Average Jane Rents Her Last DVD

Written by

You can mark your calendar for Monday, May 28, 2012 as the last time anyone from my household will ever visit a "video store" to rent a DVD.

The portents loomed large:

There were hardly any movies we wanted to see, even though it had been months since our last visit. (Admittedly, that's as much Hollywood's fault as the store's.)
As soon as we found something we were interested in watching, I launched the Netflix app on my iPhone to see if I could stream it instead.
When we checked out, it turned out we had a $1 fine from the last time we'd rented a disc, 150 days earlier.

We finally picked out a movie and took it home to watch it. After 20 minutes, I turned to my husband and said, "I'm not laughing. Shall we call it?" He said, "I'm done. Let's watch something else." Whereupon we switched to the Roku and started streaming a movie from—you guessed it—Netflix.

The next day I happened to walk past the store and I thought, "I should have brought the DVD with me." Then I proceeded to forget all about it. Every day I remembered when it was too late, so the upshot is that I returned it this morning and we'll now owe a big fine for a movie we DIDN'T EVEN WATCH.

I'm officially through with renting physical media. The selection is terrible and it's a huge hassle. From now on, we're all about streaming, broadcast and the occasional purchased DVD (but only if it's something really good like Game of Thrones).

How about you? Do you still rent DVDs?

Photo credit: Jalada and Sefran

Comments

4 responses to “Average Jane Rents Her Last DVD”

June 1, 2012

Donna W

We are usually disappointed in movies these days.

Reply
June 2, 2012

Amanda

This is a “kind of” answer. No, I won’t walk into a video store (it will always be a video to me, even though they’re now obsolete), but I will check out from the library. I don’t mind being on a waiting list for them, because I like the fact that they’re free. Returning is no problem for me because I go by the library at least once a week. Plus, my library did away with fines several years ago. So yeah, I’m all about the library.

Reply
June 5, 2012

Huts

We still get DVD’s from netflix. I don’t remember the last time we rented from a store.

Reply
June 17, 2012

Keith

When you say a BIG fine, do you mean a week / month’s salary ?

Reply