to find out who was doing it, I started asking questions about how that would work. Not because I was trying to prove her wrong, I was just genuinely curious about the procedure. She got more and more flustered as I kept asking questions, and finally said that she wasn’t about to tell how they’d get to the bottom of it, because then whoever it was would know how to avoid getting caught. I don’t think any of us really believed that there was a way the perpetrator could be caught, because they probably would have been accused already if there was. Kim was strangely silent through the exchange, so I think the idea of putting fear into everyone was solely Darlene’s idea.
Looking back on it now, I feel badly for Kim. She had a young son at the time, and I’m sure the crazy hours necessary for being a video store manager must have been stressful for her family. Sad to say, I certainly didn’t help in that matter… I often dropped availability changes on Kim right after she put out the next week’s schedule, and not because I didn’t know my own conflicts. I was just horrible at keeping track of upcoming Friars and Glee Club commitments, seemingly unable to project a week and a half into the future, which was what she needed.
In addition to a manager and an assistant, there was always a secondary assistant, a sort of assistant-manager-in-training. I suppose this person was meant to replace the real assistant manager when they got promoted to run some other store. While I can’t remember the exact chain of command, we had three or four of these in-training folks. My favorite was Roy, a tall, thin, well-mannered guy with wire-rimmed glasses who looked like he would be wearing the standard VW uniform even if he didn’t need to (in case you were wondering, light blue button-down shirt, blue slacks, ties for the in-training managers and up – even for the women). That wasn’t to say he was straight-laced, though. When we would have our monthly overnight inventory, he would be the first to show his break dancing moves on the small area of linoleum we had in front of the checkout desks. He loved to talk movies too, which was something that put us in sync. He had plans of being a filmmaker, which I also did at the time, but he seemed to be a little further ahead than me… he asked me at one point if I would be willing to dye my long hair bright red, so that I could play a villain in a movie he planned to make. He never said anything else about it, but I always hoped that I would get a call from him.
The monthly overnight inventories I just mentioned were something that I definitely didn’t look forward to… about every other month you’d be called up to participate. I know a lot of the other employees looked at it as a way to socialize all night, but I just wanted to get it done and over with. As soon as the doors were locked for the night, we’d have to get out pushcarts and miles of extension cords so that we could put our work computers (with handheld scanners and keyboards) on them and wheel them up and down the aisles, scanning every single tape in the store. If you were lucky, you were sent to work on the new release wall, where the scanner just might read the barcode through the clear plastic box. If you were relegated to the genre sections, though, that meant going through, opening every clamshell box, then scanning the barcode and closing them back up again (no one ever seemed to think of a way to put each video’s barcode on the outside of the box, where it could be easily scanned). Mix in the fact that there was so little shelf space in the overcrowded genre sections that sometimes half the videos had to be turned spine-out, and you can see how laborious it was. Clamshells weren’t really designed for repetitive handling, either. By the time you were done opening all the boxes, the pads of your fingers were scratched up, not to mention dirty from the months of dust on the boxes (did I mention that hardly anyone ever rented from the genre sections?)
I soon discovered that it was easier for me to just type in the six-digit code below the barcode than to try to maneuver the laser scanner around. So I’d use my left hand to prop open the boxes enough to see the barcode, then type it in on the computer’s keypad with my right. I was actually good enough at this that I didn’t have to look at the keypad, so I could even read the codes off the bottom shelf and type above my head while I closed them up again.
Unfortunately, as Ayn Rand taught us, if you figure out how to do a crappy job efficiently, you’re really just making sure that you’re always the one who has to do it. So I would often be helming a computer cart all by myself for hours at a time while others stood around, drinking Mountain Dew and deciding what videos to play on our multiple overheard screens (thanks to Kim, Garth Brooks Live will always remind me of staying up all night tapping out six-digit numbers).
