Jason Jordan’s store hours aren’t as regular as they used to be. They haven’t been for a while. But that doesn’t mean he’s not working when the sign on the door reads “CLOSED.”
At about twelve fifteen on a dreary, cold, and drizzly February day, Jordan walks unhurriedly, leather bag hanging from his right hand, toward Avid Video, the small Durham business he built two decades ago at an even more challenging location than the small Perry Street space it’s occupied since 2009. He was supposed to open at noon.
But these days, it’s not like many people will notice if he’s late. The video-rental businesses isn’t what it used to be. Plus, he’d already announced back in October that he’d be gone by now.
“I think a lot of people think I closed down in December,” he says. “That was the original plan. And then I ended up getting my kids for a week at Christmas break, so I just closed the store during that time. The store sales were going so well that I decided to stretch it out a couple more months. I think it might have been a mistake.”
He won’t be there much longer. He’ll close for his kids’ spring break during the last week of March and then come back the first week of April for what he calls a “blowout sale.” Around April 8, his long-beloved video store will close its doors for good.
With his long black hair, neck-length beard, and thrift shop sweaters, Jordan looks like a guy who’s gotten used to lonely days at the store. But he remains gregarious and friendly, laughs easily, and still gets hyper when discussing films.
He says he’s late today because he spent the morning at home, transferring a longtime customer’s home movies to DVD.
“Yeah, that’s another service I provide,” he says. “Since I’ve been open, actually. Early on, I took my Yellow Pages listing and, rather than put anything under ‘video rental,’ I would put it under ‘video-transfer service.’ I figured most people that were looking in the Yellow Pages were going to drive a certain distance for a movie rental, as opposed to the video-transfer service, where they might be willing to drive across town to get the service.”
That kind of scrappiness has kept Jordan going since he and his now ex-wife, Paige Jordan, opened with all VHS rentals at North Durham’s Willowdaile Shopping Center in 1996.
That, and stubbornness.
Jordan can rightfully claim that Avid was the Triangle’s last nonadult video store to stay open, despite the deadly competition from Netflix, Amazon, Redbox, and other corporate dream killers.
“I take a little pride in that, I guess,” he says. He looks down and pauses. “I refused to close it down when it would have been fiscally responsible for me to do so. You know, I should have done this years back.”
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According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 2006 was a good year for video-rental establishments, with 17,828 counted. In North Carolina, the number of stores had already dropped a bit from 2005, when there were 645. By 2013, however, the national number had dropped to 3,174. And there were only 110 statewide.
To get a sense of how crushing a decline the video-rental industry has suffered over the past decade or so, consider the once-mighty Blockbuster. At its 2004 zenith, the Dallas-based company operated more than four thousand stores nationwide. But six years later, Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy. Today, only fifty-one Blockbuster stores remain open in the U.S. Nine of them are in Alaska. Everywhere else, Blockbuster stores are an oddity.
None of the forty-two stores outside of Alaska are in North Carolina. The last of the Triangle Blockbusters closed in Raleigh more than two years ago.
After Dish Network bought Blockbuster in 2011, a three-year purge of stores followed. During that time, it wasn’t uncommon to bump into a grinning Jordan at, for instance, the now-defunct West Highway 54 Blockbuster location. He was there to scoop up some of the stock at liquidation prices.
“Every store that would close, I would go and get inventory from it,” says Jordan. “A lot of it, I put into the store, boosting our rental selection. And a lot of it I would put online to sell. And I think that’s why you’re seeing an increase in the prices online now. It’s because there aren’t those resources to get that inventory anymore. I’m sure there were other sellers just like me who were going out to those closings and buying it up and putting it online to sell. And now there are no more stores to close, because they’re already gone.”
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Jordan was born in 1970, in the small farming town of Banks, Alabama. As a kid, he says, “the only place that rented movies was a dry cleaner in our town that had a wire spinning rack of these VHS tapes that were in these big boxes back then, you know? You would pay a seventy-five-dollar membership fee at this dry cleaner to be able to rent one of the couple dozen movies that he had on a wire rack.”
Jordan knew what he had to do.
“I talked my dad into buying a VHS player, like the year they came out in the market or the year after,” he says. “Because there was nothing to do there.”
