This week I found a book called “let’s go all around the neighborhood” and read it to my 3 & 4 year old sons. It’s from 1982. A girl and her mother walk around doing errands. Mailing a letter at the post office. Buying shoes at the shoe store. Playing at the park. Eating at a restaurant. Going to the library. Buying an eggbeater at the hardware store. Stopping at the fruit and vegetable stand. They interact with humans at most stops.
I thought - in 2026, we can instead text, buy shoes and eggbeaters (?) online, stream / scroll content on devices, order restaurant food on DoorDash and groceries on Instacart.
We’re told “you’ll no longer have to” and “now you’ll be able to” with each new technological development. But there’s always a hidden “now you’ll have to” and “you’ll no longer be able to”.
The end of interest-based 3rd places is one of the many things contributing to the compartmentalization / socioeconomic bubble of modern society.
People used to frequent in person things like specialty retailers, arcades, hobby clubs, religious groups, etc. When you meet real life people in person based on shared interests, you make connections across socioeconomic groups.
I just don't see nearly as much of this in todays society as 20+ years ago.
People with kids sometimes experience this via all the activities they take their kids to, but even there a lot of kids activities have become economically stratified. Instead of playing in the local $50/year rec baseball league, there's tiers of travel teams to meet any budget.
> People with kids sometimes experience this via all the activities they take their kids to
This is something welcome I didn’t expect to come from parenthood. Like many others I had thought to myself “how do you even make new friends in your thirties?!” and then once I had kids… bam. New friendship groups.
For us the local park and playground are a great equalizer in terms of economic stratification. But when the weather turns bad it rears its head again as people head to $50 a go trampoline parks and the like.
Public school is another unifier, of course. I’m in NYC and our preschool was very obviously not a reflection of the neighborhood or city around us. But once my kids entered the city-funded Pre-K they started to meet a ton of kids from different backgrounds. It’s very different from the childhood I had but I’m very glad my kids have it.
I kind of experienced that but the relationships were more superficial than I'd have liked. If the "shared interest" is happy kids together it doesn't directly translate to the adults shared interests. But then again, maybe it was just me being me.
It's a good jumping off point, but becoming friends requires time and work.
When we're young, we have nothing but time spent together. As adults, who spend an hour at the local park with some kids, those relationships require more effort to grow.
We have a few friends we've made through our kid, and it definitely takes more work to maintain - but it's been very worth it so far.
Same, the relationships were all sort of "convenience" relationships that were dependent on the kids activities to sustain. Once the kids were older, or their interests changed, and there wasn't a scheduled game or event to bring everyone together, those relationships just evaporated.
Lack of cheap real estate is the root of all problems. Some will point to private equity buying up everything and ruining (baseball, bowling etc.). If you had cheap real estate, you can still operate a business and compete, but once your landlord raises rent every year regardless of how your business is doing, even the successful ones have to pack their bags. So many successful businesses in my city and the neighboring cities have shut down simply because “they couldn’t come to a mutual agreement on the lease with the landlord”.
>Lack of cheap real estate is the root of all problems.
Plenty of cheap dirt. It's cheap because between zoning setback frontage requirement BS and the environmentalists you can't do anything on it. Or it's far from everything and everyone.
I spent so many hours at our local mall with my friends growing up. It had an arcade, a movie theater, book store, game store, place to eat. Our parents could just drop us there for hours. Skating rinks and bowling alleys were also a solid option.
It's one of the things that make it worth the time investment to follow sports, even if you're typically not interested in it. Getting people together to watch the game, go to games, tailgate, etc is huge.
The internet has largely replaced / substituted this, which has been a mixed thing. Like minded people in smaller niches have been able to find each other online for example, much more than IRL, and much more at long range / internationally. It's made the world a smaller place, at the cost of knowing people closer to home.
It sounds good in principle. And I was very excited when discovering the Internet (Usenet) and a place to discuss all my geeky interests with many similar minded people.
However, now that the Internet has so overpowered in person relationships across the board, the cost in mental health, anxiety and general unhappiness is staggering.
If you live in a society that really devalues everything you like, having that online outlet is the difference between giving up on life[1], and being passionate.
Imagine being told you're broken because you like books, movies, and video games, and having almost every aspect of society reinforce that message.
[1] Not in the suicide sense, but in the "Life will always suck" sense.
Going to a university in a city helped a lot with that. Long conversations about comic books with friends, going to the nearby comics store on new release day with lots of other nerds, etc.
I’m no longer convinced adding the Internet to that has been a net positive. Maybe if we could have froze its growth and development at some specific point…?
Agree. I think it might have been okay if the Internet had stayed in the naïve form it had circa 2003. In those days, I had a circle of friends on LiveJournal (the closer of which became AIM buddies as well) and I think we all derived huge positive benefits from having that in our lives.
The shift to the algorithmic "Feed" established adversarial incentives across the board - the platforms are incentivized to addict and enrage, the individuals are incentivized not to be vulnerable for friends, but to be viral and get approval of the public, since if your posts don't perform for strangers, the algorithm won't even show them to your closest friends.
The Internet gave us an easier way to make "friends" with no apparent downsides, only to rugpull us all as soon as most of the 'pre-Internet' places and social habits had been completely destroyed. Now we are all obviously lonely and hate the Internet mess, but whole generations are now too awkward to even speak to others in person, just from lack of experience.
It's always this way. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et. al. killed the social internet, as Amazon and Walmart killed the mom-and-pop retailers, as Blockbuster killed the local video stores (but then Netflix killed Blockbuster).
I sometimes wonder if it was all worth it. What if we banned/rolled back the internet? Would we go back to more small-town-like community, and again have the nerd minority who "can't wait to get out of this place?" It feels like the current tech landscape is a reaction to that environment.
And I’m the nerd minority who “couldn’t wait to get out of this place.”
Now, I would still go to a big city where I could find people with similar interests. But the cost to society of all the Internet has wrought has been far too high.
It's a societal problem, mainly in the West. Many cultures around the world don't have this issue.
When I was living in Iran, we didn't need a hobby club to meet people, you just picked up the phone and everyone came over. I have vivid memories of going on trips with 5 cars filled with people
When I went to Peru with my wife to meet her extended family, it was very similar. Heck you can just randomly talk to people and meet them. At 9PM, the streets are exploding with people in Arequipa or Tehran.
The biggest difference is that in the West, people have the idea of "personal space", which doesn't really exist in some culture. People are seen more as one, rather than many. Of course this has its own downsides, but I suppose nothing is perfect.
This 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.
Anyway I only went to movie rental stores during the brief two-year window in the mid-2000s between owning a DVD player (never had VCR, we were too poor) and having broadband internet so I could pirate movies.
Yeah I could see this idea with other small local community businesses, but the video store? Ive never seen or experienced it. People just want to go in, get their movie rental, and gtfo because they still gotta drive home afterwards to watch their movie.
Movie stores were even designed to move people through them as fast as possible too because the more people standing around clogging up the store, the less people that are coming in are going to be willing to browse movies and rent extras. There is a reason they didn't have benches or chairs for people to sit around on idly watching the movies they were playing on the walls.
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.
I worked in a small, independent video store in my town during college. It was the only place locally where you could get art house, a wide selection of classic movies and other odd-ball tapes. During my time, there was a fair bit of the 'helpful advice' this article focuses on, but I think the bigger loss is due to licensing.
At Morris Video, our tapes were available as long as they played (we never switched to DVD). There was no option for the distributor to pull inventory and there were no contracts between Morris and the studios. We bought the tapes for a fixed fee, we rented the tapes as long as we could.
The result was a library that included material that was (at the time) impossible to access anywhere else in town, and that could survive the collapse, acquisition or whims of Hollywood distributors.
Today, the studios can and do change the content of films you have 'purchased' digitally (The French Connection is the best recent example) and our access to the material is governed by some impenetrable and revokable contract, and the catalogs on offer pale in comparison to Morris if you're looking for older outside of the mainstream.
There are benefits to the new mode for sure: Radically lower barrier to entry for independent creators, instant access to quite large libraries, lower priced films than peak physical media.
I don't really want to go back to having a huge wall of DVDs or tapes, but I would prefer to live in the world of simpler licensing and ownership.
