The Better Mousetrap

Let me tell you a story...when I was 18 in 1987, I went to work for an independently owned video rental store in Oak Ridge, NJ. It was owned by a man named Ed Malvey, and for 4-5 years off and on, myself and his other employees helped grow the business to be, at least to my perception, quite successful. There was only one other video store in town, which had bad customer service. We, however, had a popcorn machine, a killer candy counter, and since everyone who worked there loved to watch movies, we gave great customer service. Our customers trusted us to help them choose movies for them, and to let them know what the stinkers were. It was not only a good job, it was a fun job.

A couple of years after I'd left the business, the owner heard a Blockbuster was coming to town, and made plans to close the video store and do something different. He believed there was no way he could compete, and he may have been right. Back then, Blockbuster was seen as the diva of the video rental world, better than any other such company. Personally, I felt the stores to be horribly common denominator, only stocking tons of the most obvious titles, while customer service simply devolved into asking if they had a particular title or not. But as I clearly am not a typical consumer (not a boast) I was wrong about Blockbuster, and for many years the chain floiurished, putting indie stores out of business with their lower pricing and copious concessions. It reminded me of the times I spent with Musicland Inc., the company that owned Sam Goody, Suncoast Video, Musicland, and Media Play stores. That company was the top music retailer in the nation in 1991, and it didn't look like that was going to change any time soon.

But, as with all evolutions, things change. And in the case of video rentals and sales, the change that altered the industry forever and will continue to do so, is singular: the internet.

It started slowly, with online video retailers popping up, mostly catering to speciality genres that video stores tend to be unkind to, like horror and foreign film. Blockbuster's selection looked shoddy and lazy alongside these competitors. And then in 1999...Netflix. I have been a Netflix subscriber for about 7 years now, so I'm kind of a veteran. While deciding to join, I logged onto the site and checked to see if they had some obscure titles I was interested in. They had them. Other titles I checked were unavailable anywhere at the time, and when they became so, I emailed Netflix to advise them. With about 6 weeks, they were stocking the titles. I was being given better customer service by an unseen phantom at the other end of my modem than I'd ever gotten from Blockbuster.

The other factor that is the bigger bugaboo for the rental industry, is the exponential increase in computer processor's speed and the velocity of the internet itself. Remember trying to download video clips online back in '99? More frustration than it was worth. Today, I watched two documentaries for free on Netflix without a buffering message in sight.

Now it may sound like I'm rooting for Blockbuster's demise, but I'm not. Netflix built the better mousetrap, and Blockbuster will struggle to work their way out of bankruptcy and fight back. But thinking back to my personal vdeo store employee days, I miss the one thing I also miss about downloading music or buying books online: human interaction. We laughed and joked with our customers, and got into talks and debates about the movies. We waited to see what a customer would think of a film we'd recommended to them. My boss and I would debate what titles we ought to stock. Netflix is great, but I feel like I'd need to form a film society to get back the kind of anima that was so easily obtained back then. The same is true of music stores nowadays (less so of books). The personal touch is virtually vanished. Now some people don't care about that. They want convienience and the top ten titles at their beck and call and have no desire to dig deeper. But some of us do, and a computer is, ultimatley, far worse at helping with that than an actual person.

I hope Blockbuster survives. I think by using far less retail outlets with sizably improved selecions, they might. Maybe just have Blockbuster Supercenters that strive to be the best damn video store in a given major city, and throw the rest of their business into video on demand and online renting. That's just my thought, for what it's worth. For now the better mousetrap is Netflix...how long will it be before someone re-unlocks the human interaction aspect of the business, and we all get to glare at a new one?