I spent a good percentage of my teens and twenties in video
stores. The former age range had me on
one side of the counter, pursuing the new releases and captivated by the
possibilities that lied beneath the lurid box art with a devotion most of my peers
relegated to sports or music. I was more
than willing to make the leap to the other side of the counter as soon as I
could, and I did so my senior year in high school, landing a job at Blockbuster
Video.
This would prove to be the most corporate of my video store
gigs – a job featuring sanctioned work attire, a hefty manual, and a
corporation known well to the world of cinephiles as an enemy due to their
reluctance to carry films that weren’t “family-friendly” enough to contain
their branding. I was anxious to leave,
and I soon did, spending the next dozen or so years working for various video
rental establishments in which I didn’t have to wear a light-blue, long-sleeved
golf shirt every time I checked into a shift.
To varying degrees, I have fond memories of all of my video
store experiences, but my favorite store experience has always been working for
Video Visions, located in the now-departed Prospect Mall on Milwaukee’s east
side. For those who weren’t in Milwaukee
at the time, the Prospect Mall, which closed in 2006 and has since been
replaced entirely by the Overlook apartments, was a bizarre cavalcade of businesses, including a few
doctor’s offices, a movie theater, a book store (sometimes two), a couple of
restaurants… and the greatest video store known to man. Or at least to Milwaukee man.
Video Visions was the epitome of a ramshackle establishment that expended to fit the space as the business grew without any real regard for a grand plan. Originally opened in 1982 as one storefront in the mall, the business had grown to three by the time I was hired in 1995, and the décor was a mishmash of styles and shelf types, with VHS tapes behind the counter towards the front and Laserdiscs and special orders in a separate, often-closed, room with a separate counter in the back. (A 1984 photograph taken by an unnamed photographer at Wisconsin Step magazine speaks to their original layout – and even their availability of adult titles.)
The organization of the store was, at best, questionable,
with the VHS boxes not arranged in any order beyond genre, and even then,
meaning nothing, as a title’s availability was only registered by the existence
of a 3x5 card that represented the inventory number. (These cards were often misfiled and
frequently just vanished.) The whole
store hadn’t been fully dusted in years, and weekly vacuuming of the shag
carpeting using an ancient model seemed to kick up more dust than was actually
cleaned. In short, it was a place that
fit in perfectly with the pastiche of commerce that the Prospect Mall provided.
And I loved it. As a
video store that had been open since 1982, working at Video Visions was like
being a part of video store history, as the owner, Jim Howard, never got rid of
anything. The depth of catalog was unimpeachable
in the area, and easily surpassed the number of options afforded to current
users of most streaming services. The
co-workers were fantastic, and bonding over the trials and tribulations of the
customers and the store, coupled with the fact that Video Visions was
essentially the resource for video on the east side of Milwaukee, made it a
pleasure to come into work every shift.
Even if the pay was terrible. And
the place was a mess. And some of the
clients were kind of creepy.
Video Visions shut down in 2003, and Jim passed away in 2009, but I’ll always remember my time behind the counter of Video Visions. I’ve worked at plenty of video stores,
dealing with formats from Beta to Blu-ray, but Video Visions will always be the
dingy retail establishment closest to my heart.