The loss of 3rd places is a big deal; but it seems weird to wax nostalgic over the remarkably brief period that movie rental stores were actually a thing. Blockbuster Video opened in 1985, was overtaken by Netflix starting in 2000, and died in 2010. There were small movie rental shops prior to 1985, but not long prior.
Article should be titled 'The Lost Civic Life of Mom and Pop Stores'- no kid making $4.50 an hour is cultivating a third space atmosphere at Blockbuster, whereas any Mom and Pop place can do that, no matter what they sell.
The only non-bar place with an social atmosphere that I even know of anymore is one town nearby has a hardware store that has the old family line running it that the father and grandfather can sit around shooting the shit in it as a semi-job as they let their kids manage and operate it. And so a lot of other grey beards like to hang around for awhile when they go to pick up a can of 3-in-1 oil or a can of paint because they have known these people for 60+ years. They did have to move to a more prime location in town as the town shrank over the decades, and they also added a gun/sportings good section, and then one son learned gunsmithing to make its otherwise limited size and selection more useful.
But that is certainly not the norm, im not sure if I could find another hardware store like it within 100 miles. The social atmosphere probably barely manages to bring in the extra business needed to maintain it and it took 3 consecutive generations working well enough together and towards their customers to never break the strong community bond.
I was thinking about the loss of local shops a lot recently. There's definitely a confluence of factors at play, and it's not just price economics vs online & big box.
One thing I think is that theres just never enough time. Everyone is so over-scheduled. The white collar work day really has expanded vs what I remember my dad doing 30-40 years ago. There's more two income households than in the past. Parenting is far more active for both parents than it's ever been, and kids are being shuttled between events all weekend.
Most local shops are not open past 5pm or at best 6pm, and often closed Sunday. Who is off work by then to stop by?
Easier to click buy on amazon, and stop by the big box store after dinner Saturday open til 9pm for anything you need sooner.
Was just talking with an older colleague about this. Work used to end Friday afternoon. The amount of emails I get (and send) over the weekend means there is truly never any off time.
It isn’t, really. If it’s the expected norm in your job then there’s a real chance you’ll lose your job if you don’t do it. And particularly the kind of jobs market we see today that’s a real risk.
I'm not sure what authority you have on this subject, but anecdotally speaking as a non-software engineer who would lump himself with "most people," when it comes to white-collar work, I have noticed that all of my colleagues are, at the very least, expected to read email during time off (weekend or PTO) if not respond.
This applies to adjacent industries as well. I semi-regularly get email from firms (in the same time zone as mine) in the 11PM–2AM range.
Again, I'm not purporting to have any more experience than you do, but you can't assert that this is a tech-industry-only phenomenon when I am sure applicable examples other than my own could be found. I wish I could go without, but spending the first billable hour catching up on email is not really acceptable.
I don't think that's really what we've lost. Blockbuster was a third space not because of its staff, but because it was a place you could say "meet me here" and hang out looking at movies with no (or very little) expected monetary output. Same as arcades in the mall, or cheap matinee movies. A better framing might be where would a teenager, today, say "meet me here" to their friends. I think you'll find there's many fewer around you today than there was 20 years ago.
That doesn’t match my experience if your bar is really as low as “won’t throw you out for not buying anything”.
Obvious anecdata, but within an easy walk or bike radius of me (a couple miles) there are 3 public libraries, something like half a square mile of parks, a few public basketball courts, a few public tennis courts, a public baseball field, a bar over the baseball field that welcomes children (it’s one of the veterans things and has board games and what not), at least a dozen other businesses that don’t care if you buy anything, and your usual litany of Walmart kind of places that can’t be bothered to track who is buying and who isn’t.
I don’t have any issues finding places to hang out for free, and I use them, but they’re pretty sparsely used so it’s not as 3rd space as it used to be.
Eg I walk my dogs most mornings, and I rarely see more than 1 other person at the park or dog park at 7 or 8am.
It feels to me like 3rd spaces are disappearing because people don’t use them, rather than people don’t use them because they don’t exist.
Definitely, and renting a video itself was often a communal activity. You'd be hanging out with your friends or family and get the hankering to see a movie, so you all pile in the car together and see what they had. You'd argue back and forth about this movie or that movie, and you had to be flexible since your first pick might not be in stock. Strangers would give you suggestions or you'd see what was recommended by the staff. Lots of times you'd end up taking up something completely different than what you had planned.
We are unfair to teenagers today; give them no place to go and then we feign surprise when they act up. According to Harper's, there's a 20% decline in kids playing baseball--their noses are in their iPads. You can't take children to the mall because malls are dying. Too many parks are places where bad things happen. I don't know what the solution is.
Not only that, the tween years used to be when you developed the skills of independence that you'd hopefully more or less be able to use to be a teenager. A 9 or 10-year-old would have permission to walk or bike around the neighborhood, to and from school, maybe to a nearby shopping center or corner store... Today they're kept under lock and key for that whole time since we're afraid of having the cops called on us for "unsupervised children walking" by insane people. Teens don't even know how to bridge the gap between "fully chaperoned child" and "adult" so when they are unsupervised they get into trouble, and when they become adults they are so unconfident they do things like choosing college not because they have a passion for a subject, or for learning, or a career interest, but because when you're enrolled in college they arrange your life's schedule and assign you a living space without you having to handle any of the complexity yourself.
Malls barely exist, at least compared to the way they did 20 years ago. I wasn't arguing all third spaces are gone, but even of the ones you did note I'd bet in most communities their funding/availability has decreased in that time period.
Malls have been in decline for decades. Public pools barely exist anymore either. (https://www.poolmagazine.com/pool-news/america-is-losing-pub...). If you're in a wealthy city you probably still have a decent community center. Libraries are probably the most common space avilable, but they are also under constant attack by republicans. In wealthy cities you can find all kinds of services there. Smaller libraries will have some areas for reading and meeting.
If I'm having a problem with a server and you commented "Former sysadmin was dumb and lazy, so they misconfigured it" (and you're correct) is that constructive?
I think we mostly all agree that we as a society caused the problem, but we can't go back and undo that. Constructive would be coming up with ways we can, given the past did take place, improve things going forward.
I disagree with your analogy. I'm pointing out specific mistakes in the former sysadmin's misconfiguration. And also that the misconfiguration can be rolled back.
We can vote for politicians that fund projects and facilities for general use and welfare. We can congregate more in the malls and community centers and bowling alleys (and churches too, if that's your style), that we still have. The loss of community isn't irreversible. Yet.
> We can vote for politicians that fund projects and facilities for general use and welfare.
Putting aside the increasing efforts to limit our ability to vote for change, we have to fight against very well funded campaigns trying to convince people that we shouldn't fund projects and facilities for general use and welfare. There's a lot money and power being used to encourage people to be more isolated as well. The public is growing less educated and more fearful. People have fewer friends, fewer social skills, and historically high levels of anxiety and depression.
While there may still be places to go, the ones that don't cost money are going away or at risk, and the problem goes deeper than access to physical spaces. Some things will have to change before we can expect people to really take advantage of what spaces we have left.
Malls are dying. Many are closed. Public libraries are daycare for the homeless and parents are afraid to leave their children. Your other options may be well-run, but all suffer from a lack of funding and staffing. Pools aren't a year-round thing, even in the South.
Whenever I see these sorts of stories I think about the civic life we're missing out on by not socially gathering with our neighbors to hunt down woolly mammoths with sharp sticks so we don't all collectively starve to death.
The way things are going maybe we'll get back to those wonderful days. ;)
A bunch of families in the town I grew up in bought a fairly large cabin together in northern Ontario they just called "the hunting camp". My family wasn't involved but I got to go up there quite a few times as a guest of my friends.
In theory, the adults were hunting or fishing (although not with pointy sticks). In reality they were smoking, drinking, playing cards, screwing around on the little boat and atvs that were there (three wheelers!), and telling lies around a campfire. Us kids were pretty much on our own the entire time. We too were smoking, drinking, and screwing around on the boat and atvs.
So I agree with you- pointy stick hunting is a great weekend activity.
Places don't need to be curated to have value as civic spaces, although it certainly helps. Seniors hang out at the local McDonalds, car modding enthusiasts gather in strip mall parking lots, singles meet at the dog park...
Any place you have to physically go to provides a chance for social interaction. To debate your friends over what movie to pick, to comment on your neighbor's selections, to ask a clerk for a recommendation. Are these pretty slight? Sure, but life is made fuller by these minor brushes, and you never know which ones will unexpectedly bloom into something more.
