The lost civic life of movie rental stores
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
People used to frequent in person things like specialty retailers, arcades, hobby clubs, religious groups, etc. When you meet real life people in person based on shared interests, you make connections across socioeconomic groups.
I just don't see nearly as much of this in todays society as 20+ years ago.
People with kids sometimes experience this via all the activities they take their kids to, but even there a lot of kids activities have become economically stratified. Instead of playing in the local $50/year rec baseball league, there's tiers of travel teams to meet any budget.
This is something welcome I didn’t expect to come from parenthood. Like many others I had thought to myself “how do you even make new friends in your thirties?!” and then once I had kids… bam. New friendship groups.
For us the local park and playground are a great equalizer in terms of economic stratification. But when the weather turns bad it rears its head again as people head to $50 a go trampoline parks and the like.
Public school is another unifier, of course. I’m in NYC and our preschool was very obviously not a reflection of the neighborhood or city around us. But once my kids entered the city-funded Pre-K they started to meet a ton of kids from different backgrounds. It’s very different from the childhood I had but I’m very glad my kids have it.
When we're young, we have nothing but time spent together. As adults, who spend an hour at the local park with some kids, those relationships require more effort to grow.
We have a few friends we've made through our kid, and it definitely takes more work to maintain - but it's been very worth it so far.
It was so easy to make strong bonds as a kid, captive with other kids in a building most of the time. Now there is a cost:benefit I have to weigh a persons worth to me against.
FTFY ;-)
The movie buff at the blockbuster.
The music fiend at the local record shop
The gamer at the mom & pop game store.
The guy at Egghead Software who would let me play battle chess for hours.
Of course there are millions of them online these days, but that face-to-face interaction with the local officanado was a different thing. It wasn't a forum. And oddly, it wasn't a library either - it was a place of business - but it didn't feel like one in those moments.
Nerding out with a local stranger over a movie or a game or a band was something very different from what we do today. It was a different way for the local nerds to shine, while making a living adjacent to the things they knew so well.
Yeah, there are some things I'm not nostalgic for at all.
I was half joking with a friend that I want a everything-middle-aged-man-store open weekends (and maybe 5-8pm thursday/friday) that carries a hodge hodge of physical media, used hobby kit and maybe serves espressos/teas, does hair cuts.. and maybe do some basic EV car maintenance like tire rotation/annual state safety inspection.
Some place I can take care of needs and also enjoy some wants.
I love that vinyl has remained relevant. I believe that's true because of the record shop experience. It's one of the few places, besides maybe a cocktail bar, where you can expect to converse with a local expert at length while they're simply doing their job.
Employees got to put on whatever music they wanted.
I should ask my friend who worked there—but there was a lot of fun they had with that. Perhaps, with their musical selections playing on the store speakers, they were even trolling some customers from time to time.
(I know they enjoyed playing John Foxx's single "Endlessly" when Ann Lassley was in the store since it sounded like Foxx was singing her name.)
I believe the social feedback is what have gotten so bad. Too much bog corps and remote landlords to care.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0807042013?lv=shuf&channelId=500&p...
I spent so many hours at our local mall with my friends growing up. It had an arcade, a movie theater, book store, game store, place to eat. Our parents could just drop us there for hours. Skating rinks and bowling alleys were also a solid option.
It's one of the things that make it worth the time investment to follow sports, even if you're typically not interested in it. Getting people together to watch the game, go to games, tailgate, etc is huge.
From what I can tell skating rinks and bowling alleys are still reasonably popular especially when you factor for entertainment centers that have mini bowling alleys (much more common now).
One thing that I've realized as I have gotten older, arcades have changed a lot. Dave and Busters and other arcades are designed to extract money as quickly as possible. When I was younger, if you were good at a game you could keep playing so my friends and I got very good at these games.
While not totally covered by a cover charge, there's also an arcade called Nickelrama. Cover charge, and then all games cost like 1-6 nickels.
There's a brand called Cidercade (used to be very affiliated with a cidery), they've apparently got a location in Austin as well. Similar story, $12 cover, all games included.
There is also Pixel Palace in Round Rock that has no cover but most games are 25 cents.
Austin Toy Museum has a bunch of arcades ($17 entrance fee). Austin Pinball Collective for mostly pinball.
Pinballz is good too but expensive and does the Dave and Busters model, however, most of their classic arcades are cheap to play.
It had been a middle/upper middle class mall back then - big fast food filled food court, Macys/Filenes/Lord&Taylor, it even eventually got (and lost) an Apple Store.