Once the inventory was done, most of management’s role the following week would be taking the exception printout (that is, everything that was supposed to be in the store but didn’t get scanned) and checking the shelves to see if they could find them. I was always surprised that a significant portion of these were items weren’t ones that I typed in incorrectly, but since I never heard a complaint and I was asked month after month to cover the genre aisles, I must have done a halfway decent job.
The old trope about video stores attracting bizarre characters isn’t always true, but I tell ya, when it is… One of my most memorable fellow employees was named Rick, a short, stocky guy. He had a weird dichotomy about him… while there was nothing remarkable about his appearance, he had a definite punk rock feel about him, but was strangely reserved in other ways, such as making a point of never watching any movie that had a gun on the video cover, He did have a tolerance level for things that most people would be squeamish about, though, as I found out one time when he was late for work. Kim called him and he claimed he hadn’t come in because he couldn’t get a ride. Since I had a car, Kim had me go pick him up at his house in Ypsi. I found him there, casually making and eating a spaghetti dinner while watching a bootleg concert video of punk legend G.G. Allin… and in case you don’t know who G.G. Allin was, let me just say that I’m torn between telling you what his stage shows usually consisted of, and suggesting that you Google him, because then you might actually end up *seeing* some of it. Rick was the kind of guy who would use the word “aesthete” in conversation, but then show up with his head, formerly crowned with longish hair, totally clean-shaven. Never could figure that guy out.
As I mentioned before, the mystery of the pocketed money was eventually solved, and with it came the exit of another of our assistant managers-in-training, the second of the strangest characters I met on the job. I honestly can’t remember his name, but for purposes here, let’s call him Steve. Apart from having the strangely cartoony facial features of a Guy Fawkes mask, Steve was the kind of guy who talked a lot. I mean, a *lot*, in a Verbal Kint kind of way. To the point where, after a while, you started to question if anything he had ever said were true. Let’s assume that all the fantastical stories he told was true. If so, his life history had gone something like this: he went to college in New York City in the mid-80’s, studying film. There, he had the good fortune to befriend a relative of Robert de Niro, who he managed to get to appear in his final student film project. At the same time, he managed a video store in Manhattan, and the claim to fame of this particular store was that then-leading-man Eric Roberts would frequent it when he was working in town, dragging along his gawky little sister Julia. The reason Steve decided to give up his budding career (and the insider connections he clearly had) in New York and move to Michigan was unclear.
I got to hear a lot of these stories because I ended up doing a lot of two-person day shifts with him during the summer of 1993. Around one o’clock on most of these days, he would hand me ten bucks and ask if I’d run up the road to Arby’s or Subway and get lunch for him. “Oh yeah, and get something for yourself too,” he’d say nonchalantly, as if it was my fee for running down the road. I was more than happy to do it, and I have to admit, even when Darlene brought up the fact that someone was stealing from the registers, it never entered into my head that Steve might have been the one doing it, making me an accomplice in the process. It wasn’t after he was fired that I put the pieces together. To his credit, though, he never mentioned my name.
On the whole, I really enjoyed a lot of those times. There were some genuinely good people there who I enjoyed working with: David, another of the managers-in-training; Davi, a Native American who lent me a copy of In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (which I hate to admit I never read); Kristen, a nice but quiet girl whose face was so puffy that it looked like she was perpetually being hung upside down; Damon, who I really liked until he admitted -- on the day I left to work at another store -- that he had stolen my lunch a few months before, something I had been fuming about (I mean, in a workplace with only ten to fifteen people, what kind of person would *do* that?) I also remember a man named Antjuan (pronounced “Antoine” but spelled like “Juan” plus an insect); I also remember running back to the windows to watch the annular eclipse in the spring of 1994, an event that I was the only one in the store excited about.
I also saw a lot of great movies, but what really left an impression on me were the miniseries I would work my way through on breaks. The first one I watched was Ken Burns’ The Civil War (which was fascinating), and then moved on to Roots – both the original and Next Generations. I remember it took an awfully long time, because I only watched for fifteen minutes per shift. When James Earl Jones (playing Alex Haley) finally heard an African griot mention the name Kunta Kinte and realized that he had tracked his family back to the tragic event that had really made him who he was, it felt like I was finishing an epic journey, too.