There are also games like that for trading-card stores, video arcades, and record stores.
(I'm probably going to buy the record store one, "Wax Heads." Being a music-genre nerd and recommending bands to people is a fantasy that I was born 10 years too late to do in real life.)
More housing and fewer spaces for gathering seems to be the trend. Any open space near me became condos or protected habitat space (can’t even walk in because people trash it). There are practically no town squares. Parks are all gated by HOAs. Even the beach is encroached on by housing which means there isn’t enough parking. Where are people supposed to gather now and just enjoy the day? I see libraries, coffee shops, bars, parks, and beaches as the main zones. Not bad but there aren’t enough (or enough time to enjoy them).
Libraries are daycare for the homeless. At one city's public library, one of the librarians was mopping up vomit and was heard to comment, "I didn't go to library school for this." Washrooms double as a place to shower, reading rooms a place to sleep.
Somewhat to my surprise, given its proximity to skid row and downtown's general trend since Covid, in my experience the LA Central Library usually has few visibly homeless people inside. I work remotely and live nearby and walk there every now and then to work outside the home. Almost everyone I see hanging out in the study table areas seem to be students or remote workers. The few homeless people I have seen at the library keep to themselves and often are reading quietly like any other patron.
libraries are also just daycares for... kids. My library (which is on my block) is only open a few hours week in which gainfully employed adults would be able to go. The rest is geared to grannies and kids
I think it's great for kids to grow up amongst books. As for the homeless, it's fine if they don't stink and use the library for what it is, a place to read books or possibly go online. Any other behavior should not be tolerated.
It grinds my gears a bit when "works 9-5 in an office" is equated with "gainfully employed". There are lots of working people who have free time during these hours: restaurant and retail workers, hospital nurses and doctors, firefighters and EMTs, artists and artisans, YouTubers and professional HN posters, actors and circus performers, authors and architects, homemakers and remote office workers, and so on.
In the mid-2000s, my hometown decided to build a town square. They put it at the edge of town next to the train station, where it would look nice for commuters but not where people lived so it was always empty.
The near universal proliferation of owner's associations and management groups and whatnot is something you can lay square at the feet of the environmentalists.
Some big commercial developer developing a subdivision in 1970 would've allocated a couple lots as a park owned by the city or town. I live in a neighborhood like this.
Now those empty lots and the exact layout of plantings on them are a key part of the green space on the site plan that makes the bullshit spreadsheet math that is required for your stormwater or environmental math to pass requirements. And and some legal entity has to be responsible for that in perpetuity. Enter the HOA. And of course then they make all this stuff private because they can market the units in the development better that way.
This was exactly the subdivision I grew up in. The "park" was just a few vacant lots in the middle of the neighborhood. That's all it was for years, eventually the city put in a shelterhouse and a couple of picnic tables, a basketball court, and a baseball diamond.
One of the interesting things of living in Saskatchewan is that due to large portions of the province being offline, video movie rental is still very much alive here, as is videogame rental and other rental formats.
I feel like this overstates the point a bit. The video store was always just a means to an end for me, the clerks always sullen, the process of agreeing on a movie always long & difficult. Maybe I missed out on the phenomenon he's talking about.
I don't think any movie could better capture the atmosphere and culture of a 1980s video store better than "Clerks." For example, the various types of annoying video store customers:
I agree. Independent movie rental shops had a very long window of viability before Blockbuster expanded enough to threaten them, so there were a ton of places that had a better chance of having people who deliberately like working there, than your average corporate-owned retail store today.
Plus, pre-smartphone, most people (note: not saying all people) loved talking to other people, so even a movie store employee who wasn't a major film buff would be someone you could build up a rapport with just based on the fact that you're a regular who talks with them. My dad was that way with most of the staff at dozens of the small businesses in town, and even the 'corporate' places like McDonald's, etc.
Shopping with my kids I noticed we kinda have a replacement here in the UK in the shape of HMV (originally a spin off of His Master's Voice). When I was a kid it was mostly a record store, but now it's focused on what I'd call geek/"fandom" tat: posters, figurines, comics, band merch, etc. Whenever I'm dragged into one, it's always full of geek/fandom types hanging out.
> the drive-in theater took on much of the role that the earlier movie theater had played, serving as a third place for local youth and families where the space and interactions with other audience members were as important as the movie (if not more so). But even this drive-in culture began to disappear
I've been kind of puzzled, since the first time I gave it any thought, why "going to a movie" is culturally thought of as an activity one does with a companion, even a date. Much like dining out in a sit-down restaurant. Yet the expectation is that you sit in silence for 2 hours and spend maybe 5-10 minutes critiquing or raving as you walk out.
But now I'm wondering if the custom of doing this together is a vestigial one, formed in a time when the 'going to the cinema' was a more social event even as late as the drive-in era (I have never experienced a drive-in).
>why "going to a movie" is culturally thought of as an activity one does with a companion, even a date. Much like dining out in a sit-down restaurant.
Let me unpack a little bit.
I very rarely go to movies and really haven't for years. So it isn't a social activity so mostly won't except for the odd shoe in IMAX.
I will go see live theatre with someone or maybe a group. But am also perfectly happy to do so on my own.
As to meals? I'm so inured to solo meals with business travel I don't think twice. Enjoy eating with friend(s) whether in a business or purely social context. But it's not like I'm going to order room service or go to McDonalds if I don't have anyone to sit with.
Yeah, I've reversed course on both those things now. I literally just tell my spouse, "I think tonight at 8 I'm going to go see Project Hail Mary" since I'm the only one interested in that kind of movie. And dine wherever I want when I'm alone.
I think it was a lot harder when I was 18 because I saw being alone as a reflection on my worth as a person.
I was on the college's film committee and I often enjoyed hanging out with some of the other members on a weekend night especially if I didn't have anything else going on or it was later. (We also pre-screened all of our films in case there a problem with the print. So I did that too sometimes.) I was also fine, if I had a free afternoon with going to one of the discount theaters in town if there was something I wanted to see.
But, yeah, looking back I think I was a lot less inclined to just eat by myself in a restaurant--partially because I could often rope someone else in or would know people if I went into a dining hall and partly because I wasn't accustomed to just having a meal without anyone else around.
> I've been kind of puzzled, since the first time I gave it any thought, why "going to a movie" is culturally thought of as an activity one does with a companion, even a date.
Because after going to the movie, you've all seen it, and so can talk about it with each other.
> spend maybe 5-10 minutes critiquing or raving as you walk out.
It's not just for that trip, but it'll be a shared touchpoint. And if it's something you really enjoyed, it's something you'll be able to talk about together for years—like going to see Star Wars as a kid.
This is also how run clubs, church groups, dinner parties, and a lot of other activities actually work. The specified activity is followed by unstructured hanging out where you're expected to be open and present.
But a lot of people view these activities as the objective itself (like work) and leave immediately, losing out on the social activity.
I talk about this all the time. The experience of going with your friends to Blockbuster or similar, walking around, browsing everything, deciding what you were renting then grabbing pizza made for some pretty memorable weekends.
Just having everything listed on 50 different streaming platforms isn't the same experience. There are things we really lose with efficiency gains.
The author is really romanticizing here. In 1982, video rental stores were either seedy, dedicated to porn rentals. Or, they were tucked into the back of a record store. Video cassettes were brand new in 1982; no one knew what to make of it. Heck, the industry couldn't even decide on a format (we had Betamax in my house because Mom was convinced it was the future). In fact, in those early days, I recall people were focused more on recording ("I can record my shows and watch them when it's convenient for me!" was a revolutionary concept at the time.) than renting. Once the rental market became a thing, a few local chains popped up. Then the rental market exploded and Blockbuster basically took over the world. They destroyed the local chains. They also sucked the life out of video rental - long lines, poor selection, annoying fees, unknowledgable staff, etc. I really think people are using "rose colored glasses" when they recall the Blockbuster days; it was definitely not all good.
The only experience I can recall that matches the article is after Blockbuster took over the video rental world, there were a few local rental places that focused on the love of movies, with a diverse selection and knowledgable staff. These places probably paid the rent with porn rentals, usually in an adjoining room, but the love of movies was always palpable. It was a lot like the article describes. I remember going to one in the early-2000s and renting the original Frankenstein movie (the one with Boris Karloff), something Blockbuster would never stock, much less have staff that even knew there was an original movie. And, yeah, I remember talking to the clerk about it; he ran down the list of all the Frankenstein spin-off movies.