It was essentially empty and the stores had all gone down market. The nicest clothing store was H&M, and a bunch of storefronts were taken over by random nameless resale small businesses.
Some are rundown, but theres thousands that are well kept. They just aren't the main shopping hubs they used to be, mostly boutique stores, coffee shops, barber shops, etc.
I stopped using Amazon early last year (because Canadian). I was forced to find local shops for the stuff I was getting online and, to my surprise, a lot of those specialty retailers are still out there. Some are a bit more expensive. Some are, surprisingly, not. At many places, the staff are still a fantastic resource.
There's a world beyond Amazon that's still out there, alive and kicking. All you have to do is stop making Amazon your first and last place to look for things.
That's assuming I can find a local person or shop. Sometimes I luck up like I found a guy who sharpens basically everything with a blade. I found a tailor who is willing to make fulfill these insane request I have like create me a set of mini-crab sheets made from bamboo. But then, I can't anyone who sells a safety can opener or a jar opener that actually works well (most are crap). Toys feel impossible if you don't want plastic crap. So on, so on. Buying local is a really hard when you're in a small town. I think 100K or more is the sweet spot where it's probably possible.
It sounds good in principle. And I was very excited when discovering the Internet (Usenet) and a place to discuss all my geeky interests with many similar minded people.
However, now that the Internet has so overpowered in person relationships across the board, the cost in mental health, anxiety and general unhappiness is staggering.
If you live in a society that really devalues everything you like, having that online outlet is the difference between giving up on life[1], and being passionate.
Imagine being told you're broken because you like books, movies, and video games, and having almost every aspect of society reinforce that message.
[1] Not in the suicide sense, but in the "Life will always suck" sense.
Going to a university in a city helped a lot with that. Long conversations about comic books with friends, going to the nearby comics store on new release day with lots of other nerds, etc.
I’m no longer convinced adding the Internet to that has been a net positive. Maybe if we could have froze its growth and development at some specific point…?
Meetup could be superceded by the hitch/tinder model to organize activities with individuals over scheduled events ran by organizers.
It wasn't a disaster until megaplatforms came alone.
The shift to the algorithmic "Feed" established adversarial incentives across the board - the platforms are incentivized to addict and enrage, the individuals are incentivized not to be vulnerable for friends, but to be viral and get approval of the public, since if your posts don't perform for strangers, the algorithm won't even show them to your closest friends.
The Internet gave us an easier way to make "friends" with no apparent downsides, only to rugpull us all as soon as most of the 'pre-Internet' places and social habits had been completely destroyed. Now we are all obviously lonely and hate the Internet mess, but whole generations are now too awkward to even speak to others in person, just from lack of experience.
We may recognize a handle on a forum, but most of the time we don't know anything about the other person other than a narrow part of their interests.
And I’m the nerd minority who “couldn’t wait to get out of this place.”
Now, I would still go to a big city where I could find people with similar interests. But the cost to society of all the Internet has wrought has been far too high.
A good jiujitsu gym is pretty amazing for this. It's a melting pot of people from all socioeconomic and political groups. It's great exercise, can be done at any age, and at any level. It also cannot be done alone. After you spend 5 minutes trying to choke someone and them you, it's hard to not have a conversation after.
Unfortunately, because it's become so popular it's gotten expensive, sometimes >$100/month.
When I was living in Iran, we didn't need a hobby club to meet people, you just picked up the phone and everyone came over. I have vivid memories of going on trips with 5 cars filled with people
When I went to Peru with my wife to meet her extended family, it was very similar. Heck you can just randomly talk to people and meet them. At 9PM, the streets are exploding with people in Arequipa or Tehran.
The biggest difference is that in the West, people have the idea of "personal space", which doesn't really exist in some culture. People are seen more as one, rather than many. Of course this has its own downsides, but I suppose nothing is perfect.
Isn't this the whole point of the discussion? How do you initially get to know people?
The era when people semi-hung out at shops wasn't the "glory days" but their end. The era, that I get only historical research, where you had broad socializing was the era of clubs organized around neighborhoods and interests. American society was pretty isolated by the 1950s and only got more so after that.
I remember everyone was stressed out all the time. Attitude was sorta: "I did not drive all this way just for you nor to be told...". Karen was not just that one lady. It was everyone. Customer service was objectively worse in most places than it is today. Hearing screaming babies and feeling carsick all the time was just a fact of life. Food was worse. Cars were ugly and slow. Disgusting smells were inescapable. People had no shame and were not shy with the vulgarities.
