Since my last experience at Blockbuster Video, we’ve been doing all of our Netflix overflow renting from Hollywood Video. Having exhausted our allotment of Netflix videos quickly due to illness and laziness, we decided to hit our local Hollywood yesterday. While wandering around the New Release section, we started to get a bit weirded out, due in large part to the fact that there were way more non-New Release movies in there than normal. Also, they all had ‘Buy this DVD for $14.99’ stickers on them, instead of 3/4s of them like usual.
Getting worried, I finally approached an employee and asked — in my best ‘what I’m about to imply couldn’t possibly be true, right?’ — inflected speech whether or not they do actually rent movies or not.
“Oh, no. We do not. Everything’s for sale in this store,” was the ‘you gotta be kidding me’ inflected answer I was given.
Apparently Hollywood Video has decided to make this particular location into a Hollywood Video Outlet in the week since I’ve rented there, to better serve their customers.
I just don’t get it. Both Hollywood and Blockbuster wanted to rule the home video rental marketplace for years, ruthlessly forcing all the mom and pop video rental stores out of business. So now they’ve got what they want, but they’re both doing their damnedest to keep from having to actually rent videos to people.
