Video rental store closes after 33 years
Sheila Burch and her husband, David, have spent most evenings since 1984 meandering the narrow aisles of Nickelodeon Entertainment, a video rental store in Pacifica, helping customers navigate shelves overflowing with thousands upon thousands of movies.
The Burches and their store have been fixtures of the coastal town for the past 33 years. At a time when the movie rental storefront can seem like a curious anachronism, Nickelodeon and its owners, according to its patrons, had a personal touch no algorithm or rental kiosk could hope to match.
“Sheila is more than someone you rent movies from,” said Bob Calhoun, a Nickelodeon customer for a decade, in an email. “She’s like a good bartender. People come in just to talk to her. Plus, Sheila remembers what kind of movies you like. She was Netflix before there was Netflix.”
Now, with all the bittersweetness of a rom-
“Sheila remembers what kind of movies you like. She was Netflix before there was Netflix.” Bob Calhoun, Nickelodeon customer
com with a tearjerker ending, after Sunday, Nickelodeon will be no more. The Burches are retiring, and the last video rental store in Pacifica is retiring along with them.
“After 33 years, there comes a time when you just need to do other things. We want to do some traveling,” Sheila Burch said. “But I love the business. Anyone who’s been in business for 33 years — that tells you a lot. I’m going to miss everyone. This is my social network.”
The Burches pulled all-nighters for weeks as they scrambled to pack up and sell off an ocean of inventory. Craigslist has helped, Sheila Burch said, by drawing a handful of collectors who descended on the store from across the state.
When they made the decision to retire in February, Sheila Burch estimates the store had accumulated about 22,000 DVDs, 25,000 VHS tapes and about 20,000 LaserDiscs — yes, those giant, ancestral relatives of the DVD.
“Nickelodeon is one of those wonderful places that never threw anything away,” Calhoun said. “You never knew what you’d find there but would always be glad to find it.”
The Burches had comfortable day jobs when, at the urging of some family friends, they decided to rent out their personal film library — 25 VHS tapes and 300 LaserDiscs. Their friends, the Schneiders, were opening a record store, and thought a movie-rental section would help complement their selection of LPs. Eight months later, they took the plunge and started tending the store full time.
Comic actor Rob Schneider, who grew up in Pacifica, was the store’s first employee. Even as an 18-year-old high-school student, Sheila said, Schneider had grand ambitions of being on “Saturday Night Live,” where he would eventually get his big showbiz break.
“He always got the customers laughing, he would practice his jokes on them. I loved it, and I do miss his laughter,” she said. Schneider couldn’t be reached for comment.
The sudden rise of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu and rental kiosks like Redbox have drained business away from brickand-mortar video stores. Blockbuster closed its last company stores in 2014, with a few dozen franchise operations as the last remnant of the brand.
According to the Entertainment Merchants Association, a trade group, home video consumer spending in the U.S. reached $9.9 billion in 1992, 71 percent of which came from rentals. In 2015, consumers spent $18.5 billion on home video entertainment, but just $3.3 billion — or 17.8 percent — came from renting.
Sean Bersell, a senior vice president at the group, said that despite body blows from streaming services and other competitors, rental stores across the country are finding ways to endure.
“The brick-and-mortar stores can compete with a greater selection and curation in the sense that you have people behind the counter who know the product, who know their customers and can make recommendations about what people will like,” Bersell said.
“Netflix, they’ve hurt us a bit,” Sheila Burch said. “But people come here and say, ‘We’re having a party this week, we want a certain movie.’ Especially with older movies, they can’t get it on Netflix, but Sheila has it, so they come down.
“They say, ‘I’m counting on the movie,’ and I say, ‘Yeah, I have it.’ ”
Video rental stores also thrive, Bersell said, in more rural areas, where “not everyone has the high-speed, reliable broadband Internet you need to stream video.” Family Video, for example, operates 750 stores in 19 states, mostly in sparsely populated areas. Alaska is one of the last strongholds for Blockbuster franchises.
The remaining stores have also persisted by offering customers something more than just a wide selection of movies. Sheila Burch, for example, would assemble decorated baskets complete with plush toys for patrons buying movies as a birthday gift or for Valentine’s Day. David Burch cultivated a reputation as a PC whisperer, repairing computers, DVD players and other equipment.
“He’s been keeping everyone’s PCs running for years around here,” said Calhoun.
David Hawkins, a co-founder of Lost Weekend Video, one of San Francisco’s few remaining video outlets, drew packed crowds after instituting “semi-legendary” comedy nights, he said. The performances stopped after the store relocated a year ago. After trying to share a spot with 1-2-3-4 Go Records on Valencia Street, it now runs out of a kiosk in the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema on Mission Street.
“Some people are doing coffee, some people do bars — everyone is combining video stores with something else. We’ve been jumping through hoops and reinventing ourselves,” he said.
San Francisco’s community of video stores has dwindled in recent years, thanks in part to lower sales and higher rents. Le Video closed in 2015 after 35 years. That same year also saw the closure of Frontlyne, which operated for 26 years.
The Nickelodeon may be gone after Sunday, but the Burches — aside from some traveling to their lake house in Wisconsin and to visit Sheila’s family in her native Hawaii — will still be around. The pair have a few thousand videos in their possession, and Sheila Burch is already toying with the idea of a mobile video store.
“Maybe we can turn it into something on the road and keep selling the inventory,” she said. “I have to keep busy.”