Employee profile
What was the name of your video store?
Video City
Where was the store located?
Moraga, California (United States)
When did you start working at this store?
1987
In your own words, how did you get started working in video retail? What
led you to choose the video industry, and this store in particular?
I was working part-time in a small typesetting/copy shop. One day, while collating real estate brochures, I accidentally stapled my thumb. As I was walking home from work, I saw a "Help Wanted" sign in the window of Video City. It seemed like time for a change. The thing is, I had always been interested in movies; I'd checked out every film-related book in the school library and had already made some fairly ambitious stop-animated epics in Super-8. I guess my preference for film over tape kept me from embracing a video-store job earlier.
Describe your store - what did it look like? What were its distinguishing
features?
At the time, Video City was located in a narrow shopfront about 25 feet wide and 120 feet deep. Shelves along both walls, with three kiosks down the middle, new releases at the back. There were five little window panels over the front door and picture window, and we often filled them with whatever mini-posters happened to be available, but we didn't have much display space.
What were your customers like? What particularly memorable customers or events do you remember?
There was Mrs. Lerch, the mother of a kid who picked on me in school. I gained a tiny bit of sympathy for him, imagining what it must have been like for him growing up. Mrs. Lerch liked to ask questions-- a lot more than she liked to listen to answers, and would frequently ask new questions while I was in the middle of answering the last ones. It didn't matter to her how many people were in line. Mr Wygas was an old guy, probably alcoholic, who rented three porno tapes a day. He would complain unashamedly about cassettes that jittered whaen he paused them or ran them frame-by-frame. I lived in continual dread of the day when he would finally have a stroke or something in the adult room. Mike and Tracy were college kids, about five years older than me, who liked my recommendations so much that they started inviting me to their wild hippie parties. They threw my 21st birthday party and introduced me to white russians, margaritas, and Long Island iced teas.
What was your boss like? How did he or she divide the work in the store?
Milt was an uptight Mormon whose strongest exclamation was "Dirty rotten censored!" He preferred to do all the bookkeeping and ordering himself, and left a year after he hired me. He was replaced by Raul, a laid-back Philippino with a raunchy sense of humor and a cute daughter. He solicited my input regularly. He also gave odd jobs to the schoolkids who hung around the store, reasoning that they wouldn't go off and get in trouble that way. Many of them later became full-fledged employees.
What video formats did your store offer (i.e. VHS, Beta, Laserdisc)? Where were
different formats kept in the store?
Video City was VHS/Beta when I joined, but beta was on its way out. Our last Beta order was STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME. Shelf displays were arranged by title, and the VHS and Beta boxes sat next to each other. VHS had green stickers, Beta had pink stickers. We discontinued Beta altogether in 1989, just before the store moved to a larger location.
In addition to mainstream Hollywood movies, what other kinds of videotapes
(children's videos or X-rated tapes, for example) did you rent/sell? Where were these
videos found in your store, and how important were they to the business?
Children's tapes, and anything under 60 minutes, were 99-cent rentals. The Children's section was at the front of the store. Vintage Disney tapes were in constant demand-- a given family might rent SLEEPING BEAUTY three times a month, and keeping irreplaceable tapes in working order was an ongoing challenge. The Adult section was at the back, next to the counter, where we could keep an eye on things. It had a fairly random selection of tapes-- Milt had no interest in keeping it current. Raul made that a priority. Video City's founder had some curious interests. He was an aviation enthusiast, and we had a whole shelf of tapes, that he produced himself, of local air shows. They were located next to the new releases. They didn't rent much. He was also a WWII enthusiast, and had acquired exclusive rights to a variety of vintage titles, the most significant being the notorious Nazi propaganda film JUDD SUSS and the German 1943 fantasy MUENCHAUSEN. The other titles were mostly exploitation crap with Nazi themes and it made me uncomfortable to have them in the store. We generally stuck them on the bottom shelves, or, if the box art was particularly lurid, in the Adult section.
What other services/products did you offer besides the rental or sale of
programs? Did this change over time?
Video City was a small chain, and if a customer wanted to rent a title we didn't have, we could get it shipped over on loan from one of the other stores. This often took a while, though.
Did you ever rent VCRs or other hardware to your customers? If so,
how important were hardware rentals to the business?
We rented VHS players. When I say 'players', I mean they didn't record-- they just played tapes, and only at SP speed. They were, however, virtually indestructible, built into strong plastic cases with handles. Once we got one back from a frat party and it was full of beer. I think it cleaned up OK though. There was also one full-featured Betamax VCR in a suitcase. It almost never rented.
During the period that you worked at the store, what changes did you see take place?
Beta phased out Store relocated to larger place down the block-- this involved, among other things, integrating the library of a sister store that had just closed, thereby doubling our inventory. During my tenure, I took it upon myself to proof-read the catalog. It took me about a year, but I fixed all the typos I could find-- for instance, some twenty movies were listed under 'T' for 'The' when I started. I also re-entered or re-wrote titles that were too long to register properly in the catalog's limited field-- I think there was only space for 15 characters per title, which meant, for instance, that all six Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles videos had identical listings...
Is this store still open? If not, when did it close?
Raul bought Video City from the dying chain around 1997, economically changing the name to City Video. He brought in 12-inch laserdiscs, and was one of the first in the area to carry DVD. He retired and closed the place in 2001, I believe.