Finally, the economic downturn's come to a place that many thought was impervious: the local video shop with a selection of adult titles. Video Movie Liquidators (don't worry, the link is safe for work), a chain of rental stores with ten branches in Greater Washington, will close their location at Georgia Avenue and University Boulevard right in the center of Wheaton March 26th.
Of course, this isn't the first movie-rental place in East County to close recently. It joins a Blockbuster Video in Burtonsville and Hollywood Video locations in Colesville, Wheaton, and Downtown Silver Spring. As we discovered last month, Wheaton's been renting their copies of Twilight from Netflix.
5 comments:
There goes my favorite neon sign in downtown Wheaton (the one of the large nosed gentleman in the director's chair half covered by the Half-Off Adult DVDs sign in your pic). I guess Cadmus II across Georgia Ave will have to carry the load so to speak.
Blockbuster in Plaza del Mercado closed about a year ago and Potomac Video in the Layhill shopping center closed about a year before that. I guess it's a sign of the times.
Renting videos at a store is very quickly becoming obsolete. I don't expect the next generation of kids to even know that such a thing ever existed.
This is why I am so torn over the idea of a Costco going it. Though I really don't want that type of store to define Wheaton or the traffic problems it could cause, it may be a saving grace to local stores by that very same traffic increase.
I just found this blog and it made me smile. I was the manager of this location from July 2004 up until its end. Glad to see others are lamenting the closing of this shop.
It's my belief that the owner just wanted out. 2006 was our most profitable year ever as a company but each year thereafter we lost more business each year. Part of it was an unwillingness on the owner's desire to advertise in the City Paper as he had for many years before. He stopped all advertising in the beginning of 2007 hoping to fly under the radar, so to speak, as the Bush administration was waging their war on porn. He was afraid they were going to make an example of him because he had 10 stores in the DC/Baltimore area. Another factor was I would get edicts to pull certain titles or subject matter (no bukkake, no squirting videos, no more than three men cumming on a woman's face, etc..) from the backroom until it was so ridiculously sanitized there was no way we could compete with the internet. People couldn't find what they were looking for there and eventually turned to other shops or the internet to get the stuff we weren't carrying anymore and they never came back.
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