alt Hacker NewsThis seems counter to my experience and memories. I'm old enough to remember the pre-VCR days so lived through the entire rise and fall of video rental. These stores were never a community gathering place or anywhere that you really met people. You'd go in, browse for a bit, pick a movie, pay and leave. This was the same at the locally owned shops and later when Blockbuster arrived and put all the local shops out of business.
I do think we've lost a lot of "civic life" in the past few decades but video rental stores aren't anything I remember fondly.
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I think people forgot what the experience was actually like and are just recalling commercials where the experience was obviously over romanticized. If Wal-Mart went away today, you'd have people a decade from now reminiscing about how great going to Wal-Mart was and how sad it was we lost a "third place" when they went away.
Yeah - the article does over-glorify. I did frequent one rental store where I could chat with the person behind the counter about movies, but none of the others.
Mine had a video game rental store next door (GameCrazy) where I met other gamers.
On the other hand:
Vidiots: https://vidiotsfoundation.org/history-mission/
Video Journeys: https://conorholt.medium.com/video-store-interview-video-jou... (Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne)
Video Active: Down the street, they kept a stock popular with visual artists although reviews concentrate on other content (https://www.yelp.com/biz/video-active-los-angeles)
Video Archives: https://www.bbc.com/articles/c4g40ndzpe0o (Tarantino)