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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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
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.
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.
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 work. 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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...
The one where narrators have rose-colored glasses?
The author does make an authentic point about bored/maladjusted clerks messing with customers. I had one fill in what was apparently my nickname in the message-of-the-day on a receipt, a mean slur about my appearance. Of course, that isn't unknown today, when a human processes a transaction which has been flagged. Take a closer look at Youtube video IDs sometime. (My ex and her friends did it to me on a real estate site, on the listing for a childhood home.) /shrug
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 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.
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.
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:
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 been a disaster.
It wasn't a disaster until megaplatforms came alone.
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.
> 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).
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.
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
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.
i am sorry that it bothers you
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.
That is a very good thing.
Kids desperately need third spaces too.
>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 work. 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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Malls still exist. As do public libraries, community rec centers, gyms, and pools.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
Just as long as you pretend to not notice your neighbor come out of the curtained room...
> 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...
The one where narrators have rose-colored glasses?
The author does make an authentic point about bored/maladjusted clerks messing with customers. I had one fill in what was apparently my nickname in the message-of-the-day on a receipt, a mean slur about my appearance. Of course, that isn't unknown today, when a human processes a transaction which has been flagged. Take a closer look at Youtube video IDs sometime. (My ex and her friends did it to me on a real estate site, on the listing for a childhood home.) /shrug
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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...
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.
Forever memorialized in Kevin Smith's Clerks
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.
I admit it, I've never returned that DVD, found it behind a couch years later, only told my mom a decade later.
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.
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.
this article is trash. the "how many angels dance on the head of a pin" of someone who had a TV for parents.