I suspect the audience pining for those days is split between the would-be perpetrators of the unpleasantness and younger people not knowing what to expect.
I implore those young people to search for "peopleofwalmart" and then imagine overhearing the worst parts of reddit in real life.
Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone talks about the decline of community in America but the decline of community inside shops isn't mentioned because it never really existed. Taverns - yes, community once exist there but that was destroy by Prohibition, ie a long time ago. Cafe community in the US actually grew into existence in the 90s in my observation of the US.
Whatever happened to pubs and the shared interest of drinking beer (and getting drunk in the process ...)? ;-)
Just battered from every possible direction
A lot of these organizations, you go there to share an interest, and you walk in and they're not really talking about their interest. To be blunt: a lot of them are just a bunch of old men griping about old-man things, making old-man jokes that were acceptable in the '80s, bringing up (ahem) old-man politics... This kind of stuff is kryptonite to a 25 year old who wants to join your club.
This is pretty much exactly what the local HAM radio org was in the place I used to live. I went to one meeting and noped out of there pretty quickly.
I thought - in 2026, we can instead text, buy shoes and eggbeaters (?) online, stream / scroll content on devices, order restaurant food on DoorDash and groceries on Instacart.
We’re told “you’ll no longer have to” and “now you’ll be able to” with each new technological development. But there’s always a hidden “now you’ll have to” and “you’ll no longer be able to”.
People think UBI will unleash creativity and people will engage in their true calling in life. I don't see that happening. I see people sinking more of their lives into things that are at war for their eyeballs.
But you can still do all those things from the book. Don't do the things you don't want to do.
In 2026, most people don’t use technology to buy groceries or order food. Those people are a minority.
You'd crack eggs into a bowl, stick the whisk in, and turn the crank. The end result was a homogenized mix of yolk and white, good for cooking with
If NOT we need it! Really needs to happen behind the scenes or this will turn into AI talking to AI.
I do lament the decline of brick-and-mortar retail somewhat, but I think it is holding on stronger than what I would have assumed in some cases.
Aka the only food that's adapted to delivery, or almost.
Nowadays mailing any letter is pretty rare as most people communicate via text, email, etc but it is still absolutely possible to do so.
And yes the red flag is to indicate a letter needs to be picked up for delivery.
> The Congress shall have Power… To establish Post Offices and post Roads
With that one of the hallmarks of the USPS is they really strive to service every person in the country no matter how remote.
The fact they’ve turned it into a “business” and not a public good is really a tragedy.
Yes.
One of my surprises when moving from the US to the UK were that I couldn't mail a letter from my house (and also how expensive the postage is!)
Subs blew my mind because for almost all my childhood it was only pizza and Chinese.
I was at a friend's house and they got them for the whole family, couldn't believe it.
Then in cities, at first, it was like any ethnic food.
Then that crazy bastard started taking photos of people's menus.
I don't get the reference. Is this a startup origin story?
I do think we've lost a lot of "civic life" in the past few decades but video rental stores aren't anything I remember fondly.
Movie stores were even designed to move people through them as fast as possible too because the more people standing around clogging up the store, the less people that are coming in are going to be willing to browse movies and rent extras. There is a reason they didn't have benches or chairs for people to sit around on idly watching the movies they were playing on the walls.
I worked at a GameStop-like store for my first job. We had regulars come in to trade games all the time and they would chat it up with us (the clerks) for long periods of time about various games. It had a similar function. Across from us was the music store and their employees were generally quite passionate about music and loved to discuss it. Rarely did it create an enduring friendship but that kind of social interaction has declined for sure.
Vidiots: https://vidiotsfoundation.org/history-mission/
Video Journeys: https://conorholt.medium.com/video-store-interview-video-jou... (Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne)
Video Active: Down the street, they kept a stock popular with visual artists although reviews concentrate on other content (https://www.yelp.com/biz/video-active-los-angeles)
Video Archives: https://www.bbc.com/articles/c4g40ndzpe0o (Tarantino)
Anyway I only went to movie rental stores during the brief two-year window in the mid-2000s between owning a DVD player (never had VCR, we were too poor) and having broadband internet so I could pirate movies.
One thing I think is that theres just never enough time. Everyone is so over-scheduled. The white collar work day really has expanded vs what I remember my dad doing 30-40 years ago. There's more two income households than in the past. Parenting is far more active for both parents than it's ever been, and kids are being shuttled between events all weekend.