It seems like the library has more movies than my local video store ever did at this point. But you can’t really talk there, and they don’t show movies on the screen. Maybe they should set up a separate section to give more of a 90s Blockbuster vibe with a dedicated movie librarian, that would be fun.
more romanticizing of the bygone era. late fees (due at midnight!), restocking fees, etc; some of these fees to the tune of a new dvd/vhs; good riddance.
That's true and when the Netflix DVD service arrived, I thought it was really a situation where the consumer had finally won. (No late fees! Yay!). That said here in Boulder we had the Video Station which was a phenomenal place for browsing and discovery with a super knowledgeable staff especially for foreign and art house cinema. They survived for a surprisingly long time, but finally closed about ten years ago [0]. Not long ago, while cleaning out an old (manual transmission -- another artifact of a bygone era) car I found a Video Station receipt which I still have. Good times!
Coral Gables, Fla had Lion Video. If Blockbuster carried it, Lion didn't: instead it was art house films, foreign films and lots of Spanish-language titles impossible to find elsewhere. One day the owner died and...that was it.
Some things just need to survive the crash. We have THREE drive in movie theaters within an hour of here. All are doing well. One doesn't even have a digital projector, and they almost closed multiple times yes, but now there's a cult following around vintage flicks they play from horror to comedy. If you can survive long enough it seems like you can make it, if you work hard to build a social group around things like film or movies
Expensive motel rooms, a lack of housing and not renting rooms to teenagers or college students might have something to do with the continued longevity of this business. And don't forget that on weekends they become flea markets.
> more romanticizing of the bygone era. late fees (due at midnight!), restocking fees, etc; some of these fees to the tune of a new dvd/vhs; good riddance
Well, they were a business after all. And what's being romanticised is the civic experience of that bygone era. The modern experience sucks. It is devoid of any real human interaction. That is highly missing part in the modern landscape and it will only get worse.
A bit cruel and there were probably some indie stores that were different but I remember video rentals as a place where you went in, grabbed a movie, and left.
the big city that i lived in back then only had blockbuster or hollywood so my comment was about them; besides indie video rentals didn't have those kind of fees so, i was not talking about them. besides why cruel? market dynamics change and many businesses just don't make it..
Every era can be romanticized, and every era has its downsides. Just today, I could ramble on about the ever-increasing costs of streaming services as they reduce their available catalogs, ads forced upon users who have purchased the "ad-free" streaming bundle, UI/UX patterns designed to make cancelling difficult, things you've "purchased" no longer being available to you because the service no longer carries that studio's titles, paying up to $24.99 to "rent" a movie on Amazon for a mere 48 hours, the endless cycle of a service starting out "great" only to be enshittified, etc.
you are right, but that does not negate the friction that people felt at the time. my experience is with netflix, and i never found issues canceling, and as a matter of principle, i do not subscribe to services unless there are no alternatives (e.g. i pay for amz shipping, my own email domain). compare canceling a service sitting at home to driving to the video store, depositing dvd/vhs, and still having to check if they 'accidentally' overcharged. today it's so simple afaict.
Where I live we still have a locally owned video rental store, though several years ago they put in a bar and now it's more a bar with a video section than a video store where you can get beer and watch movies. We do still rent when there's something we can't stream on one of the services we pay for; I much rather do that than give more $ to Amazon and the like.
It's weird when shops pivot. There was a record store in a neighboring village that went from vinyl to video game kiosks. Then the record store that became a candy store. Put couches in bookstores and people stop buying books. I guess they figure the rent is paid by benefactors. Then again, Barnes & Noble seems to have a partnership with Starbucks...
> That same time-traveling video renter might find herself startled by the employee offering to recommend a movie, or by the knot of customers hanging out by the counter, shooting the breeze and discussing film.
What universe is this person from? I must have missed it...
I used to live under the guy that ran Lost Weekend on Valencia street. Held out till like 2014/2015. At the time I wasn't really sad about it but now I wish it was still around
I remember when they opened the Alamo Drafthouse they had a semi-permanent outpost of Lost Weekend included in the lobby area. I wonder if it's on the Killed By Covid And Never Came Back list.
This must be from a different era. In the 90s, people at our store used to stare at the shelves in silence. You certainly weren't striking up conversation with strangers there.
The screaming and explosions from the movie trailers playing full blast on a non-stop loop throughout the store over the PA didn't help.
I used to do a lot of chit-chat with folks I knew on Twitter during the work day. After Musk largely torched it and a lot of people just decided they didn't need that kind of social media any longer, that channel largely went away. I use Facebook some but not the same and LinkedIn even less so.
Someone should make a coffee shop that is also like an old school rental place that has a few CRT TVs with VCRs around and people can take movies down from some shelf and pop them in and watch them on a communal couch. Very third place.
For the Modern American version of that—last time I was in an Urgent Care, they had a tv playing one of the Sharknado movies. The security guard there was excited to show everyone the bit where he was an extra in the film.
This week I found a book called “let’s go all around the neighborhood” and read it to my 3 & 4 year old sons. It’s from 1982. A girl and her mother walk around doing errands. Mailing a letter at the post office. Buying shoes at the shoe store. Playing at the park. Eating at a restaurant. Going to the library. Buying an eggbeater at the hardware store. Stopping at the fruit and vegetable stand. They interact with humans at most stops.
I thought - in 2026, we can instead text, buy shoes and eggbeaters (?) online, stream / scroll content on devices, order restaurant food on DoorDash and groceries on Instacart.
We’re told “you’ll no longer have to” and “now you’ll be able to” with each new technological development. But there’s always a hidden “now you’ll have to” and “you’ll no longer be able to”.
The end of interest-based 3rd places is one of the many things contributing to the compartmentalization / socioeconomic bubble of modern society.
People used to frequent in person things like specialty retailers, arcades, hobby clubs, religious groups, etc. When you meet real life people in person based on shared interests, you make connections across socioeconomic groups.
I just don't see nearly as much of this in todays society as 20+ years ago.
People with kids sometimes experience this via all the activities they take their kids to, but even there a lot of kids activities have become economically stratified. Instead of playing in the local $50/year rec baseball league, there's tiers of travel teams to meet any budget.
> People with kids sometimes experience this via all the activities they take their kids to
This is something welcome I didn’t expect to come from parenthood. Like many others I had thought to myself “how do you even make new friends in your thirties?!” and then once I had kids… bam. New friendship groups.
For us the local park and playground are a great equalizer in terms of economic stratification. But when the weather turns bad it rears its head again as people head to $50 a go trampoline parks and the like.
Public school is another unifier, of course. I’m in NYC and our preschool was very obviously not a reflection of the neighborhood or city around us. But once my kids entered the city-funded Pre-K they started to meet a ton of kids from different backgrounds. It’s very different from the childhood I had but I’m very glad my kids have it.
I kind of experienced that but the relationships were more superficial than I'd have liked. If the "shared interest" is happy kids together it doesn't directly translate to the adults shared interests. But then again, maybe it was just me being me.
It's a good jumping off point, but becoming friends requires time and work.
When we're young, we have nothing but time spent together. As adults, who spend an hour at the local park with some kids, those relationships require more effort to grow.
We have a few friends we've made through our kid, and it definitely takes more work to maintain - but it's been very worth it so far.
> becoming friends requires time, work, and a mutual desire for friendship
FTFY ;-)
Same, the relationships were all sort of "convenience" relationships that were dependent on the kids activities to sustain. Once the kids were older, or their interests changed, and there wasn't a scheduled game or event to bring everyone together, those relationships just evaporated.
Lack of cheap real estate is the root of all problems. Some will point to private equity buying up everything and ruining (baseball, bowling etc.). If you had cheap real estate, you can still operate a business and compete, but once your landlord raises rent every year regardless of how your business is doing, even the successful ones have to pack their bags. So many successful businesses in my city and the neighboring cities have shut down simply because “they couldn’t come to a mutual agreement on the lease with the landlord”.
>Lack of cheap real estate is the root of all problems.
