Holdout video store falls victim to streaming, costs
Black Dog Video, one of the last remaining video rental stores in Vancouver, is closing its doors for good.
The small independent business, which boasts 17,000 titles including cult, classics and foreign films, has outlasted giants like Blockbuster and Rogers Video. It also survived the construction of the Canada Line on Cambie Street.
But now owner Darren Gay said he has to call it quits.
“It's a long time coming. There's so many factors against us. We just can't keep it going anymore.”
Business has been on a decline for years, he said, while costs, like rent, have risen. One of the biggest culprits are illegal downloads and streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime which Gay referred to as the “convenience of mediocrity.”
“You don't have to leave your house to watch whatever instead of making the effort to come here," he said.
Black Dog Video has been a fixture on Commercial Drive and a haven for cinephiles for more than 16 years.
Gay started the business in 1996 with his first store on Cambie Street, then opened the location on The Drive in 2005.
During the boom years of the video store, people would flock to Black Dog for date nights and movie nights in. “A rainy weekend in the summer, that would be killer for us,” said Gay. “All that has changed. It's the opposite now. People don't want to leave the house.”
When the pandemic first hit in 2020, the stores saw a bit of a boost, despite being closed. For two months, it was “insanely busy” as people stuck at home sent Gay emails with a list of rental orders and he'd have the items ready for curbside pickup.
But once the businesses reopened, customers still stayed home.
In September 2020, Gay sold the struggling Cambie Street location to a longtime employee who wanted to make a go of it. The store, renamed Video Cat, is now Vancouver's last surviving movie rental store.
Gay said he is saddened and disappointed — and a little mad, he admitted — about the upcoming closure. He's not a fan of fare offered by streaming services, and fears a loss greater than the disappearance of his brick-and-mortar store and livelihood.
“We have such a rich history of films here, films from the beginning of the history of film from the 1800s to now and so many things you can't get,” he said. “All this history and this great availability of films are just going to be lost.”
Gay has set the end of June as the tentative date for the closure, barring a “miracle” like a wealthy benefactor or an unexpected inheritance. After he and his staff take home some of their favourite titles, the remaining items — still numbering in the thousands — will be available to the public for sale starting May 1.
Gay also plans to keep his online store going, but only for sales, not rentals.
In a letter sent to customers Thursday, Gay said he has loved his job and felt “damn lucky and privileged to have been able to bring the world of cinema to Vancouver for so long.”
The best part of the job was the community and friends he had met over the last two decades of running the shop, noted Gay. “We've always had a good number of the population that wanted to come here and help support a small business. Unfortunately, it's just not enough anymore.”