Barb Stephens, owner of Yore Movie Store, is closing her video rental store after 28 years of business. She’s passionate about movies, but the trend towards streaming movies over the internet and on pay-per-view has made many video stores unprofitable in recent years. (Richard McGuire photo)
For more than 28 years, many residents of Osoyoos have gone to Yore Movie Store to rent video movies.
Next week that era comes to a close as owner Barb Stephens plans to close the store on Nov. 7, a casualty of changing technology in the way people watch movies.
“It’s definitely an industry thing,” said Stephens, who said she’s heard from owners of video stores in other communities that have closed in the last six months. “This industry has really changed.”
At the root of the change, internet streaming services such as Netflix, iTunes and Google Play Movies, along with video-on-demand from cable and fibre optic providers like Eastlink and Telus, mean fewer people are going to video rental stores to pick up a film.
Stephens is passionate about movies and keeps up with the newest releases, while treasuring old classics, foreign films and quirky independents. But she’s never embraced the new technology.
“I haven’t watched regular television for probably almost two and a half years,” she admits. “I’ve never had cable and I’ve never had satellite. And I don’t have internet at home.”
Still, she talks to people who have told her they increasingly get movies streamed to their homes.
She ran into a former customer who admitted he no longer comes to her store, preferring pay-per-view. He told her he pays $6.50 to watch a new release.
“I said mine are only $5,” she recounts. “He said, ‘Yes I know, but you get your slippers on and you’ve got your glass of wine poured and you don’t have to leave the house.’”
It certainly wasn’t always this way. When Stephens and her former husband bought the business after moving from Alberta and opened in March 1987, it was heady days for those in the movie rental business.
They only stocked VHS-format videocassettes as the demise of the competing Beta format was all but certain when they opened their doors.
“We had eight VCRs that were renting out constantly and we had about 850 movies,” said Stephens. “On the weekends you couldn’t breathe you were so busy.”
The store moved from its original location a couple doors up the street into the present location and later expanded to take up both sides of the building.
Ironically, the store’s location reflected an earlier movie evolution. The building once housed the Sunland Theatre that had been the town’s movie house in an era when most people watched movies by going to a theatre.
Although other video stores came and went in Osoyoos through the years, none of the major chains ever located here and Yore Movie Store was always the main video store in the community, Stephens said.
One of the reasons video rentals did so well in the early days was that the only ways to see movies had been to go to a theatre or wait, often years, for them to be shown on TV. When video stores started, there was almost no direct sales of movies to the public.
“You couldn’t buy movies anywhere,” said Stephens, adding that there simply were no movie sales bins at large stores. “If you didn’t see it at the theatre, the only other place you could watch it was through the video store.”
In those days, stores had to pay on average $95 to $110 for a VHS tape. That meant they had to rent them between 25 and 27 times just to break even, let alone make any money.
“So you had to be renting a lot of movies, which we were,” she said.
Yore Movie Store has always stocked the most popular blockbusters, said Stephens, because most of the renting public mainly wants to be entertained, rather than challenged by a movie.
“They don’t want to sit around and try to figure out what that ending meant,” she said. “They want a happy ending and they want it quick enough that they’re not going to fall asleep.”
A smaller, but passionate group of movie viewers, among whom Stephens counts herself, seeks out more challenging films that leave viewers discussing afterwards what has happened.
She notes, however, that most customers have become much more demanding of quality over the years as they have been exposed to more and more movies.
Asked how many films she might have watched in her lifetime, Stephens admits she doesn’t have a clue, saying she has been watching movies regularly since elementary school.
“I grew up in a large family and there was no extra money for summer vacations and ski packages,” she recalls of her childhood in Edson, Alta. “But there was always money to go to the movies. We’d go to the theatre on the weekend.”
She and her sisters would play act their own movies in the living room.
“I’m a huge movie buff,” she said. “It’s been a huge part of my life.”
Does she have a favourite movie?
“I have probably a top 10,” she said. “One of them being Lawrence of Arabia. Never Cry Wolf would probably be in there. I’ve got some foreign films in there – Incendies, The Skin I Live In, there’s so many. I probably have got more like a top 50.”
As she ponders the question further, others pop into mind – old black and white classics. “In the Heat of the Night would be another real favourite of mine,” she adds.
Stephens has sold off many of the movies in the store, but she’s put several hundred aside for her own collection, unable to part with them.
Much as she’ll miss running the store, she’ll also miss the “amazing” regular people who came by to Yore Movie Store.
One of those is Vince Sam, a local homeless man, who spends many hours at the store, relaxing in an armchair and watching movies.
“I love Vince to pieces,” said Stephens. “He can give me grief on occasion when we have our little tête-à-têtes in here, but I’m going to miss him so much, not being able to come in and sit here… He loves animal movies. He’s very softhearted, so I’ll put on animal movies for him and we cry together if anything bad happens to the animals and we have wonderful conversations and I make him cups of tea and coffee.
“I’m really worried about Vince because this is where he comes when the sun starts to go down and it starts to get chilly in winter,” she said. “It’s warm and he could be entertained and escape from the realities of his life, so I worry where he’s going to go from here.”
Stephens plans to take a much-needed rest when the store closes and then will look for part-time work to tide her over until she can collect a pension in another year.
“It’s going to be really strange after being my own boss for 28 years, but I’m looking forward to it with enthusiasm and a bit of trepidation,” she said, touched with emotion. “It’s going to be tough. I don’t go willingly from this. I would have loved to have hung in for a couple more years. I can count on one hand the number of bad moments I’ve had in 28 years.”
RICHARD McGUIRE
Osoyoos Times