Plenty of cheap dirt. It's cheap because between zoning setback frontage requirement BS and the environmentalists you can't do anything on it. Or it's far from everything and everyone.
Putnam's "Bowling Alone" (2000) is about this, and it is something that has been in decline since the 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone.
Yea, agreed completely here.
I spent so many hours at our local mall with my friends growing up. It had an arcade, a movie theater, book store, game store, place to eat. Our parents could just drop us there for hours. Skating rinks and bowling alleys were also a solid option.
It's one of the things that make it worth the time investment to follow sports, even if you're typically not interested in it. Getting people together to watch the game, go to games, tailgate, etc is huge.
The internet has largely replaced / substituted this, which has been a mixed thing. Like minded people in smaller niches have been able to find each other online for example, much more than IRL, and much more at long range / internationally. It's made the world a smaller place, at the cost of knowing people closer to home.
It’s been a disaster.
It sounds good in principle. And I was very excited when discovering the Internet (Usenet) and a place to discuss all my geeky interests with many similar minded people.
However, now that the Internet has so overpowered in person relationships across the board, the cost in mental health, anxiety and general unhappiness is staggering.
It's not an all-or-nothing.
If you live in a society that really devalues everything you like, having that online outlet is the difference between giving up on life[1], and being passionate.
Imagine being told you're broken because you like books, movies, and video games, and having almost every aspect of society reinforce that message.
[1] Not in the suicide sense, but in the "Life will always suck" sense.
I was that kid.
Going to a university in a city helped a lot with that. Long conversations about comic books with friends, going to the nearby comics store on new release day with lots of other nerds, etc.
I’m no longer convinced adding the Internet to that has been a net positive. Maybe if we could have froze its growth and development at some specific point…?
Discord has done wonders for gaming shops keeping people connected and organizing in between weekly game sessions.
Meetup could be superceded by the hitch/tinder model to organize activities with individuals over scheduled events ran by organizers.
It helps before you get to university, and once you leave. The place you live for work may have very few people with similar interests.
Agree. I think it might have been okay if the Internet had stayed in the naïve form it had circa 2003. In those days, I had a circle of friends on LiveJournal (the closer of which became AIM buddies as well) and I think we all derived huge positive benefits from having that in our lives.
The shift to the algorithmic "Feed" established adversarial incentives across the board - the platforms are incentivized to addict and enrage, the individuals are incentivized not to be vulnerable for friends, but to be viral and get approval of the public, since if your posts don't perform for strangers, the algorithm won't even show them to your closest friends.
The Internet gave us an easier way to make "friends" with no apparent downsides, only to rugpull us all as soon as most of the 'pre-Internet' places and social habits had been completely destroyed. Now we are all obviously lonely and hate the Internet mess, but whole generations are now too awkward to even speak to others in person, just from lack of experience.
>It’s been a disaster.
It wasn't a disaster until megaplatforms came alone.
It's always this way. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et. al. killed the social internet, as Amazon and Walmart killed the mom-and-pop retailers, as Blockbuster killed the local video stores (but then Netflix killed Blockbuster).
Because back then the Internet was a hobby itself. Normal people(for a lack of better word) mostly weren't online.
Yes but that’s my point. Taken as a whole it’s been a net negative.
I think its made relationships more short term and superficial.
We may recognize a handle on a forum, but most of the time we don't know anything about the other person other than a narrow part of their interests.
I sometimes wonder if it was all worth it. What if we banned/rolled back the internet? Would we go back to more small-town-like community, and again have the nerd minority who "can't wait to get out of this place?" It feels like the current tech landscape is a reaction to that environment.
I would.
And I’m the nerd minority who “couldn’t wait to get out of this place.”
Now, I would still go to a big city where I could find people with similar interests. But the cost to society of all the Internet has wrought has been far too high.
I recommend a group fitness class gym. This brings me much joy and I lost 60 pounds. A positive 3rd space.
It's a societal problem, mainly in the West. Many cultures around the world don't have this issue.
When I was living in Iran, we didn't need a hobby club to meet people, you just picked up the phone and everyone came over. I have vivid memories of going on trips with 5 cars filled with people
When I went to Peru with my wife to meet her extended family, it was very similar. Heck you can just randomly talk to people and meet them. At 9PM, the streets are exploding with people in Arequipa or Tehran.
The biggest difference is that in the West, people have the idea of "personal space", which doesn't really exist in some culture. People are seen more as one, rather than many. Of course this has its own downsides, but I suppose nothing is perfect.
You picked up the phone and everyone came over, that’s cool. What number did you call? Was this a public service of some sort?
> The end of interest-based 3rd places
Whatever happened to pubs and the shared interest of drinking beer (and getting drunk in the process ...)? ;-)
This 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.
Same here.
Anyway I only went to movie rental stores during the brief two-year window in the mid-2000s between owning a DVD player (never had VCR, we were too poor) and having broadband internet so I could pirate movies.
Yeah I could see this idea with other small local community businesses, but the video store? Ive never seen or experienced it. People just want to go in, get their movie rental, and gtfo because they still gotta drive home afterwards to watch their movie.
Movie stores were even designed to move people through them as fast as possible too because the more people standing around clogging up the store, the less people that are coming in are going to be willing to browse movies and rent extras. There is a reason they didn't have benches or chairs for people to sit around on idly watching the movies they were playing on the walls.
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)
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.
Seriously. I just remember as a kid seeing my school bus driver browsing the adult video section. I'm sure he did not want to find "community" there.
there's supposed to be a curtain to keep you nosy freakin kids from seeing us in there!
Mine had a video game rental store next door (GameCrazy) where I met other gamers.
I worked in a small, independent video store in my town during college. It was the only place locally where you could get art house, a wide selection of classic movies and other odd-ball tapes. During my time, there was a fair bit of the 'helpful advice' this article focuses on, but I think the bigger loss is due to licensing.
At Morris Video, our tapes were available as long as they played (we never switched to DVD). There was no option for the distributor to pull inventory and there were no contracts between Morris and the studios. We bought the tapes for a fixed fee, we rented the tapes as long as we could.
The result was a library that included material that was (at the time) impossible to access anywhere else in town, and that could survive the collapse, acquisition or whims of Hollywood distributors.
Today, the studios can and do change the content of films you have 'purchased' digitally (The French Connection is the best recent example) and our access to the material is governed by some impenetrable and revokable contract, and the catalogs on offer pale in comparison to Morris if you're looking for older outside of the mainstream.
There are benefits to the new mode for sure: Radically lower barrier to entry for independent creators, instant access to quite large libraries, lower priced films than peak physical media.
I don't really want to go back to having a huge wall of DVDs or tapes, but I would prefer to live in the world of simpler licensing and ownership.
The loss of 3rd places is a big deal; but it seems weird to wax nostalgic over the remarkably brief period that movie rental stores were actually a thing. Blockbuster Video opened in 1985, was overtaken by Netflix starting in 2000, and died in 2010. There were small movie rental shops prior to 1985, but not long prior.
Article should be titled 'The Lost Civic Life of Mom and Pop Stores'- no kid making $4.50 an hour is cultivating a third space atmosphere at Blockbuster, whereas any Mom and Pop place can do that, no matter what they sell.
The only non-bar place with an social atmosphere that I even know of anymore is one town nearby has a hardware store that has the old family line running it that the father and grandfather can sit around shooting the shit in it as a semi-job as they let their kids manage and operate it. And so a lot of other grey beards like to hang around for awhile when they go to pick up a can of 3-in-1 oil or a can of paint because they have known these people for 60+ years. They did have to move to a more prime location in town as the town shrank over the decades, and they also added a gun/sportings good section, and then one son learned gunsmithing to make its otherwise limited size and selection more useful.
But that is certainly not the norm, im not sure if I could find another hardware store like it within 100 miles. The social atmosphere probably barely manages to bring in the extra business needed to maintain it and it took 3 consecutive generations working well enough together and towards their customers to never break the strong community bond.
I was thinking about the loss of local shops a lot recently. There's definitely a confluence of factors at play, and it's not just price economics vs online & big box.
One thing I think is that theres just never enough time. Everyone is so over-scheduled. The white collar work day really has expanded vs what I remember my dad doing 30-40 years ago. There's more two income households than in the past. Parenting is far more active for both parents than it's ever been, and kids are being shuttled between events all weekend.
Most local shops are not open past 5pm or at best 6pm, and often closed Sunday. Who is off work by then to stop by?
