Trouble at the video store

I don’t think Michele will be taking me to the video store again. Just too much trouble. All stemming from incident a few weeks back. I hadn’t been to one in years, but an evening of unlikely desperation found us at the local blockbuster-esque corner video store. What surreal and bewildering experience. I recommend not visiting to a music or video store for 3-5 years then suddenly trying it again. Trippy.

One immediately strange thing you’ll notice is that some shelves would be taken up with 10 or twenty boxes containing the exact same movie. Meanwhile lots of other perfectly good movies that I seem to remember weren’t anywhere in the store at all. I don’t know why, but there didn’t seem to be any option to download or transfer in any of these movies from some central archive.

It was hard to choose a movie. First there was the limited selection problem, and then for some reason I wasn’t able to tell just from looking at the shelves if my friends had seen any of these movies, which ones they might recommend, get a tomatometer score, or even google-up some independent reviews of them. hmmm.

Finally though, after some deliberation, I pick one out. No you can’t rent that she tells me. Why not? It’s out. What do mean it’s out? Somebody else has it, the disc has left the store. I don’t understand. How can’t you understand? Well I have money and I want to rent this one, why can’t the guy at the front just burn me another copy? [big sigh] Tom, you know it doesn’t work that way.

Perfectly digital media stuck on individual spinning discs. What a crazy business model. How would you ever explain it to your grandkids?

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