Video Store Interview: Video Universe

Video Universe in Robbinsdale, Minnesota is the last video store in the Twin Cities area. For almost 40 years, it has rented VHS and DVDs to Minnesotans, surviving the rise and fall of Blockbuster Video, only to be brought down by the COVID pandemic and the dominance of streaming. Whenever I’m visiting home, I always liked to stop by and visit the store. I made my last visit back in February, and now the store will be closing on May 15th. I’m thankful to owner Scott Prost for talking with me about his favorite memories of the store, and his thoughts on the future of video stores and physical media.

When did you first start going to video stores?

I went to video stores probably right when home video hit, which would’ve been, as far as I can remember, I think in the early 1980s, cause I remember buying a expensive $1,000 or more Betamax player.

Do you remember one of the first films you rented?

I remember one of the first things was John Carpenter’s The Thing, a very early rental where we got everybody together to watch a movie at home.

Were there a lot of video stores in the Twin Cities back in the 1980s?

When it started, there weren’t a lot of video stores per se that were just renting movies. There were more places that were selling the hardware and on top of that, renting movies. I don’t think it had quite evolved where it was just flat out video stores at that time. It’s a long time ago, but I just remember that there were selling the hardware and renting movies and then it evolved where it was just standalone video stores.

So how did you start at Video Universe?

Well, I didn’t start the video store myself. I started out as one of the very first video stores in the city, Video Central. I was their first employee. So that must have been back in, oh my God, that would’ve been 1980, 1983 or something like that. I worked at that store for a few years and then somebody else opened up the store across the street and I ended up going over there and then I ended up owning that store, which is Video Universe. So there wasn’t really a video store that I was fond of, and once I started working at the store, I was just able to have access to movies.

Do you remember how many titles you had back in those early years?

Oh, there wasn’t very many at all. I remember there was the original set of Magnetic Video that came out. And then Fox started some kind of a program where they had a bunch of titles. But no, there wasn’t very many movies, and there was definitely was not the depth of copy that evolved later in the Blockbuster years.

Did you rent out both BetaMax and VHS until Betamax stopped being popular?

Video Central, where I started, that was one of the original franchise chains. Back in the early 80s, at Video Central we were carrying both Beta and VHS. We didn’t have laser discs, but we had the CED discs, the ones that were, you know, they were in the hard shell, and you put the whole thing in the player with the hard shell and the movie. I don’t know how those things worked.

Were the 90s the peak of the video stores?

Yeah, it had to be the 90s and early 2000s, the heyday of home video. There were so many of them all over the place. It was amazing. It gets me thinking about how many there were. But yeah, there were so many. And they had an annual video store convention in Las Vegas. And those were just, those were huge, with all the vendors selling supplies for video stores, all the studios that were marketing, both A and B titles and all the celebrities that were there. But that was a huge yearly event, the VSDA Convention.

Do you remember any celebrities you saw?

Oh, I think we saw, Martin Sheen, Janet Leigh, I think Debbie Reynolds was out there, cause I think she had a workout video. Yeah, anybody that had a workout video, I think Jane Fonda. But yeah, all the B-studios would bring in the celebrities and have them sign autographs for a couple hours, and they’d get huge lines for that.

I’ve heard that Jane Fonda won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the VSDA Convention for her Workout Videos.

Yeah, that was big in the day, all the workout videos.

Do you remember any of your most popular titles, films that rented the most?

Well, Grease was always huge. Dirty Dancing was big. Of course, we live in Minnesota, so Fargo was phenomenally big. Anything the Coen Brothers did was huge. Ghost was big. God, it’s been so many through the years. The Godfather. Titanic was huge.

How was it to compete with Blockbuster and Hollywood Video and other big chains?

Well, of course, there were so many huge national chains and then huge local chains. But it was just a battle to fight that depth of copy they had cuz people were willing to just jump from store to store to store to get that new title. But I think in the long run, well, I mean we’re closing now, but in the long run, you know, we succeeded just through the variety of titles and not the depth of copies. But we did have to get, you know, 20 or 25 copies of some of these titles. But of course they had like 200 copies of these movies.

