Back in the mid-1980s heyday of video cassettes, Oak Park and River Forest had more than a dozen video stores. To cash in on the sizzling market, business owners were renting tapes out of basements and second floors.
But 25 years later, the bricks-and-mortar video store is quickly becoming a relic. The last Blockbuster video store in Oak Park will be gone by the end of the month; River Forest doesn’t have any left.
Blockbuster is looking to close as many as 960 stores in the U.S. by the end of next year, as it faces competition from Netflix, an online rental service, and Redbox, a chain that puts movie rental kiosks at neighborhood spots near supermarkets and convenience stores. Dallas-based Blockbuster lost $116.8 million in the third quarter of 2009 and saw same-store sales drop by 18.3 percent. It shut 216 stores during that three-month span.
Oak Parker Julie Chyna, 39, used to go to Blockbuster. She gave it up a few years ago, frustrated to find dozens of copies of the latest hit but never have what she wanted.
“The bricks-and-mortar stores like Blockbuster sort of weeded themselves out of the business by not offering the variety that most people are looking for,” Chyna says. “There are still a few little independent video stores that are filling that desire, but for a lot of people, there’s just not a need for the big huge corporate video store anymore.”
When VHS ruled
Video Home System tapes came available in the late 1970s. From a perusal of old telephone books at the Oak Park and River Forest Historical Society, it appears that the first video stores popped up in our villages around 1981.
Two of the earliest were Home Video Entertainment, 7369 W. North Ave. in River Forest, and Studio 909, which was at 909 S. Oak Park Ave. in Oak Park. Both were first listed in the 1981 phone book.
By 1985, there were about a dozen video stores in Oak Park, River Forest and Forest Park, according to a March 20, 1985 Oak Leaves article. Today, there are only four in the three villages: a Blockbuster on Harlem in Forest Park, two independents on Madison in Oak Park, and another on Roosevelt Road.
In the VCR craze in the ’80s, gas stations and grocers alike rented tapes. By the end of 1984, about 17 million VCRs were being used, according to the Oak Leaves article.
At the time, the store on North Avenue in River Forest had a collection of 4,000 movies and 12,000 tapes. They ranged in price from $29 to $59. A copy of Gone with the Wind on VHS was $89.95.
Another store operating in the mid-1980s in Oak Park was MTL Movies, which boasted a small collection of 350 tapes. The store was on the second floor of 1142 Chicago Ave. It even delivered videos, like pizza, to people’s doors.
Other shops in Oak Park were Video Biz (1010 North Blvd.), Babyo’s Records Tapes and Video (7112 W. North Ave.) and Peaches Records and Tapes (7123 W. North Ave.). The Dunkin’ Donuts/Baskin Robbins on Roosevelt used to be a Windy City Video franchise, while Bedding Experts at Garfield and Harlem was a store called Video Magic.
Circle Video in Forest Park was popular since it opened in 1981. It started with just 80 movies and one paid employee. It bloomed to a collection approaching 50,000 titles by the time it closed in March 2006.
Owner Patrick Cerceo considered starting an online version of the store, but canned the idea because of the mushrooming kiosks. “The advent of these Redboxes really was a death knell,” Cerceo says, referring to the $1 fee. “They took away what little market the video stores had.”
There are six Redbox kiosks now in Oak Park and River Forest, two of them in River Forest – all in or near Jewel, 7-Eleven and Walgreens.
With the closing of Blockbuster at 200 Lake, three video stores will be left in Oak Park, all independents: New Top Video at 6120 Roosevelt, Oak Park Video & Beeper at 26 Madison, and Madison Video at 500 Madison.
Former Oak Park resident Richard Chhun has been running Madison Video for 15 years, coming here from Cambodia to open the store. Business recently has been slow, which he blames on the economy, but the shop is getting by. Madison Video has about 10,000 films, a small portion of which are VHS. It rents movies for $2.50. Chhun says that price has helped him keep pace with Blockbuster, which charges twice as much for rentals.
There will always be a place for bricks-and-mortar video stores, he says. “Netflix is not going to hurt us because it takes time for them to ship. Sometimes people want to watch a movie right away.” Chhun says he can also compete with Redbox because of the variety he offers and that people “don’t want to stay out in the cold.”
Calls to the owners of Oak Park’s other two video stores were not returned.
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David Zverow, 63, was a regular at Circle Video. He loved the old-fashioned store for its staff, selection and rates. “It was very nice to go to a store where people had some sense of your taste and sometimes they shared our taste,” says Zverow, who’s into independent and foreign films. After Circle closed, he turned to Netflix and to Oak Park Public Library.
He’s not the only one to tap the library’s video collection. Connie Strait, circulation services manager at Oak Park Public Library, says they’ve seen a 34 percent increase in circulation of videos over the past year. Back in 1985, the library had a collection of about 100 VHS tapes. Today, the library has about 18,000 titles on DVD and 3,000 on VHS.
In the first eleven months of last year, people checked out 140,000 feature films from the library, compared with 187,887 for the same period this year. That excludes the number of children’s films checked out the past two years.
Strait attributes the surge in use of the library as a video resource to the bad economy. People are saving their pennies and going to the library for movie night. Up until October 2007, the library charged a rental fee for video. “Taxpayers have purchased the materials with their money, and we don’t charge up front for a book, so why do it for a video?” Strait says.
The fee was dropped. Circulation of videos went up. The library spent about $80,000 this year to add 3,000 DVD titles, an increase over the $60,000 spent in 2008.
The human factor
Khaliah Ferguson, 30, frequents Blockbuster in Forest Park and was happy to hear it was spared from the company’s recent round of closures. She grew up going to the chain and her family often makes a night of traveling to the store and picking out a video. She’s saddened by the notion of movie night devolving into just going and standing in front of a box.
“When I go to Blockbuster, I’ll ask one of the clerks if they saw a movie, and they’ll give me recommendations,” Ferguson says. “I can’t do that with Redbox; it’s like, with that itty-bitty paragraph that pops up, I need to make a choice.”
Krissy Peterson, 25, of Oak Park used to work at a mom-and-pop video store in Lemont when she was in high school. She liked hearing discussions about movies and seeing how certain people would respond to different recommendations. Today, she goes to the Oak Park library to get her movies. The library has a vast selection, but not the personable touch of the small video stores, she says.
Cerceo, the 66-year-old Elmwood Park resident who used to own Circle Video, occasionally gets his movie fix from Redbox. It’s ironic, Cerceo says, that Blockbuster, which helped put small stores out of business, now is being pushed out by other big operations. In losing indie stores, people also are losing, according to Cerceo, the coffeehouse vibe.
“There was a lot of repartee that took place between customers and my employees,” he says. “What you’ve got now is a computer screen, and if you don’t understand it, that’s your problem.”
CONTACT: mstempniak@wjinc.com