Easier to click buy on amazon, and stop by the big box store after dinner Saturday open til 9pm for anything you need sooner.
Was just talking with an older colleague about this. Work used to end Friday afternoon. The amount of emails I get (and send) over the weekend means there is truly never any off time.
reading and responding to those on the weekend is your choice
It isn’t, really. If it’s the expected norm in your job then there’s a real chance you’ll lose your job if you don’t do it. And particularly the kind of jobs market we see today that’s a real risk.
Actually not for most people. This is a peculiarity mostly of the tech industry. Most people don't read their work email after 5:00.
I'm not sure what authority you have on this subject, but anecdotally speaking as a non-software engineer who would lump himself with "most people," when it comes to white-collar work, I have noticed that all of my colleagues are, at the very least, expected to read email during time off (weekend or PTO) if not respond.
This applies to adjacent industries as well. I semi-regularly get email from firms (in the same time zone as mine) in the 11PM–2AM range.
Again, I'm not purporting to have any more experience than you do, but you can't assert that this is a tech-industry-only phenomenon when I am sure applicable examples other than my own could be found. I wish I could go without, but spending the first billable hour catching up on email is not really acceptable.
Fair enough, I'm only speaking about the people I know and work with.
Yeah that’s a privileged point of view. You lose clients if you aren’t responsive enough.
Yeah that’s a privileged point of view. You lose your job if you aren’t responsive enough.
I don't think that's really what we've lost. Blockbuster was a third space not because of its staff, but because it was a place you could say "meet me here" and hang out looking at movies with no (or very little) expected monetary output. Same as arcades in the mall, or cheap matinee movies. A better framing might be where would a teenager, today, say "meet me here" to their friends. I think you'll find there's many fewer around you today than there was 20 years ago.
That doesn’t match my experience if your bar is really as low as “won’t throw you out for not buying anything”.
Obvious anecdata, but within an easy walk or bike radius of me (a couple miles) there are 3 public libraries, something like half a square mile of parks, a few public basketball courts, a few public tennis courts, a public baseball field, a bar over the baseball field that welcomes children (it’s one of the veterans things and has board games and what not), at least a dozen other businesses that don’t care if you buy anything, and your usual litany of Walmart kind of places that can’t be bothered to track who is buying and who isn’t.
I don’t have any issues finding places to hang out for free, and I use them, but they’re pretty sparsely used so it’s not as 3rd space as it used to be.
Eg I walk my dogs most mornings, and I rarely see more than 1 other person at the park or dog park at 7 or 8am.
It feels to me like 3rd spaces are disappearing because people don’t use them, rather than people don’t use them because they don’t exist.
Consider yourself very lucky if your public libraries are not daycare for the homeless.
Definitely, and renting a video itself was often a communal activity. You'd be hanging out with your friends or family and get the hankering to see a movie, so you all pile in the car together and see what they had. You'd argue back and forth about this movie or that movie, and you had to be flexible since your first pick might not be in stock. Strangers would give you suggestions or you'd see what was recommended by the staff. Lots of times you'd end up taking up something completely different than what you had planned.
We are unfair to teenagers today; give them no place to go and then we feign surprise when they act up. According to Harper's, there's a 20% decline in kids playing baseball--their noses are in their iPads. You can't take children to the mall because malls are dying. Too many parks are places where bad things happen. I don't know what the solution is.
Not only that, the tween years used to be when you developed the skills of independence that you'd hopefully more or less be able to use to be a teenager. A 9 or 10-year-old would have permission to walk or bike around the neighborhood, to and from school, maybe to a nearby shopping center or corner store... Today they're kept under lock and key for that whole time since we're afraid of having the cops called on us for "unsupervised children walking" by insane people. Teens don't even know how to bridge the gap between "fully chaperoned child" and "adult" so when they are unsupervised they get into trouble, and when they become adults they are so unconfident they do things like choosing college not because they have a passion for a subject, or for learning, or a career interest, but because when you're enrolled in college they arrange your life's schedule and assign you a living space without you having to handle any of the complexity yourself.
Great job, Gen-X parents.
Hey, cut us some slack, we were raised by Boomers.
Malls still exist. As do public libraries, community rec centers, gyms, and pools.
Malls barely exist, at least compared to the way they did 20 years ago. I wasn't arguing all third spaces are gone, but even of the ones you did note I'd bet in most communities their funding/availability has decreased in that time period.
> Malls barely exist, at least compared to the way they did 20 years ago
Presumably because people spend less money there than they used to.
> I'd bet in most communities their funding/availability has decreased in that time period.
It's one of the tragedies of our age. The inability to fund anything for the common good.
Malls have been in decline for decades. Public pools barely exist anymore either. (https://www.poolmagazine.com/pool-news/america-is-losing-pub...). If you're in a wealthy city you probably still have a decent community center. Libraries are probably the most common space avilable, but they are also under constant attack by republicans. In wealthy cities you can find all kinds of services there. Smaller libraries will have some areas for reading and meeting.
> Malls have been in decline for decades
People voted with their wallets.
> public libraries are under constant attack by republicans
Voters get the services they vote for.
All of us are to blame.
True but not very constructive.
Pointing out the cause of the problem is not constructive?
What’s actionable about “it’s everyone’s fault”?
If I'm having a problem with a server and you commented "Former sysadmin was dumb and lazy, so they misconfigured it" (and you're correct) is that constructive?
I think we mostly all agree that we as a society caused the problem, but we can't go back and undo that. Constructive would be coming up with ways we can, given the past did take place, improve things going forward.
I disagree with your analogy. I'm pointing out specific mistakes in the former sysadmin's misconfiguration. And also that the misconfiguration can be rolled back.
We can vote for politicians that fund projects and facilities for general use and welfare. We can congregate more in the malls and community centers and bowling alleys (and churches too, if that's your style), that we still have. The loss of community isn't irreversible. Yet.
> We can vote for politicians that fund projects and facilities for general use and welfare.
Putting aside the increasing efforts to limit our ability to vote for change, we have to fight against very well funded campaigns trying to convince people that we shouldn't fund projects and facilities for general use and welfare. There's a lot money and power being used to encourage people to be more isolated as well. The public is growing less educated and more fearful. People have fewer friends, fewer social skills, and historically high levels of anxiety and depression.
While there may still be places to go, the ones that don't cost money are going away or at risk, and the problem goes deeper than access to physical spaces. Some things will have to change before we can expect people to really take advantage of what spaces we have left.
Much better!
> Voters get the services they vote for.
It's hard to feel bad about a small backwoods town of idiots who vote to shut down their public libraries (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/book-ban-lgbtq-jamestown-michig...) but there are efforts on the federal level too (https://www.ala.org/faq-executive-order-targeting-imls). Right wing nutjobs all over the country have been threatening library staff and calling in bomb threats and we can't vote them out
Malls are dying. Many are closed. Public libraries are daycare for the homeless and parents are afraid to leave their children. Your other options may be well-run, but all suffer from a lack of funding and staffing. Pools aren't a year-round thing, even in the South.
Whenever I see these sorts of stories I think about the civic life we're missing out on by not socially gathering with our neighbors to hunt down woolly mammoths with sharp sticks so we don't all collectively starve to death.
The way things are going maybe we'll get back to those wonderful days. ;)
Sounds a lot more fun to me than sitting in front of a computer all day.
Availability and legality of wooly mammoths aside, what's stopping you? Pointy stick hunting sounds like a great weekend activity.
A bunch of families in the town I grew up in bought a fairly large cabin together in northern Ontario they just called "the hunting camp". My family wasn't involved but I got to go up there quite a few times as a guest of my friends.
In theory, the adults were hunting or fishing (although not with pointy sticks). In reality they were smoking, drinking, playing cards, screwing around on the little boat and atvs that were there (three wheelers!), and telling lies around a campfire. Us kids were pretty much on our own the entire time. We too were smoking, drinking, and screwing around on the boat and atvs.
So I agree with you- pointy stick hunting is a great weekend activity.
God, that sounds like absolute paradise. Either as a kid or a grown-up.
It was great except for the insects and lack of showers.
So many bug bites.
Places don't need to be curated to have value as civic spaces, although it certainly helps. Seniors hang out at the local McDonalds, car modding enthusiasts gather in strip mall parking lots, singles meet at the dog park...
