I once again find myself nostalgic for video (rental) stores, and I’m trying to figure out what I would actually want from that experience today aside from the nostalgia itself (hard to live up to those expectations and rarely a recipe for a viable business or community space).

By any metric, I’m sure that today I have access to more media than I ever did at Blockbuster. It’s probably cheaper, too, but that’s harder to measure well; I think there are a bunch of confounding factors that make “cheaper” a difficult question, e.g. which streaming service has the thing I want and on what plan and is it really there or just tied in via some streaming-service-within-a-streaming-service add-on plan.

It’s easy to point to the modern media representation of the experience – that one super knowledgeable video store clerk who had exactly the right recommendation that you never knew you wanted and would never find on your own – as the thing I want, but that’s not an experience I ever really had. Has anyone? Feels more like a movie trope than an actual lived experience, let alone a common one.

Maybe it’s just the novelty? When I went to the video store, I’d get one movie or game. Today, I have access to effectively infinite libraries of media via all sorts of streaming services, not to mention all the free options like YouTube and podcast audio dramas.

I don’t really have an answer here. I’m not even sure I want one. Nostalgia is a weird thing. I remember the ritual that was visiting video store fondly, and maybe that’s enough. I wonder what I’m doing these days that will eventually become relics of the past that I am once again nostalgic for.