So it was the breadth of your section that kept you going?

Oh, absolutely. Yes. It was the variety of everything. And not just to be dependent on the new releases. Those big chains, they ended up killing themselves off anyways by taking on so much corporate debt. Everybody would’ve been better off had they not destroyed the independent stores. To what extent there’d be more now at this point in time, I don’t know; people are streaming a lot now.

Was streaming hurting you before COVID, or did it really take off during COVID?

It took off because of Covid and afterwards it really accelerated after Covid, once they got a taste of it, cuz everybody was forced inside and then everybody evolved their own streaming platforms, you know, all this Hulu and Apple and Amazon Prime. And there’s all this product that is out there. And so much of it is not available on disk. They’re not releasing a lot of that stuff anymore, which is understandable because there’s just not that much of a market for it. It’s a big endeavor to try to mass produce all this stuff and get it out into the pipeline. And there’s not many places left to sell this stuff. You know, if you go into Target or Walmart, there’s just hardly any DVDs. There’s not much there. And what really didn’t help video rentals was probably gas prices going up as high as they did, because it just did not become economically a good deal for people to have to drive to the video store, to rent the movie, drive back home, and then make another trip back and forth to return it. With gas prices up to four or $5 a gallon or something, it didn’t work economically, I think, for a lot of people to run back and forth.

It’s interesting that actual video stores are struggling these days, but there’s this online nostalgia for Blockbuster and video store culture.

It’s funny, you know, we’re going out of business, we’re having a big sale, we’re selling our titles. And it seems to me that, you know, it’s almost like in order to get business, you have to be going out of business. Then all of a sudden everybody wants to come in when you’re closing, and they’re like, I haven’t been here for so long and, and you know, they’re all sad and everything, but, but I don’t know if you’re gonna get people to get out of their houses to engage with movie rentals anymore. The problem is that, you know, so many people come in and they’re asking for the same titles.

They’re looking for the stuff that’s not streaming, you know, and, and that’s continuously changing. I just heard that now what Netflix is not going to be doing movies through the mail anymore. So I thought, oh, maybe I picked the wrong time to close up the store. I don’t know. But it’s kind of interesting too that they’re discontinuing that one people when you know, people more and more staying at home to stream, but there’s not money to be made. And even shipping stuff, you know, I thought, oh, I have this great inventory, maybe I could have gotten into renting ’em online like Netflix with this huge selection I have. But I think the economics of that don’t work too well. You were asking whether video stores could come back again. I don’t know. I don’t really see it.

It seems like, on the one hand, people prefer to stay home these days, but on the other hand, they’re feeling cooped up. But they don’t realize they miss something till it’s gone.

Yeah, they really don’t. And that is the problem with home video, it requires two trips. That’s the problem. You gotta do it twice. I suppose if you get in a groove and you keep renting when you return stuff, it’s a little better. The people that have money, you know, they’ll stream and they’ll pay whatever, they don’t care. They’ll have multiple streaming services and whatever. It’s the people that don’t have the extra money that are the ones that needed home video rental. And still do, I mean, that’s what I’m finding, as I’m closing here, is that it’s like these older customers that don’t have all the streaming and or access to it or the money to that it costs to get that to do all that really needed the video store. But with gas prices going up, the expense of it just kind of got to our lower end customers who are willing to drive back and forth all that much.

On top of that, not being able to get these titles or movies or shows that they’ve heard about from other people, or you hear about. The Tom Hanks film Greyhound, I think has been the most requested, unavailable title that I can remember it was that so many people have come in asking for that. But it’s an Apple title, and they didn’t put it out on discc.

I don’t see the video store making a comeback. I think what really amazes me is the incredible interest in VHS tapes. That’s kind of gone crazy, seeing as they just don’t make the players anymore. And I don’t know if people are gonna be able to repair the ones they’ve got on hand. But that’s pretty amazing. I mean, I don’t think it’s gonna make a comeback in the way like vinyl has.