Any place you have to physically go to provides a chance for social interaction. To debate your friends over what movie to pick, to comment on your neighbor's selections, to ask a clerk for a recommendation. Are these pretty slight? Sure, but life is made fuller by these minor brushes, and you never know which ones will unexpectedly bloom into something more.
half the article is nostalgia for the blockbuster job
So many people are nostalgic for these kind of interest-based stores that there's a whole subgenre of simulation games.
For video stores, there's Retro Rewind: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3552140/Retro_Rewind__Vid...
There are also games like that for trading-card stores, video arcades, and record stores.
(I'm probably going to buy the record store one, "Wax Heads." Being a music-genre nerd and recommending bands to people is a fantasy that I was born 10 years too late to do in real life.)
More housing and fewer spaces for gathering seems to be the trend. Any open space near me became condos or protected habitat space (can’t even walk in because people trash it). There are practically no town squares. Parks are all gated by HOAs. Even the beach is encroached on by housing which means there isn’t enough parking. Where are people supposed to gather now and just enjoy the day? I see libraries, coffee shops, bars, parks, and beaches as the main zones. Not bad but there aren’t enough (or enough time to enjoy them).
Libraries are daycare for the homeless. At one city's public library, one of the librarians was mopping up vomit and was heard to comment, "I didn't go to library school for this." Washrooms double as a place to shower, reading rooms a place to sleep.
Somewhat to my surprise, given its proximity to skid row and downtown's general trend since Covid, in my experience the LA Central Library usually has few visibly homeless people inside. I work remotely and live nearby and walk there every now and then to work outside the home. Almost everyone I see hanging out in the study table areas seem to be students or remote workers. The few homeless people I have seen at the library keep to themselves and often are reading quietly like any other patron.
It doesn't have to be that way. It is a policy choice in some communities.
libraries are also just daycares for... kids. My library (which is on my block) is only open a few hours week in which gainfully employed adults would be able to go. The rest is geared to grannies and kids
I think it's great for kids to grow up amongst books. As for the homeless, it's fine if they don't stink and use the library for what it is, a place to read books or possibly go online. Any other behavior should not be tolerated.
It grinds my gears a bit when "works 9-5 in an office" is equated with "gainfully employed". There are lots of working people who have free time during these hours: restaurant and retail workers, hospital nurses and doctors, firefighters and EMTs, artists and artisans, YouTubers and professional HN posters, actors and circus performers, authors and architects, homemakers and remote office workers, and so on.
> professional HN posters
Wait, is this a career option I should have been aspiring to? I wonder if it's too late...
i am sorry that it bothers you
That is a very good thing.
Kids desperately need third spaces too.
> There are practically no town squares.
In the mid-2000s, my hometown decided to build a town square. They put it at the edge of town next to the train station, where it would look nice for commuters but not where people lived so it was always empty.
>Parks are all gated by HOAs
The near universal proliferation of owner's associations and management groups and whatnot is something you can lay square at the feet of the environmentalists.
Some big commercial developer developing a subdivision in 1970 would've allocated a couple lots as a park owned by the city or town. I live in a neighborhood like this.
Now those empty lots and the exact layout of plantings on them are a key part of the green space on the site plan that makes the bullshit spreadsheet math that is required for your stormwater or environmental math to pass requirements. And and some legal entity has to be responsible for that in perpetuity. Enter the HOA. And of course then they make all this stuff private because they can market the units in the development better that way.
> a couple lots as a park
This was exactly the subdivision I grew up in. The "park" was just a few vacant lots in the middle of the neighborhood. That's all it was for years, eventually the city put in a shelterhouse and a couple of picnic tables, a basketball court, and a baseball diamond.
This brings me back. I got to work at a movie store for a while. Great times. Almost like Empire Records.
One of the interesting things of living in Saskatchewan is that due to large portions of the province being offline, video movie rental is still very much alive here, as is videogame rental and other rental formats.
I feel like this overstates the point a bit. The video store was always just a means to an end for me, the clerks always sullen, the process of agreeing on a movie always long & difficult. Maybe I missed out on the phenomenon he's talking about.
Perhaps the clerk was not sullen, and just preferred to stay out of other people's affairs. You're not allowed to rent here anymore!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEEj6d3GTOU
I don't think any movie could better capture the atmosphere and culture of a 1980s video store better than "Clerks." For example, the various types of annoying video store customers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9khHJTztKk
Ordering obscene videos from the warehouse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwFjw798mPI
And some period-era fanfic filmed in an IRL video rental store.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiPC2pIJNzc
Maybe I missed out on the phenomenon he's talking about.
You did. It was a fairly widespread thing.
Although "The video store was always just a means to an end for me" indicates that you excluded yourself from this, rather than missing out on it.
How did we exclude ourselves? I went to the store, I got cassettes, discussed it with the people I came with.
We do the exact same thing now except use a phone or tablet.
I agree. Independent movie rental shops had a very long window of viability before Blockbuster expanded enough to threaten them, so there were a ton of places that had a better chance of having people who deliberately like working there, than your average corporate-owned retail store today.
Plus, pre-smartphone, most people (note: not saying all people) loved talking to other people, so even a movie store employee who wasn't a major film buff would be someone you could build up a rapport with just based on the fact that you're a regular who talks with them. My dad was that way with most of the staff at dozens of the small businesses in town, and even the 'corporate' places like McDonald's, etc.
Just as long as you pretend to not notice your neighbor come out of the curtained room...
Shopping with my kids I noticed we kinda have a replacement here in the UK in the shape of HMV (originally a spin off of His Master's Voice). When I was a kid it was mostly a record store, but now it's focused on what I'd call geek/"fandom" tat: posters, figurines, comics, band merch, etc. Whenever I'm dragged into one, it's always full of geek/fandom types hanging out.
> the drive-in theater took on much of the role that the earlier movie theater had played, serving as a third place for local youth and families where the space and interactions with other audience members were as important as the movie (if not more so). But even this drive-in culture began to disappear
I've been kind of puzzled, since the first time I gave it any thought, why "going to a movie" is culturally thought of as an activity one does with a companion, even a date. Much like dining out in a sit-down restaurant. Yet the expectation is that you sit in silence for 2 hours and spend maybe 5-10 minutes critiquing or raving as you walk out.
But now I'm wondering if the custom of doing this together is a vestigial one, formed in a time when the 'going to the cinema' was a more social event even as late as the drive-in era (I have never experienced a drive-in).
>why "going to a movie" is culturally thought of as an activity one does with a companion, even a date. Much like dining out in a sit-down restaurant.
Let me unpack a little bit.
I very rarely go to movies and really haven't for years. So it isn't a social activity so mostly won't except for the odd shoe in IMAX.
I will go see live theatre with someone or maybe a group. But am also perfectly happy to do so on my own.
As to meals? I'm so inured to solo meals with business travel I don't think twice. Enjoy eating with friend(s) whether in a business or purely social context. But it's not like I'm going to order room service or go to McDonalds if I don't have anyone to sit with.
Yeah, I've reversed course on both those things now. I literally just tell my spouse, "I think tonight at 8 I'm going to go see Project Hail Mary" since I'm the only one interested in that kind of movie. And dine wherever I want when I'm alone.
I think it was a lot harder when I was 18 because I saw being alone as a reflection on my worth as a person.
I was on the college's film committee and I often enjoyed hanging out with some of the other members on a weekend night especially if I didn't have anything else going on or it was later. (We also pre-screened all of our films in case there a problem with the print. So I did that too sometimes.) I was also fine, if I had a free afternoon with going to one of the discount theaters in town if there was something I wanted to see.
But, yeah, looking back I think I was a lot less inclined to just eat by myself in a restaurant--partially because I could often rope someone else in or would know people if I went into a dining hall and partly because I wasn't accustomed to just having a meal without anyone else around.
> I've been kind of puzzled, since the first time I gave it any thought, why "going to a movie" is culturally thought of as an activity one does with a companion, even a date.
Because after going to the movie, you've all seen it, and so can talk about it with each other.
> spend maybe 5-10 minutes critiquing or raving as you walk out.
It's not just for that trip, but it'll be a shared touchpoint. And if it's something you really enjoyed, it's something you'll be able to talk about together for years—like going to see Star Wars as a kid.