In the late summer of 1994, I got a surprise promotion. Even though I had never been a manager-in-training, I was asked to become the assistant manager of another VW store, this one in the Gault Village shopping center in Ypsilanti. It was one of the oldest stores in the chain, and wasn’t one of the better kept-up ones, but it did solid business… along with bad weather, low income was another bellwether that a video store would do good business, since you could entertain a family for the better part of an evening for $3. A substantial raise went along with the change, and although it added a dozen miles to my commute and my car was junky but reliable, I took the job.
My manager at the new store was a young woman named Kabian – by way of explanation, she said her parents were hippies. She was stick-thin, with a slight mustache and crazily wild black hair. Nice person, but not the greatest manager, for reasons that became apparent later on. She was great at scheduling and making sure her employees were happy, but she would also pull tricks like leaving at 3 in the afternoon when I got there for the evening shift, then calling two hours later and saying that she had “forgotten” to punch out, and would I clock her out? She swore she’d correct for the overtime manually.
The store itself was like the shopping center it resided in… past its prime, but stable and holding itself together. We never had a shortage of customers, and there were few packs of roving kids that would come by during the schoolless days. One group that came by regularly was exceedingly polite: they’d bring up cartoons or PG-rated movies from the shelves and ask if I could please play them on the overhead monitors so they could sit and watch for a while. As long as they didn’t mess around and there weren’t a lot of other customers in the store, I let them.
The assistant-in-training at Gault Village was Amber, and she clearly was gunning to be a manager someday. She didn’t seem to hold a grudge that I got the job over her; I did have a year and a half seniority with the company, so apparently it didn’t bother her. But she was known to show up early and stay late if we were busy. It was great having her as a part of the team, and now that I was on the management side it gave me a deeper appreciation for reliable, dedicated employees.
And we had those in spades at Gault Village… it seems that while the rest of the chain seemed to regard us as the seedy outlier in the chain, its employees dedicated themselves wholeheartedly. There was Diana, the middle-aged VW veteran who had been working for the chain since the beginning, but never aspired to management, instead preferring to work the registers and talk to customers; Glenda, the young mom who was working to supplement her household income for her three sons; Peter, who was physically odd (despite the fact that both his parents were surgeons, he had hands looked and moved like Mickey Mouse gloves) but loved calling delinquent customers and asking them to return long-overdue videos, thus endearing himself to everyone else on the staff who didn’t want that particular job; and Nick, the hip college student who loved movies as much as I did and had a laid-back style that I consciously tried to emulate when dealing with problem customers.
I never did learn what the store had been before it was a VW, but its unusually large back area made it an important location… aside from multi-stall bathrooms that must have been public in one of the store’s previous incarnations, there was also a large conference room that became the location of the quarterly managers’ meeting, where everyone would gather to touch base with at least one of the Sumon brothers (though never Ray himself). While it was easy to forget on a day-to-day basis that anything other than your own store existed, these meetings really made me aware of how the whole chain worked as a whole.
The next few months went by quickly. Summer blazed outside (mostly because the Gault Village parking lot had been recently blacktopped), and a kind of cool predictability settled in. I became comfortable with scheduling, counting down drawers, driving to the bank for daily deposits, even dealing with irritable customers. Summer slid into fall, and when the day came that I had worked my last shift I didn’t even know it was happening.
One Friday evening in November, I worked the day shift as usual and went home. Nick, who by that time had shown enough promise to become a second manager-in-training, was handling the close. Shortly before midnight, while Nick was in the back office counting down the second-to-last drawer and the store was empty of customers, two men entered the store armed with shotguns. The first thing they did was to approach the employee checking in videos by the front door and smack her across the face with the butt of one of the guns, knocking her down. Fortunately, she either couldn’t or wouldn’t get up, and the second employee on the front desk was quick to act on their men’s request to get the manager up front.