Most local shops are not open past 5pm or at best 6pm, and often closed Sunday. Who is off work by then to stop by?
Easier to click buy on amazon, and stop by the big box store after dinner Saturday open til 9pm for anything you need sooner.
This applies to adjacent industries as well. I semi-regularly get email from firms (in the same time zone as mine) in the 11PM–2AM range.
Again, I'm not purporting to have any more experience than you do, but you can't assert that this is a tech-industry-only phenomenon when I am sure applicable examples other than my own could be found. I wish I could go without, but spending the first billable hour catching up on email is not really acceptable.
Sample size of six jobs total, three per person.
when i get off work i would absolutely (and do) shop at stores that are open.
i stopped 90% of online shopping a couple years ago so once i regained the lay of the land of where to get what, shopping at mom and pop stores is tough since they seem to close right when everyone gets off work.
larger chain stores seem to keep longer hours so they get more of my business than i’d like. even then i’m still happier than when i bought everything online, no question about it.
Obvious anecdata, but within an easy walk or bike radius of me (a couple miles) there are 3 public libraries, something like half a square mile of parks, a few public basketball courts, a few public tennis courts, a public baseball field, a bar over the baseball field that welcomes children (it’s one of the veterans things and has board games and what not), at least a dozen other businesses that don’t care if you buy anything, and your usual litany of Walmart kind of places that can’t be bothered to track who is buying and who isn’t.
I don’t have any issues finding places to hang out for free, and I use them, but they’re pretty sparsely used so it’s not as 3rd space as it used to be.
Eg I walk my dogs most mornings, and I rarely see more than 1 other person at the park or dog park at 7 or 8am.
It feels to me like 3rd spaces are disappearing because people don’t use them, rather than people don’t use them because they don’t exist.
This place IS the supposed '3rd world shithole' that Republicans say. That the libraries, the legacy from the early Carnegie 1900's billionaires, are now the climate refuge and place to try to succeed for the homeless.
We (royal) fail so many humans, prey on the absolute conquest of 'make more money at all costs'.
Great job, Gen-X parents.
For most of my 13 year old kid's friends, I only know their grandparents. Never see the actual parents.
There are families out there still with 18-20 year cycles and could pretty much tick off every generation.
And families like mine that more or less skip every other: Silent -> X -> Z -> ???.
It's like how Twister is super fun to play with your friends casually but how you'd never want to play in an organized Twister league.
Presumably because people spend less money there than they used to.
> I'd bet in most communities their funding/availability has decreased in that time period.
It's one of the tragedies of our age. The inability to fund anything for the common good.
People voted with their wallets.
> public libraries are under constant attack by republicans
Voters get the services they vote for.
All of us are to blame.
I think we mostly all agree that we as a society caused the problem, but we can't go back and undo that. Constructive would be coming up with ways we can, given the past did take place, improve things going forward.
We can vote for politicians that fund projects and facilities for general use and welfare. We can congregate more in the malls and community centers and bowling alleys (and churches too, if that's your style), that we still have. The loss of community isn't irreversible. Yet.
Putting aside the increasing efforts to limit our ability to vote for change, we have to fight against very well funded campaigns trying to convince people that we shouldn't fund projects and facilities for general use and welfare. There's a lot money and power being used to encourage people to be more isolated as well. The public is growing less educated and more fearful. People have fewer friends, fewer social skills, and historically high levels of anxiety and depression.
While there may still be places to go, the ones that don't cost money are going away or at risk, and the problem goes deeper than access to physical spaces. Some things will have to change before we can expect people to really take advantage of what spaces we have left.
It's hard to feel bad about a small backwoods town of idiots who vote to shut down their public libraries (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/book-ban-lgbtq-jamestown-michig...) but there are efforts on the federal level too (https://www.ala.org/faq-executive-order-targeting-imls). Right wing nutjobs all over the country have been threatening library staff and calling in bomb threats and we can't vote them out
I guess California is pretty nice and I don't appreciate this all enough lol
The way things are going maybe we'll get back to those wonderful days. ;)
In theory, the adults were hunting or fishing (although not with pointy sticks). In reality they were smoking, drinking, playing cards, screwing around on the little boat and atvs that were there (three wheelers!), and telling lies around a campfire. Us kids were pretty much on our own the entire time. We too were smoking, drinking, and screwing around on the boat and atvs.
So I agree with you- pointy stick hunting is a great weekend activity.
So many bug bites.
