Ok, so here are some amusing anecdotes from my two summers (and one winter break) working as a salesperson at various Blockbuster Video stores in South Florida. Each anecdote is not only funny/sad, there's a lot to be learned from them.
I once refused a return on "It's a Wonderful Life;" the lady didn't want it because she said she got home, put it in her DVD player, and she "couldn't figure out how to make it color."
This experience taught me that movie-consumers don't like old. "Old" is practically a swear word. Half of Blockbuster's inventory (at the time of my writing this) is less than 12 months old. You hear that? 115 years of film history and 50% of Blockbuster's stock covers 99.2% of that history. But don't blame Blockbuster for the discrepancy: their business-practices are in direct response to what patrons are willing to buy. I must've rented ten new releases (sometimes ten copies of the same new release) for every old release, and old releases were generally only rented with coupons.
We salespeople would offer coupons for free rentals and patrons would refuse them more often than they took them.
I once asked a co-worker what his favorite five movies were and he couldn't name anything older than a year. Or without nudity. But that's another story.
A ten-year-old kid once tried buying the unrated edition of "The Girl Next Door." I refused to sell it to him, so he grabbed his mom and she promptly bought it for him. With her own money.
I mean, I might just be an old fogey, but first of all, I wasn't allowed to see R-rated films until I was about 14, and even then, they could only be R strictly for grisly gratuitous monster/alien/mutant violence, at most. Second of all, no way would I get a free movie if it wasn't also Christmas. Parents, by and large, do not ever know what their kids are renting, or, more alarmingly, what they themselves are renting for their kids.
Case in point: mother comes up to the counter to rent "some movie" with a bright pink cover and a girl wearing a ballgown on it. A three-year-old is running around by her feet. I go to scan the disk only to see that it is in fact But I'm a Cheerleader (1999), a film about a girl who is sent to a "lesbian rehabilitation camp" by her parents. I wasn't going to say anything, and teach her a priceless parenting lesson, but my manager, alas, who is indeed a better person than I, informed her of the movie's subject-matter and thus saved that mother's day.
Countless times would a parent hand over a Dora the Explorer DVD at the checkout counter and demand to know if he/she had rented it before. For those of you who don't know, there are about--no joke-- 16 billion (with a b) different Dora the Explorer adventures, and I was tasked with scrolling through all the titles and figure out if this parent's kid has seen this one before.
What was even more sad was when grown-ups with no kids would demand to know if they had seen new releases before. Um, if you can't remember the movie, even if you did see it previously, does it matter?
Wow, I've still got a lot of these stories. Maybe a Part II for Monday...?
--Serge
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