Video Gallery closes doors for good

By Miriam Ostermann, Associate Editor

One of southern Alberta’s last – if not the last – video rental stores, Video Gallery, is forced to close up shop in Strathmore at the end of the month.
Nearly a decade ago, Strathmore was home to four movie rental stores. When the businesses started dwindling one by one, Ed McCune, then manager of the Movie Gallery, decided opportunity was knocking and turned the Movie Gallery into the Video Gallery. He operated a successful enterprise for eight years as a result of many loyal customers, but is now forced to shut down his business.
According to McCune, last year’s downtown construction that interfered with traffic on Second Avenue – the store’s current location – set the business owner back by $30,000. While McCune said he could have recovered from the shortfall in one year’s time, his Canadian and American suppliers stopped sending magazines and posters and eventually discontinued their service. McCune was told he would have to increase his orders or go through a third party retailer to get movies. After exploring his options, the Strathmore entrepreneur decided it was time to move on.
“It’s a mom-and-pop operation now so you don’t make a lot of money and you have to work most of the hours yourself. It’s not the old days when it was a gold mine,” McCune said.
“This store in Strathmore, we used to do $10,000 to $12,000 dollars a week as Movie Gallery. We were still doing $5,000 a week at the time (when the other stores closed down). Then it slowly started dwindling. We started losing a few customers every year until we got down to the core; the diehards that didn’t want to give up. Those are the people who are upset because this is what they like to do on the weekends.”
Retail video rental stores experienced a boom in the 1980s and ’90s shortly after the first home video systems became readily available. The video retail chain, Blockbuster Video, had more than 4,500 stores in 1995, peaked in 2004, but filed for bankruptcy protection in 2010 due to competition from Netflix, Video on Demand, and the Redbox Automated business. In recent years, other small video rental stores in Alberta have closed their doors for various reasons.
However, McCune said Netflix had no impact on his business, with people coming to his store for new material. While he thinks illegal downloading posed the real issue to the industry, it didn’t stop loyal customers from returning to his store like clockwork every week. Some even rented from Shaw online but stopped in the store at least once a month to support the local business. Since the announcement of his store’s closure, these people have visited the store to express their appreciation and take part in the closing sale to support the local business owner one last time.
“In a small town like this you build a lot of relationships with your regulars,” he said. “Seven years ago, when I started and when I was the manager at Movie Gallery, there were so many people coming in you got to know a small handful and not even that closely. But the last four or five years when things got slower, the ones that hung on and stayed with me, they could’ve rented movies off Shaw Cable too, but they stuck with me because they wanted to support local business.
“You got to know every single one of them really well. I know their families, I know their kids, I know their wives, I know when they go on holidays. They become part of the social fabric of your life in a small business. They’re really loyal and they’re upset, they’re not happy, but they understand that I have to close.”
With rents skyrocketing, he moved the business downtown to Second Avenue. The business attracted customers from within Strathmore but also surrounding rural areas, specifically Gleichen and Cluny.
Up until the closing-out-sale posters went up, Video Gallery was still signing up a few new members every week. McCune said it’s too early for retirement and he is not interested in opening up another store.
“A lot of regulars are coming in to say goodbye and it makes me feel like I was doing something worthwhile for all these years,” McCune said. “I don’t really want to start another business, it’s too late in my life to do that. It’s hard work and it’s too stressful. Of course, I said that before I started this too.”
The Video Gallery will continue its movie sale until the store officially closes on Feb. 28.