But that is certainly not the norm, im not sure if I could find another hardware store like it within 100 miles. The social atmosphere probably barely manages to bring in the extra business needed to maintain it and it took 3 consecutive generations working well enough together and towards their customers to never break the strong community bond.
Any place you have to physically go to provides a chance for social interaction. To debate your friends over what movie to pick, to comment on your neighbor's selections, to ask a clerk for a recommendation. Are these pretty slight? Sure, but life is made fuller by these minor brushes, and you never know which ones will unexpectedly bloom into something more.
I've been thinking about offering free videos in town somehow. Taking my collection of various movie media. Anyone have something like this? Like a free library for film, or a corner of someone's storefront?
[EDIT]
Can't not mention https://scarecrowvideo.org if we're talking video rental survivors.
Wait, is this a career option I should have been aspiring to? I wonder if it's too late...
Kids desperately need third spaces too.
In the mid-2000s, my hometown decided to build a town square. They put it at the edge of town next to the train station, where it would look nice for commuters but not where people lived so it was always empty.
The near universal proliferation of owner's associations and management groups and whatnot is something you can lay square at the feet of the environmentalists.
Some big commercial developer developing a subdivision in 1970 would've allocated a couple lots as a park owned by the city or town. I live in a neighborhood like this.
Now those empty lots and the exact layout of plantings on them are a key part of the green space on the site plan that makes the bullshit spreadsheet math that is required for your stormwater or environmental math to pass requirements. And and some legal entity has to be responsible for that in perpetuity. Enter the HOA. And of course then they make all this stuff private because they can market the units in the development better that way.
This was exactly the subdivision I grew up in. The "park" was just a few vacant lots in the middle of the neighborhood. That's all it was for years, eventually the city put in a shelterhouse and a couple of picnic tables, a basketball court, and a baseball diamond.
If other visitors try to police it, which invariably escalates, the staff kick out the person trying to police it.
For video stores, there's Retro Rewind: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3552140/Retro_Rewind__Vid...
There are also games like that for trading-card stores, video arcades, and record stores.
(I'm probably going to buy the record store one, "Wax Heads." Being a music-genre nerd and recommending bands to people is a fantasy that I was born 10 years too late to do in real life.)
I never had conversations with employees or patrons in the video store.
The time spent in that store was enjoyable enough but nothing to write home about. It was mostly a functional experience to get something to watch. You could even argue that it was a waste of your time on a Friday evening when you were ready to start your weekend.
The only experience I can recall that matches the article is after Blockbuster took over the video rental world, there were a few local rental places that focused on the love of movies, with a diverse selection and knowledgable staff. These places probably paid the rent with porn rentals, usually in an adjoining room, but the love of movies was always palpable. It was a lot like the article describes. I remember going to one in the early-2000s and renting the original Frankenstein movie (the one with Boris Karloff), something Blockbuster would never stock, much less have staff that even knew there was an original movie. And, yeah, I remember talking to the clerk about it; he ran down the list of all the Frankenstein spin-off movies.
Blockbuster may have not been the best for finding old niche classics but if your goal was to find anything mainstream released in the 80s or 90s it was great.
Many clerks were passionate about the movies even at Blockbuster, as it was one of the best places to get access to movies at a time when it was a lot of work and effort to even get ahold of a few hundred titles back then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEEj6d3GTOU
I don't think any movie could better capture the atmosphere and culture of a 1980s video store better than "Clerks." For example, the various types of annoying video store customers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9khHJTztKk
Ordering obscene videos from the warehouse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwFjw798mPI
And some period-era fanfic filmed in an IRL video rental store.
You did. It was a fairly widespread thing.
Although "The video store was always just a means to an end for me" indicates that you excluded yourself from this, rather than missing out on it.
We do the exact same thing now except use a phone or tablet.
Plus, pre-smartphone, most people (note: not saying all people) loved talking to other people, so even a movie store employee who wasn't a major film buff would be someone you could build up a rapport with just based on the fact that you're a regular who talks with them. My dad was that way with most of the staff at dozens of the small businesses in town, and even the 'corporate' places like McDonald's, etc.
Just having everything listed on 50 different streaming platforms isn't the same experience. There are things we really lose with efficiency gains.
Well, they were a business after all. And what's being romanticised is the civic experience of that bygone era. The modern experience sucks. It is devoid of any real human interaction. That is highly missing part in the modern landscape and it will only get worse.
[0] https://www.dailycamera.com/2017/02/27/the-video-station-bou...
