LR’s R.A.O. to close doors after 43 years; owners blame pirating.
Owner’s son blames pirating’s rise; buyer sought for building
Victor Oliver said pirating killed the video store.
Well, the store he runs for his father, R.A.O. Video, a fixture on Main Street in downtown Little Rock since its founding 43 years ago, will be dead once a buyer is found for the building it has occupied since 2001.
The elder Oliver, Robert, founded the video store as a kiosk on Main Street in 1977 after reading an article in The Wall Street Journal about the new cutting-edge technology at the time, videocassettes.
The store moved up and down a three-block section of Main before settling in 2001 at 609 Main, between the Arkansas Repertory Theatre and what is now Three Fold restaurant.
Along the way, it converted its titles to DVD and Bluray as well as diversifying. But it wasn’t enough.
“Pirating killed the movie industry,” Victor Oliver said. “It continues to. Illegal downloads, illegal streaming, illegal copying.
“Every time a video store closes down, they want to blame it on Netflix, Amazon and that stuff. But I can tell you that being here for 40 years and watching the change, it is pirating.”
The evidence is everywhere if anyone is paying attention, he said.
“I can’t tell you how many comes in on a Tuesday when I just get a new movie in. They say, ‘What have you got new?’ I say I got this one. ‘Oh, I watched that on my Fire [TV] Stick two weeks ago.’ I mean it’s just blatant.”
Someone can rent a title at R.A.O. and the next day sell 30 or 40 copies of it from his car, Victor Oliver said.
He had taken to purchasing new titles at Walmart.
“Instead of getting 10, I get one or two,” he said. “It’s cheaper to buy them at Walmart. Plus when I bought them wholesale, I’d have to pick them out two or three months in advance and I wouldn’t know the demand for them at that time. So now I just wait and see what people want that day or that week.”
Diversifying hasn’t worked out well, either. The Olivers, for example, opened a vaping section in the store about five years ago.
“But with all the media scare and misinformation out there, that business is really tough,” Victor Oliver said. “Big tobacco is doing everything they can to shut
that down.”
The Olivers thought about leasing the building but when a buyer approached, they were willing to listen. The prospective buyers wanted to invest up to $4 million to convert the building into a multiuse development — a restaurant on the ground floor and 16 apartments on the upper two floors.
The buyers evaluated the building for 90 days.
“They didn’t find anything wrong with the building, but after they ran the numbers on the build-out that they wanted to do, it was going to be too costly for them,” Victor Oliver said.
Two other prospective buyers have expressed interest in the building, he said. If both fall through, he plans to list the building.
Historically, it is known as the Fulk-Haverty Building, but it is considered a noncontributing building in the Little Rock Main Street National Historic District, according to Patricia Blick, executive director of the Quapaw Quarter Association, which promotes preserving historic structures, especially in the downtown area.
“It is by architect Charles Thompson, 1916, but the original Thompson facade is obscured by the panels, I believe installed in 1960s,” Blick said in an email. “It could be restored to its original appearance.”
R.A.O. will be closing down, a few DVD sales at a time.
“I probably sold 55, 56 movies this morning,” including 47 to one customer, Victor Oliver said.
Roy Marshall purchased three DVDs a few minutes later.
Marshall, 58, of Conway and a former longtime Little Rock resident, said he has been a customer since 1986.
“I wish it wouldn’t close,” he said. “It’s the best video store I’ve ever been in.”
Marshall said options such as Red Box don’t have the old titles that R.A.O. carries.
When the store closes, “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said.