Well, do you? Because I sure do. They’re not totally gone yet, but they are clearly on their way out, and I figured that I would write down a few words about them before go the way of the record store.

To the young people of today, actually going to a brick and mortar store and looking over their selection and then renting something you have to return by hand must seem kind of old-fashioned and clumsy. They probably roll their eyes as their Generation X parents (people my age, in other words) drag them to Blockbuster excitedly and try to get them interested in the whole movie selection process, saying “I used to love coming to the video store when I was your age!”, like that made it any less lame. And even worse, parents my age telling them how getting stuff in the mail from Netflix is just “not the same”.

You’re right, Dad. It’s not the same. It’s better.

And it is better. That’s the thing. Heck, even old school Netflix is looking pretty old in the tooth now that you have things like Netflix Instant, which stream hundreds of thousands of titles to homes without a physical disc being involved in the slightest. No stupid “Netflix queue”, no waiting, no finding a mailbox, no not knowing what you will get, just instant access to the world of video content.

It’s so efficient it hurts. But it’s a good kind of hurt.

Well, don’t worry, kids. I am not going to try to convince you that the Good Old Days were somehow better for being slower, more complicated, more expensive, and all around stupider. I am not, by nature, that nostalgic. I know that life is ever unfolding and that to ask the world to stop just because I am growing older and it is getting harder and harder to adjust to change would be both sad and wrong. Everything I love in the world was born at the expense of something my parents’ generation loved, and what they loved replaced something their parents loved, and so on back through time. There’s nothing so special about my generation’s toys that makes them any different.

But I do want to think on video stores a while, simply because they are something that did not exist when I was born, came into existence well after I entered school, and are now fading with the sunset. They are, therefore, the first major cultural institution that I can think of that will have come and gone during my lifetime (first of many, I am sure) and so, for that alone, the video store deserves some recognition in the pages of my life.

And I was no casual bystander in the video store years. I was a very eager participant. In fact, I was on the front lines, or at the least, had relatives there.

You see, my grandfather, Clifford Gaudet, had C. J. Gaudet’s TV and Stereo Sales and Service, the small town electronics store that brought pretty much everything to my home town. He founded it way back in the days when radio was king, and each successive new thing (black and white TV, long playing records, color TV, stereo sound, the first VCRs, quadraphonic sound, and so on and so forth), so when the video revolution came along in the 80’s, my grandfather’s store was the only place to buy a VCR, and the only place to rent the videos as well.

And because my mother was my grandfather’s daughter, we always got good deals on the Latest Thing, and therefore we had a VCR, and rented videos, a little before others.

Of course, other video stores soon sprang up, and they became a frequent haunt of mine, replacing the video game arcades that I formerly inhabited. Now, instead of hanging around in arcades to get my video game fix, I just rented cartridges for my NES.

The drug was the same, but the dose per dollar was much, much higher.

In fact, for me, the video store was overwhelmingly the video game store. I rented movies now and then, but with limited allowance funds to invest, it just made a whole lot more sense to rent a video game that would give me dozens of hours of entertainment over a movie that would give, at most, two.

Besides, cable television provided all the passive viewing action I could ever have wanted. Muchmusic (Canadian for “MTV”) alone kept me busy a lot of the time.

Nevertheless, I spent a lot of time at the video stores in my area. They just seemed to be where things happened, and best of all, they were the place where I could, if I was lucky, talk to other people about the movies and video games I loved.

Back then, as now, good conversation was one of my primary needs. So hanging out at the video store had many benefits for me, even if I got chastised now and then for “pestering” people. Heck, I was used to it from my days as an arcade brat anyhow.

But then the Internet came along and suddenly, getting my video game fix at home was just a little piracy away. So the trips to the video game store petered out over time, and I would have to say that my days of going to video game stores ended at almost exactly the same time as the end of the SNES.

Video stores and I had a great time together, and I will always look back on those times fondly. They were islands of mental stimulation and color in my sleepy little town. I felt almost at home in them.

That said, I don’t really miss them. How sad can I be about them passing when it has not even occurred to me to go to one in at least six years? And I have one quite close to me. I could go any time I wanted. It’s not even a block away. I just have no use for them any more.

So farewell, video stores. I won’t be there when you finally go, but I was there at the beginning and I am glad for all the fun times we had together.