This is also how run clubs, church groups, dinner parties, and a lot of other activities actually work. The specified activity is followed by unstructured hanging out where you're expected to be open and present.
But a lot of people view these activities as the objective itself (like work) and leave immediately, losing out on the social activity.
I talk about this all the time. The experience of going with your friends to Blockbuster or similar, walking around, browsing everything, deciding what you were renting then grabbing pizza made for some pretty memorable weekends.
Just having everything listed on 50 different streaming platforms isn't the same experience. There are things we really lose with efficiency gains.
The author is really romanticizing here. In 1982, video rental stores were either seedy, dedicated to porn rentals. Or, they were tucked into the back of a record store. Video cassettes were brand new in 1982; no one knew what to make of it. Heck, the industry couldn't even decide on a format (we had Betamax in my house because Mom was convinced it was the future). In fact, in those early days, I recall people were focused more on recording ("I can record my shows and watch them when it's convenient for me!" was a revolutionary concept at the time.) than renting. Once the rental market became a thing, a few local chains popped up. Then the rental market exploded and Blockbuster basically took over the world. They destroyed the local chains. They also sucked the life out of video rental - long lines, poor selection, annoying fees, unknowledgable staff, etc. I really think people are using "rose colored glasses" when they recall the Blockbuster days; it was definitely not all good.
The only experience I can recall that matches the article is after Blockbuster took over the video rental world, there were a few local rental places that focused on the love of movies, with a diverse selection and knowledgable staff. These places probably paid the rent with porn rentals, usually in an adjoining room, but the love of movies was always palpable. It was a lot like the article describes. I remember going to one in the early-2000s and renting the original Frankenstein movie (the one with Boris Karloff), something Blockbuster would never stock, much less have staff that even knew there was an original movie. And, yeah, I remember talking to the clerk about it; he ran down the list of all the Frankenstein spin-off movies.
It seems like the library has more movies than my local video store ever did at this point. But you can’t really talk there, and they don’t show movies on the screen. Maybe they should set up a separate section to give more of a 90s Blockbuster vibe with a dedicated movie librarian, that would be fun.
That's a really good idea!
more romanticizing of the bygone era. late fees (due at midnight!), restocking fees, etc; some of these fees to the tune of a new dvd/vhs; good riddance.
That's true and when the Netflix DVD service arrived, I thought it was really a situation where the consumer had finally won. (No late fees! Yay!). That said here in Boulder we had the Video Station which was a phenomenal place for browsing and discovery with a super knowledgeable staff especially for foreign and art house cinema. They survived for a surprisingly long time, but finally closed about ten years ago [0]. Not long ago, while cleaning out an old (manual transmission -- another artifact of a bygone era) car I found a Video Station receipt which I still have. Good times!
[0] https://www.dailycamera.com/2017/02/27/the-video-station-bou...
Coral Gables, Fla had Lion Video. If Blockbuster carried it, Lion didn't: instead it was art house films, foreign films and lots of Spanish-language titles impossible to find elsewhere. One day the owner died and...that was it.
Some things just need to survive the crash. We have THREE drive in movie theaters within an hour of here. All are doing well. One doesn't even have a digital projector, and they almost closed multiple times yes, but now there's a cult following around vintage flicks they play from horror to comedy. If you can survive long enough it seems like you can make it, if you work hard to build a social group around things like film or movies
Expensive motel rooms, a lack of housing and not renting rooms to teenagers or college students might have something to do with the continued longevity of this business. And don't forget that on weekends they become flea markets.
> more romanticizing of the bygone era. late fees (due at midnight!), restocking fees, etc; some of these fees to the tune of a new dvd/vhs; good riddance
Well, they were a business after all. And what's being romanticised is the civic experience of that bygone era. The modern experience sucks. It is devoid of any real human interaction. That is highly missing part in the modern landscape and it will only get worse.
You forgot the $2 charge for rewinding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K97bkACYWLY
A bit cruel and there were probably some indie stores that were different but I remember video rentals as a place where you went in, grabbed a movie, and left.
the big city that i lived in back then only had blockbuster or hollywood so my comment was about them; besides indie video rentals didn't have those kind of fees so, i was not talking about them. besides why cruel? market dynamics change and many businesses just don't make it..
Indie rental shops in many areas did, in fact, have those kinds of fees.
Every era can be romanticized, and every era has its downsides. Just today, I could ramble on about the ever-increasing costs of streaming services as they reduce their available catalogs, ads forced upon users who have purchased the "ad-free" streaming bundle, UI/UX patterns designed to make cancelling difficult, things you've "purchased" no longer being available to you because the service no longer carries that studio's titles, paying up to $24.99 to "rent" a movie on Amazon for a mere 48 hours, the endless cycle of a service starting out "great" only to be enshittified, etc.
you are right, but that does not negate the friction that people felt at the time. my experience is with netflix, and i never found issues canceling, and as a matter of principle, i do not subscribe to services unless there are no alternatives (e.g. i pay for amz shipping, my own email domain). compare canceling a service sitting at home to driving to the video store, depositing dvd/vhs, and still having to check if they 'accidentally' overcharged. today it's so simple afaict.
Be kind, rewind.
Where I live we still have a locally owned video rental store, though several years ago they put in a bar and now it's more a bar with a video section than a video store where you can get beer and watch movies. We do still rent when there's something we can't stream on one of the services we pay for; I much rather do that than give more $ to Amazon and the like.
It's weird when shops pivot. There was a record store in a neighboring village that went from vinyl to video game kiosks. Then the record store that became a candy store. Put couches in bookstores and people stop buying books. I guess they figure the rent is paid by benefactors. Then again, Barnes & Noble seems to have a partnership with Starbucks...
> That same time-traveling video renter might find herself startled by the employee offering to recommend a movie, or by the knot of customers hanging out by the counter, shooting the breeze and discussing film.
What universe is this person from? I must have missed it...
I used to live under the guy that ran Lost Weekend on Valencia street. Held out till like 2014/2015. At the time I wasn't really sad about it but now I wish it was still around
I remember when they opened the Alamo Drafthouse they had a semi-permanent outpost of Lost Weekend included in the lobby area. I wonder if it's on the Killed By Covid And Never Came Back list.
This must be from a different era. In the 90s, people at our store used to stare at the shelves in silence. You certainly weren't striking up conversation with strangers there.
The screaming and explosions from the movie trailers playing full blast on a non-stop loop throughout the store over the PA didn't help.
we would ask recommendations and discuss experiences of watching various movies with strangers or with people we regularly saw at the video store
That was my experience, and in the 90s as well.
Forever memorialized in Kevin Smith's Clerks
Obligatory video from theonion: Blockbuster Offers Glimpse Of Movie Renting Past
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TrPwOrf4sM
"What's so poignant about this time is the uncertainty"
I wonder when we'll see articles on the lost civic life of social media? With increasing AI use, it is happening.
that already happened. The early days of Facebook as a user were much different than what they became later on.
The early days of Facebook as a user were much different than what they became later on.
Facebook jumped the shark when it eliminated customization and forced everyone to have the same personal page.
"Pieces of Flair" and a thousand other ways to express yourself were extinguished, along with any actual "social" aspects of Facebook.
Facebook jumped the shark the instant they allowed non-.edu email domains to sign up.
And Network pages which you were automatically included in based on your .edu domain, designed to facilitate real-world activities at that location.
early instagram vs influencer instagram ... early twitter vs whatever that shit is now ... the list is long ...
you either disappear like tumblr or you stay up long enough to turn into a dumpster fire.
I used to do a lot of chit-chat with folks I knew on Twitter during the work day. After Musk largely torched it and a lot of people just decided they didn't need that kind of social media any longer, that channel largely went away. I use Facebook some but not the same and LinkedIn even less so.
Someone should make a coffee shop that is also like an old school rental place that has a few CRT TVs with VCRs around and people can take movies down from some shelf and pop them in and watch them on a communal couch. Very third place.
For the Modern American version of that—last time I was in an Urgent Care, they had a tv playing one of the Sharknado movies. The security guard there was excited to show everyone the bit where he was an extra in the film.
I hope he had a license to be broadcasting that publicly. I wish I were being sarcastic about this.
I admit it, I've never returned that DVD, found it behind a couch years later, only told my mom a decade later.
this article is trash. the "how many angels dance on the head of a pin" of someone who had a TV for parents.