The Last Video Store

There was a specific excitement to being taken to the video rental store as a child that doesn’t have an exact equivalent today. You’d walk in surrounded by cover art—adventure, action, the promise of two hours of something completely other than your ordinary life. Parents kept you to the family section. You weren’t supposed to touch anything, and you definitely weren’t supposed to wander past the action films into the adult section tucked against the back wall, behind a beaded curtain or a half-height partition that wasn’t really hiding anything from anyone.

You’d hold your money and deliberate like the decision genuinely mattered. It did, a little. You couldn’t just skip to the next one if this one turned out to be wrong.

Most of those stores are gone now, absorbed first by iTunes and then by streaming, which promised infinite choice and delivered infinite paralysis. I scroll through Netflix for forty-five minutes and end up rewatching something I’ve already seen three times because today everything feels like soulless garbage. The algorithm knows what I’ve liked and offers me the same thing again, slightly different. The video store offered you a cover you’d never seen and a paragraph on the back. That was enough.

In Alaska, apparently, the clock slowed down. Thanks to genuinely poor internet infrastructure, a Blockbuster branch—lit up, stocked, open—was still operating, old titles alongside new ones, the whole physical fact of a place you go specifically to get a film. That detail stuck with me more than I expected. Not because the past was better. Because sometimes the friction was the point.