According to Hofmann: Be kind and rewind…or else!
I remember the heyday of video rental businesses like Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Movie Gallery and even those little rental displays at your local grocery store.
It was a great business model for the time. You could go to a store and rent a VHS movie for a few bucks, take it home and watch it as many times as you want 鈥� but only if you bring it back at the time the store demands or you pay the price!
Quite literally a price, as I remember once hearing that the late fees the video stores applied to movie rentals that were kept a bit too long was a big part of the revenue flow.
As an added bonus 鈥� or fine, depending on what side of the cash register you stood 鈥� if you didn鈥檛 rewind your VHS tapes, then that was another cost passed on to the consumer.
What really hurt was renting something for the weekend, and not watching it in time. That meant you had the choice to eat the $1.99 rental fee and not watch 鈥淐rocodile Dundee II,鈥� or risk the $7.99 late fee and try to enjoy the crap out of it.
Those kinds of decisions really molded your outlook on cinema and film appreciation. If you don鈥檛 believe me, keep in mind that filmmaker Quentin Tarantino had worked at a video store before making it big.
Of course, the video rental market has but all vanished out of the brick-and-mortar husks of their former selves because of technological advances in rentals like mail-subscription rental services, streaming services and milk production, for some reason.
There are, of course, still a few video stores but there are plenty of Redbox kiosks where you can still rent tangible movies, and they automatically charge you if you鈥檙e late returning the rental.
The problem with those kiosks is the removal of the excitement and potential danger of arguing with a store clerk that you missed the deadline by a few minutes because you had to wrestle the DVD of 鈥淒ude, Where鈥檚 My Car?鈥� out of your dog鈥檚 mouth because he thought it was a frisbee (also, those bite marks and slobber on the DVD were there when you rented it).
If you鈥檙e wondering why I鈥檓 bringing up all of that lost nostalgia, it came from a story I found concerning a library patron returning a VHS movie 19 years after it was due.
The Johnson County Library in Kansas recently posted on their Facebook page a photo of a VHS copy of the Russian film 鈥淏urnt by the Sun鈥� that a patron returned nearly two decades after the original seven-day loan.
Upon returning the tape in its original packaging, the 20-something volunteer looked it over a few times and asked, 鈥淲hat鈥檚 this thing?鈥�
After speaking to someone in their 40s, they learned it was a movie that was put into a bulky machine called a VHS player that could only play, stop, pause, rewind and fast forward the film.
If I volunteered at that library, the first question I鈥檇 ask is why 鈥淏urnt by the Sun鈥� and why obsessively keep it for 19 years? I mean, I鈥檇 understand if the movie was 鈥淏asic Instinct鈥� and certain parts of the videotape were worn down to the width of dental floss, but 鈥淏urnt by the Sun,鈥� a drama set in 1936?
How many rubles did it take to rent that one, comrade?
Yes, I鈥檓 aware there are differences between renting a movie at a video store and checking out a movie at a library 鈥� the biggest is the fact that borrowing a movie from a library is free and the late fees are normally reasonable like a quarter a day or a dollar if you live in the big city.
What made me sad and angry (sangry?) was the fact the library only enforced their late-fee cap of $6 as long as the item was returned undamaged.
Otherwise, the patron would have to pay over $2,000, and that fight would shatter the library鈥檚 noise-control policy.
At first, I wondered why the patron who returned the movie wasn鈥檛 identified because it wasn鈥檛 as though they鈥檇 done something heinously wrong. Plus, there鈥檚 hundreds of legitimate excuses for such a late, late return from forgetting about it while moving to a new house or a generation of puppies gnawing on it while teething.
No, the reason why the patron went unidentified was because the library didn鈥檛 take them to task over the tape being returned late, especially in a span of 19 years.
It must be understood that, deep down, we all have a bit of evil in us and that evil needs to be released in small doses or else, we have a pressure-cooker situation and that evil will explode out of you, and that鈥檚 why we have road rage.
It must be said that our libraries are fine institutions, and like many other institutions that cater to the community, they鈥檙e struggling.
But I do think we can have a win-win-win-win compromise in place if libraries really stick hard to their return policies because they鈥檒l receiving additional funding through the gestapo-esque crackdown of overdue items, the average Joe gets a chance to relieve some pressure when they need to fight with library staff over way-past-due book, the number of road rage incidents can finally go down and I can finally get a chance to borrow a VHS of 鈥淏asic Instinct,鈥� which I鈥檝e been on the waiting list to watch since 1994.
According to Hofmann is written by staff reporter Mark Hofmann of Rostraver Township. His books, 鈥淕ood Mourning! A Guide to Biting the Big One 鈥� and Dying, Too鈥� and 鈥淪tupid Brain,鈥� are available on Amazon.com.