Badmovies.org Forum

I imagine that we would all love to own our own video store, but is it profitable? Can anyone share their insight or experience on this subject? I'd love to open a store with old movies, classsics, cult, horror, sci-fi, foriegn, obscure, rare, classic tv, oddities, documentaries, etc. (no new releases). I figured you would have to rent out 40 movies a day just to pay the rent and your own living expenses and thats if you ran the store totally by yourself 7 days a week. I'm not sure I could find 40 people on a daily basis to rent older movies. It would never work, would it? I have alot of other original idea's to help it along, but ....................... What are the ins and outs of the business? Everything from buying film, credit cards to damage rentals, etc.

I worked in a video store for a while in 1993, it was pretty cool coz I got to watch movies and got all the posters I wanted.
The video rental is different now, all the independent stores have closed down leaving the likes of Blockbuster to corner the market.

we have 2 maybe 3, family run movie stores.

The only way they've been able to stay in business is to have good prices.

Everyday, except Firdays and Staurdays, New releases are 4.00 bucks and 2 for 1.

Old Movies are 2 bucks for 2 and you get them for 7 days.  And there's usually like 50 people in there a day.

Nobody here liked BB, cause their too damn expensive and never get in anything good. Like American Movie or American Beer..

Global Video is the best one over here, they sell off  fairly new ex-rental tapes for £10. In Pudsy,near where I live, we have a Global vid right next door to a Blockbuster.

In NJ where I'm from, there use to be allot of different independent video stores. I have seen about 3 go out of business in the last year or two. There are 5 ballbuster stores that I know of around here. It is a tough business because you won't make hardly anything from it in most cases. I'd rather stay a collector then run a store.

To run a successful video rental store would be difficult, Blockbuster pretty much controls the market. If you plan to have all new releases in stock, good luck. Also, any movie from Paramount that’s a new release will only be available at Blockbuster first – usually for the first two weeks.

How do the small, independent video stores survive? Finding a niche market beyond the scope of Blockbuster is key. Yes, that usually means renting porno. How else do you get customers to come to your place? If Blockbuster doesn’t have it - you can capitalize on it.

I like the idea of a video store that carries “odd titles”. I think this would work in a college town or a low rent district in a major city. In a college town, rent would be cheap and you could advertise for dirt cheap – local school paper, flyers, and stickers – much like a used CD shop. The capital needed would be for original copies of movies, licensed for rental purposes. This would be the most difficult task. Beyond that, payments would be cash – who needs to take credit cards and have a 15% transaction fee? The majority of renters who are looking for weird movies will pay cash since they can’t find these types of movies just anywhere – charge $3-4 for the movies since only you carry them. Rent them out for 2 days, turn your inventory over quicker! Again, it’s about find the niche market – people will pay for movies they can’t find anywhere else.

As for insurance, you would want it – such odd titles usually get stolen.

There are a million other things to think about, but overall it could be profitable with the right inventory and location.

DVD is the big thing now and I know a few shops that are DVD only, the good thing about them is that there quite cheap as retail videos can be anything up to £80 ( although some retail DVD like Scream 3 and Road Trip are coming out at £80)

Argh! I despise DVDs. They're just too damn expensive.

I would love to see a video store that carries only rare and hard to find movies.

Scott, if you ever do it, let me know. I'd gladly work for you. I could bring my 125 horror movies with me. Some of them are hard to find.

My father owned a video store from the early 80s till around 1998.

He said he used to make alot of money in the 80s, problem was it was a very small town and around around 1992 or 1993 the town got PAY PER VIEW and that affected the store greatly. He started losing more money on the moneys who had to buy than made money. In  around 1998 he sold it. I miss being able to get movies for free. I miss DEM days.

My father owned a video store from the early 80s till around 1998.

He said he used to make alot of money in the 80s, problem was it was a very small town and around around 1992 or 1993 the town got PAY PER VIEW and that affected the store greatly. He started losing more money on the moneys who had to buy than made money. In  around 1998 he sold it. I miss being able to get movies for free. I miss DEM days.

Wild and Woolly Video

W&W in Louisville was like the Mecca of all video stores to me. We have/had some indie-type video stores around Philly, but nothing like W&W. Their selection included some smut, but they also carried titles that many people struggle to find as bootlegs, let alone have the opportunity to rent.

Regardless, I wish every town in America had  Wild and Woolly.

Here in LA, we have an honest-to-goodness,
bona fide cult video store called Cinefile.
Being located right next to the Nuart
theatre, they do fairly brisk business,
though I can't imagine it working in too
many other locations.  Staff is a little
surly, but their selection, for a
B-movie nut, is like manna from heaven...
check it out if you're ever in helLA.

That porno option probably works well -- however, here in Utah, the major indie chain (Movie Buffs) basically got driven out of business by two court cases over them renting cable-version stuff.  The irony?  The store owner eventually won, but thanks to a multi-year legal battle he lost his business, his marriage... not pretty.

Since then, just about every indie has fallen to BB.  When a second local chain (Video Express) went under, BB even moved into their old locations.

There are exactly four indies left in a two-county area.  Video Update just pulled both its stores out of this market, which leaves me with one Super Video, one Hastings -- and 12 Blockbusters and 5 Hollywoods.

I makes my heart weep.

Nathan

I'm in Utah too, and I used to like going to Sounds Easy Video.  They had a much better selection than BB and Hollywood Video, but all of their locations have closed down now too.  I actually have rented from 3 different SE locations over the years, and now they are all gone.

Sad.

Yup.  First the one in Provo (Sounds Easy Pizza & Video -- could anything be cooler for a college student?  I lived across the parking lot from it) just plain went out of business, and then the one in Cedar City was replaced with Hollywood.  Actually, that was something of an improvement; there was no longer a feeling that the movies were being spaced out to take up the store.

I don't know if you followed the whole Movie Buffs fiasco, but it p**sed me off royally.  But I know Randy Spencer, the public defender that finally got him off, and I'm damned proud of him.

Nathan
(Everyone else, just ignore two Utahns talking to each other in a public place.)

Yeah, I was pretty p**sed off about the whole Movie Buffs fiasco.  I was very pleased when he won his case.  I triumph for free speech, but it's too bad the whole process bankrupted him.  The moral of the story being, if you want to exercise free speech don't try to do it as an independent video store owner in Utah County.  Of course the ironic thing is that Provo city is now in the pornography business by creating a becoming cable TV provider.  Of course that simplifies things, people can't watch pornography in the privacy of their own home without having to go to the video store, where *gasp* their neighbors might see them coming out of the adult section.

I don't sound bitter do I?  It's just that hypocrisy like that really gets my goat.

Back on topic: Go for it Scott!  Open your own video store, but just make sure you do it because you love it and not because you want to make a profit.

I'm afraid I wasn't terrible coherent in that post.  Sorry about that.  I get excited and spelling goes out the window.  I think you probably understood what I was try to say though.

The thing is that Blockbuster gets preferential treatment--they get exclusive discounts on almost every rental cassette they buy from the big studios, while independent stores have to pay full price.  And what's worse, now Blockbuster is trying to pressure the studios into "rental pricing" DVDs, which would mean that DVDs would have the same rental-only period that VHS tapes do.  I beg all of you, PLEASE DO NOT RENT MOVIES AT BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO!!!

On the subject of good video places, the Video Station in Boulder, Colorado is easily the best rental store I've ever seen in my life.  They have virtually every movie ever released on video or DVD in the US and dozens of foreign stuff as well.  You think of a movie, they've got it.  And I'm sure they do quite well, being right next to the biggest university in Colorado.