As a person with Down syndrome, routines are very important for Christina Cavanaugh. Nearly every day for the past 15 years, the Pocatello, Idaho resident and her mother would go to the Video Stop to rent a movie for her to watch. She became such a valued customer that new employees would be trained on how to interact with her and check out her movie choices, as Christina is nonverbal. With the advent of streaming taking over the home video rental market, it appeared inevitable that Video Stop would close. However, thanks to the store’s owner David Kraning, she can still rent movies out of a section built in the convenience shop next door.
While Video Stop has ceased all rentals, Kraning took a small selection of film titles and built a small video rental section for Christina into the adjacent K&B Kwik Stop. While the section is affectionately known as “Christina’s Corner,” a small group of other loyal customers can also rent from the collection held there. For Toni Cavanaugh, Christina’s mother, it was a relief.
“[Christina] doesn’t understand things closing,” Toni told East Idaho News, recounting a time when another video store Christina visited closed down. “Her and I drive over and I let her get out of the car and she goes up and there’s nothing there, and the doors are locked. She still wanted to go in, and it is really heartbreaking to watch the anguish.”
Knowing how much the store meant to Christina, Kraning decided to keep the video rental business, but smaller. After seeing a corner of his K&B Kwik Stop meant for deli storage fail to take off, he decided to change it into a small video rental section.
“That area was going unused, and I thought, ‘OK, it wouldn’t be too much terrible work to just retrofit it, put some shelving in there, and move some of the movies over, and just create kind of a mini video store corner for this kid, so she still could have her normal routine that she’s used to,’” said Kraning.
Now Christina continues her routine of picking out a movie with her mother as the staff of K&B Kwik Stop welcome them like “family,” according to the store manager Jennifer Klassen.
Getting access to physical media can be important to many people, not just folks like Christina. While streaming services are convenient, the costs to maintain subscriptions have significantly increased across the board over the years since its inception. There is also not a guarantee that the streaming service you subscribe to will keep the movies you frequently watch as a part of their library, as services like Max permanently remove titles while other streamers like Netflix and Disney+ follow suit.
While they aren’t built for big business that require growing monthly profits or answering to shareholders, the small business market is welcoming the cult-like revival of video stores for film buffs in the mid-2020s as vinyl records were for music fans in the 2010s. Many revival stores have sprouted or survived in the video rental business in recent years such as Vidiots in big city Los Angeles, California and Symsonia Video in small towns Symsonia, Kentucky. If not a brick and mortar business, local libraries have also become hubs to check out blu-rays and DVDs.
DVDs and blu-rays have become a niche product that still has a strong loyal consumer base that is in part due to folks like Christina that prefer or can afford the rental store experience or people who have become collectors of physical media and enjoy being able to have certain movies available to them without needing to pay a subscription or risk having that movie taken offline.These shops fall into the same category as vinyl record stores, comic book shops, and action figure toy shops. While they’re no longer products widely found in big box stores like Target or Walmart, or were items sold in defunct national chains like Blockbuster, Sam Goody, or Toys R Us, there is still need for them as a function, a collector’s item, or (in some cases) an archive for media
If you have an interest in movies or film, you may want to investigate if there is a similar video store in your area to support—and maybe find community there, too.
