Photo: Flickr / The MIT Press Reader.
Hollywood Video was a VHS, DVD, and video game rental shop company started in 1988. It ceased operations, after declaring bankruptcy, in 2010.
Today’s story reminds us how much the old video stores provided a hangout for like-minded people. You can probably think of analogies, from certain coffee shops to high-end record stores of the 1960s. I remember one of those in New York City that my friends loved. It had enclosed listening booths that were like old-time phone booths. You could ask the staff to let you listen to a record, and off you’d go. They did get tired of teens who didn’t end up buying the record, though.
Joshua M. Greenberg writes at MIT Press, “If a DVD owner from the year 2005 found herself transported back to a video store circa 1982, she would likely find the space remarkably familiar: videocassette cases lining the walls, a movie playing on a television set, maybe some marquee lights framing an announcement board over the checkout counter — all in all, not terribly unlike the video store of two and a half decades later.
“However, understanding the video store simply as a transactional space in which money is exchanged for goods and services misses the forest for the trees.
“That same time-traveling video renter might find herself startled by the employee offering to recommend a movie, or by the knot of customers hanging out by the counter, shooting the breeze and discussing film. The early video store was often a place to talk as well as to shop, and the persona and expertise of retailers and clerks structured the consumer experience of home video as much as the shelves on the wall. …
“Consider the English pub, the French café, the German beer garden, or the American tavern: These are places where patrons can buy food or drink. But an analysis that focuses only on the producer/consumer exchange would overlook the vital role these and other spaces play in establishing and maintaining broader social relationships. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg describes such spaces as ‘third places.’ … Such places serve to unite the neighborhood through simple, day-to-day interaction. For example, Oldenburg writes, ‘In many [American] communities, the post office served this function well when everyone had a mailbox there; when everybody had to walk or drive to it.’ …
“As Oldenburg puts it, ‘Nothing more clearly indicates a third place than that the talk there is good; that it is lively, scintillating, colorful, and engaging.’
“This orientation toward lively conversation was also a social leveler; third places ‘counter the tendency to be restrictive in the enjoyment of others by being open to all and by laying emphasis on qualities not confined to status distinctions current in the society. Within third places, the charm and flavor of one’s personality, irrespective of his or her station in life, is what counts.’ Another core attribute of third places is the sense of shared ownership among its regulars, regardless of who actually owns the building. ‘Those who claim a third place typically refer to it in the first person possessive (“Rudy’s is our hangout”).’ …
“The traditional story told about home video is that its sudden appearance fragmented the moviegoing audience into individuals. As [sociologist Richard Butsch] and others have argued, home video helped the viewing public wall themselves off in their separate living rooms. What this argument misses, however, is the shared practice of acquiring those tapes and then watching them at home — in its early years, the video store became a third place where customers, retailers, and clerks met, talked, and shared a common experience of movies on videocassette. …
“While clerks were usually seen as the in-store experts, the flow of information was by no means unidirectional. Many of the earliest video store customers were film buffs themselves, and the lucky clerk who happened to be working when one came in might be in for an education. ‘I remember [one customer who] really knew the old stuff . . . like old B movies and serials,’ says Lance Strate, who worked at Arthur Morowitz’s Video Shack in the early 1980s. ‘That’s where I first learned about Tom Mix and the Phantom Empire’.” …
“At their best, video clerks and store owners fostered a true third-place atmosphere in their stores. ‘There was always conversation in our store,’ recalls Jerry Frebowitz, owner of Philadelphia’s Movies Unlimited. ‘Especially on Saturdays . . . there was so much film talk going on. Total strangers were talking to each other; it was really a phenomenon.’ Though his customers always came to rent a movie, Frebowitz says, ‘They definitely stayed to talk . . . hardly anybody came in to get the movie and leave.’ ”
More at MIT Press, here. What other third places can you think of? Alternatively, are there places where people with shared interests gather and no one gets to know anyone else? I thought yoga classes were disappointing in that regard.