Nick acted completely cool under pressure. He complied with everything the men said, emptying out the remaining register. They marched him into the back office (and here I’m fuzzy on whether or not they made him put a wastebasket over his head so he couldn’t study their faces), took the money from the drawer he had been working on, and told him to open the safe. Kabian and I were the only ones who had the combination, though. He basically told them that he was sorry, he’d be more than happy to open it if he had the combination, but he just didn’t. It must have been Nick’s calm demeanor that convinced them he was telling the truth, and they left without inflicting any more damage.
I got news of the robbery just as Amy and I were preparing to go to bed, and it was like a punch in the stomach. Until that moment, I had assumed that I was going to continue working for the company, and didn’t have any kind of exit strategy in place. Amy and I had just gotten married during the summer, we were planning from our friend’s place into our own apartment, and our lives had just found a comfortable pattern. But this news kept us up half the night talking. We were torn between my loyalty to my friends and co-workers, and the realization that Gault Village was the lone store open until midnight in a somewhat remote shopping center, and the possibility that armed violence could happen again was frighteningly real. At the end of it, after going through nightmare scenarios where I had been working that night, or the thieves hadn’t believed Nick was unable to open the safe and shot him, or even that the men demand that Nick call me to get me to come open the safe, I decided I just couldn’t put myself at risk like that. There were much safer jobs out there.
I called Kabian and told her that I couldn’t take the shift the next morning that I had been scheduled for. I needed time, I said, and made sure that they understood I was still trying to decide whether I could continue working there at all. A manager from another store picked up my morning shift, and the following day I came in to talk to Kabian and Nick, letting them know how conflicted I was but that I couldn’t continue to work there. They seemed to understand how hard it was for me to walk away. Since I was a newlywed, I think they could get where my mind was at when I finally made the decision.
Strangely enough, I was the only employee that left. Even the woman who had been hit in the face continued to work. And here, I learned after some reflection, was the difference in work ethics, which I probably applies to all jobs… at the Ann Arbor stores, employees saved their primary focus on other things they were involved in: school, better jobs, etc. Not that they weren’t good workers, but the job was never their number one priority. It certainly wasn’t for me. It was a means to an end, something to draw money and free movies from that wasn’t too mentally or physically demanding while pursuing something else. At Gault Village, employees came from a stratum of society where the job was the end in itself, and their pride in doing it well was appropriately escalated. They weren’t “also” doing anything else. This was how they supported their family, what filled their days and occupied their minds. They made themselves a part of it, and appreciated how good and reliable a company it was to work for. In the end, I think that how much I had come to be one of them was what made it so hard for me to leave, even knowing that my personal safety was at risk.
And so my time as a participant in the video rental industry came to an end. I continued to be a patron of Video Watch, even when they were eventually bought out by Hollywood Video. (As a side note, Ray Sumon took the $50-60 million he got from selling VW to Hollywood Video and moved to South Florida, where he started a new chain of about thirty stores, called Video Avenue and sometimes Video Street. It looks like he did this because it was the only state where he could legally own a video store per the terms of his buyout. He, once again, he sold them to Hollywood Video. One has to wonder if that had been his plan all along). I held out going to Blockbuster as long as I could, still not liking their censorship policies, and had switched over to Netflix by the turn of the century.
And so, what my original employer Dave couldn’t imagine came to pass… the video rental store got shelved right next to other obsolete entertainments as record stores, soda fountains, nickel arcades and Farrell’s ice cream parlors. As I’ve been writing down most of what I can remember about it, I’ve realized that it covered a significant period of my life, too… when I first started working at Video Watch, I was just starting school at the University of Michigan, and by the time it ended, I was married and my wife and I were just about to move into our first real home together. And let’s not forget that it was my decision to quit VW that led to my starting another job, this time in the returns warehouse of a little book retailer known as Borders…