I’m part of that group, I’m a big VHS guy and yeah, it is funny how like, especially the last few years, it’s really blown up.

And I’ve still got a lot of tapes laying around. But yeah, especially the horror, horror movies are unbelievably collectable. It’s like the worse the title the more it’s worth.

Video Universe is the last video store in like the Twin Cities. Do you remember when Intercontinental Video and Movies on 35th Street closed?

Yeah, I bought the DVD inventory of Intercontinental Video, but some other guy came into town and he took all their VHS tapes. And the guy who owned Movies on 35th Street, I saw him a couple weeks ago. He’s still coming into the store every once in a while and renting movies. It’s kind of sad to be on the other end of it where I’m trying to sell inventory because I’ve always been, through the course of 25, 30 years, as each video store closed, I would go to the going out of business sale and just pick up titles that we didn’t have. And it was always an endless search for stuff that we needed in the collection. But I mean, I’ve probably been the most, the huge majority of the video stores sales that have closed in the Twin Cities, except for of course some of the Blockbusters or Hollywood videos, cuz a lot of that inventory was pretty redundant. But as the independent’s closed, I picked up stuff.

I’m from Roseville, and I went my local Hollywood Video growing up, but I know it used to be a Title Wave.

Yeah, they were a local chain. I think they had both music and movies. Wow, that’s a long time ago.

Looking back now, what are some of your favorite memories of running your store?

Well, part of it probably is just as we were talking about, was hunting down all these titles, finding things that we didn’t have in these video stores that were closing. That part of it was just being at the store or when it was crazy busy. You know, it was Friday nights and Saturday nights and it was just a lot of people. And people would get together or they’d run into their neighbors or friends, and yeah, it was a time. It was a time when the video starts were crazy. And helping people find titles or pick out titles or they’d return something and they’d say they liked that. Of course, you know, this was all before all the Netflix algorithms to, you know, if you like this, you’ll like that.

I mean, we didn’t even have the internet. So customers were more dependent on the employees that were there, or people working for input rather than just, I mean, now you can just go into your phone and say, movies like Greyhound, and you’ll get a list of titles. But yeah, it was fun. You had to be there when it was busy. Of course it had its drawbacks, cause with VHS tapes, you’d get people that would go like, oh, your tape wrecked my player. It’s your tape’s fault. And we’d be like thinking, no, it was your player has got a problem.

Did you have any horror stories with late fees over the years? People who would never return films?

Of course you have that, that’s just basically theft. They would do that, or you’d have the people that were continuously late. The late fee would get up to, you know, $200 and, oh, can you pay something down on this late fee? they’d get it down to $190. And of course the stuff they just rented would be late again, so it was like, it was just you continuously battle. And back in the day, the Robbinsdale Police Department, they used to actually go to people’s houses for us.

Really?

Yes, to get movies back. I mean, of course they don’t do that now, go knocking on somebody’s door, with their guns ready to go. But yeah, they would help us get stolen movies back.

Did you have any celebrities at the store?

We didn’t really have any celebrities. Joel Hodgson of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I remember he rented, oh God, that was so long ago. But yeah, we just didn’t get a lot of celebrities coming in.

How does it feel to be closing now?

I just think it’s too bad, with the turn everything has taken with all the streaming and so much stuff that’s gonna be unavailable to people and hard to find. It’s just too bad that video stores are going away.

I’m hopeful that video stores could come back, perhaps as a non-profit community organization, like Vidiots here in Los Angeles.

Yeah. But again, you’re gonna fight that battle with not having new releases. And I’m starting to wonder how long disks are going to last for, whether it’s starting to evolve, or if we’ll get more disk rot or something going on with a lot of these older, especially old Warner Brothers titles seem to have a lot of problems, what the lifespan of all these discs are, especially the life lifespan of all these Burn on Demand disks that Warner Archives are doing.

But yeah, more power to ’em if they can give it a shot. Keep it going.