At Morris Video, our tapes were available as long as they played (we never switched to DVD). There was no option for the distributor to pull inventory and there were no contracts between Morris and the studios. We bought the tapes for a fixed fee, we rented the tapes as long as we could.
The result was a library that included material that was (at the time) impossible to access anywhere else in town, and that could survive the collapse, acquisition or whims of Hollywood distributors.
Today, the studios can and do change the content of films you have 'purchased' digitally (The French Connection is the best recent example) and our access to the material is governed by some impenetrable and revokable contract, and the catalogs on offer pale in comparison to Morris if you're looking for older outside of the mainstream.
There are benefits to the new mode for sure: Radically lower barrier to entry for independent creators, instant access to quite large libraries, lower priced films than peak physical media.
I don't really want to go back to having a huge wall of DVDs or tapes, but I would prefer to live in the world of simpler licensing and ownership.
I've kind of half joked with my wife about the idea of opening a modern video rental place there. We both lament the loss of a place or you could go and chit chat about movies.
The common refrain is "no one even owns DVD players anymore" to which I say "we'd rent them out too, for a couple dollars a night". I'm sure if I went around garage sales one weekend I could get a stack of them.
My wife's idea is to have a number of rooms people could rent for a couple hours for viewing movies in spaces done up in the style of various eras TV rooms.
It's kind of depressing just how hard it's become to even try to connect with people through modern media. It's so disposable. I try to talk to my friends about music for instance and the refrain is basically "I don't know, I just put Spotify on". Basically no one's heard of let alone seen most of the shows I watch, nor I theirs.
The modern world is a weirdly lonely existence.
South Park did an episode where Randy Marsh does this
I've been kind of puzzled, since the first time I gave it any thought, why "going to a movie" is culturally thought of as an activity one does with a companion, even a date. Much like dining out in a sit-down restaurant. Yet the expectation is that you sit in silence for 2 hours and spend maybe 5-10 minutes critiquing or raving as you walk out.
But now I'm wondering if the custom of doing this together is a vestigial one, formed in a time when the 'going to the cinema' was a more social event even as late as the drive-in era (I have never experienced a drive-in).
Because after going to the movie, you've all seen it, and so can talk about it with each other.
> spend maybe 5-10 minutes critiquing or raving as you walk out.
It's not just for that trip, but it'll be a shared touchpoint. And if it's something you really enjoyed, it's something you'll be able to talk about together for years—like going to see Star Wars as a kid.
But a lot of people view these activities as the objective itself (like work) and leave immediately, losing out on the social activity.
Let me unpack a little bit.
I very rarely go to movies and really haven't for years. So it isn't a social activity so mostly won't except for the odd shoe in IMAX.
I will go see live theatre with someone or maybe a group. But am also perfectly happy to do so on my own.
As to meals? I'm so inured to solo meals with business travel I don't think twice. Enjoy eating with friend(s) whether in a business or purely social context. But it's not like I'm going to order room service or go to McDonalds if I don't have anyone to sit with.
I think it was a lot harder when I was 18 because I saw being alone as a reflection on my worth as a person.
But, yeah, looking back I think I was a lot less inclined to just eat by myself in a restaurant--partially because I could often rope someone else in or would know people if I went into a dining hall and partly because I wasn't accustomed to just having a meal without anyone else around.
Movies were good for awkward teen dates when it's probably a supplemental activity to hanging out between class or after school, but as an adult I think they are not great for first dates because you don't get the time to talk or interact. Still fine as a date night for a regular relationship.
Now things flutter in and out of availability, and are fragmented between countless different services. In 1999, though, a visit to Blockbuster and/or my well-stocked film-geek local store would get me pretty much anything I wanted to watch.
My hometown of Los Alamos has a video store called Film Festival. It's still in business, still renting tapes, DVDs, etc. When I went back to visit a few years ago I was amazed
Facebook jumped the shark when it eliminated customization and forced everyone to have the same personal page.
"Pieces of Flair" and a thousand other ways to express yourself were extinguished, along with any actual "social" aspects of Facebook.
you either disappear like tumblr or you stay up long enough to turn into a dumpster fire.
What universe is this person from? I must have missed it...
The screaming and explosions from the movie trailers playing full blast on a non-stop loop throughout the store over the PA didn't help.
The 1980s were a simpler time.
Tavern?
I understand this is just subjective with a sample size of 1.
Anyone else find the same, or was it some kind of great movies social hub?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TrPwOrf4sM
"What's so poignant about this time is the uncertainty"