Family Video

» see familyvideo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Turkey had video rental shops, one to a neighborhood, run by whoever owned the shop. What it never had was a chain of them. Family Video was 800 stores under the same yellow sign across the American Midwest, and the interesting part of the story is not the renting. It is who owned the ground the stores were sitting on.

Charles Hoogland opened the first one in Springfield, Illinois in 1978. His son Keith ran it later through Highland Ventures, the family holding company, and the head office moved to Glenview, Illinois in 2003. The chain grew through the VHS years and then the DVD years without ever going public, which meant it never had to explain a bad quarter to anybody outside the family.

By 2016 it was the only national video rental chain left in the United States. Blockbuster's corporate stores had been shut three years earlier and Hastings Entertainment liquidated that same year, which left Family Video renting discs to the Midwest as a genuine monopoly on a dying format. It was still opening locations in 2019.

Then 2020. The theaters closed in March and the studios stopped putting films out, which meant a business whose entire calendar was built on new releases had nothing new to put on the shelf for most of a year. Keith Hoogland sent the letter on 5 January 2021.

~ the dossier ~

~ the landlord trick ~

Blockbuster rented its buildings. Family Video bought them. Highland Ventures owned the real estate under almost every store, which changed the arithmetic completely, because a location that stopped covering its rent was a location with no rent to cover. Lease renegotiations were the mechanism that finished Blockbuster off, and Family Video was on the other side of that table from itself.

That is the reason the chain survived a collapse that took every competitor it had. When the stores closed in 2021, Highland Ventures still owned the buildings.

~ the pivot years ~

Long before the end, the parent company had been quietly turning into something other than a rental chain. It built i3 Broadband, a fiber internet business, and StayFit 24, a chain of gyms, and dropped both into the property portfolio it already had. From 2013 it started co-locating stores with Marco's Pizza so you could collect a film and a pizza at one counter. In 2019 the shelves picked up CBD products.

None of that was a joke or a flailing gesture. It was a company holding a lot of buildings on decent roads, looking for anything to put inside them that people would still drive to.

~ what got buried with it ~

The physical stores went first, liquidated through the early months of 2021, selling off discs and shelving and store fixtures at closeout prices, each location shutting once its inventory was gone. The web store lasted a while longer and closed at the end of March 2022. Forty-four years.

What died was not the ability to watch a film, which had been solved several times over by then. What died was the last commercial room in America where the selection was finite and a person had chosen it. A Family Video held a few thousand titles and a staff member who had opinions about which of them were worth your evening, and the thing that replaced it is an infinite scroll driven by a recommendation engine that has never seen the film either.

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