The dry cleaner’s selection wasn’t all that greata lot of Chuck Norris, Jordan recalls. But he nonetheless managed to find the perfect flick for his family’s first movie night.
“The first movie we watched was Dawn of the Dead,” he says, laughing. “And I was just fascinated by the fact that you could pause the movie and rewind it, and I could watch a guy’s head explode one frame at a time.”
He loved movies, but there were no theaters in Banks. So his mom would have to drive him to nearby Troy to see live-action Disney films of the seventies, starring the likes of Kurt Russell and Jodie Foster.
“There was a drive-in there in that town,” he says. “I would see double features that I probably shouldn’t have seen at a very young age.”
Soon after, his family moved to Panama Beach. After high school, his love of literature led him to study it at Florida State University. At some point, though, he realized that this path would lead to a teaching job, and that didn’t appeal to him.
Videos appealed to him.
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For Jordan, filling Avid’s shelves with Blockbuster product was sweet revenge. In 1999, Blockbuster had bullied Avid Video out of its original fifteen-hundred-square-foot location at Willowdaile.
“Blockbuster was pretty famous for doing this at the time,” Jordan says. “They would find a store that had already established a market. … And they would go into a market where there was already an established customer base, build a store close to that location, and then undersell the competitor.”
Blockbuster also had the clout to convince landlords to choose the big chain over the little guy. So Avid was out.
It was just as well, Jordan says. Business wasn’t all that great there anyway.
“I was sandwiched between a nail salon on one side and a dry cleaner on the other,” he says. “I must have breathed so many toxic chemicals.”
Jordan spent most of his time playing video games with teens from a nearby apartment complex. When the nail salon was converted to a tae kwan do studio, the store had a new problem: students over there were shaking the plaster with kicks and slams.
“I constantly had films falling off the walls,” he says.
Jordan and Paige had moved to North Carolina from Tallahasseethey’d met at FSUspecifically to open a video store.
“We were music lovers,” Jordan says. “We were constantly at the local club in Tallahassee, listening to bands play. A lot of them would be on the road from Chapel Hill.”
The couple decided Chapel Hill was their kind of town. They packed up two thousand VHS tapes of mostly B-movies and straight-to-video cheapies Jason had purchased from Video 21, the small chain that employed him as a store manager for a few years. But when they looked around Chapel Hill, they found that the retail rents were prohibitively high.
They ended up at Willowdaile. While they worked to avoid opening too close to a Blockbuster, there was nonetheless daunting competition.
“When we opened, there were fifty or sixty rental stores in the Triangle,” Jordan says. “That’s why I picked the name Avid, for the Yellow Pages listings, so that we would come first. Because there were so many stores.”
Three years later, Jordan was scouring Durham for another affordable spot. He found one next to the Whole Foods at Broad and Main in Durham, where they rented twenty-eight hundred square feet.
Around that time, DVDs had come on the market, and they were cheap. Jason ordered them by the dozens.
“I was catering to a more art-house crowd,” he says. “I was stocking foreign films and independent titles and classics, and anything that would play at the Carolina Theatre, I would bring into the store.”
Avid thrived on constant foot traffic from Whole Foods customers. Jason and Paige had their first child, Sadie, in 2004, and she became a regular presence, running around through the maze of the big basement video room, often with customers’ children. A son, Nico, was born in 2008.
Meanwhile, the business started showing signs of what people had warned Jason about all along.
“Since I first opened, people were saying that the video industry was dead,” he says. “There was always something that was going to kill it.”
When the recession hit, a lot of local video stores went downincluding Jason’s favorite, VisArt Video.
“Oh, I hated to see those VisArts close,” he says. “That was a great store. Early on, that was what I was wanting to emulate. Their business. Their model. The art-house films that they carried. The titles they offered. … Even after DVD had really taken over the industry, they still kept all that VHS, with every single title facing out.”
VisArt, founded in 1985, grew as a small but lucrative chain, constantly seeking bigger spaces and moving to escape Blockbuster’s hostile maneuvers.
“We were probably doing a couple of million dollars a year, at the best of times, with probably six stores,” says Stacey Gamble, who worked as a buyer for VisArt from 1988–2011. “At the end, it was less than half that.”
She adds that the success of DVDs in the early 2000s initially did more harm than good.
“There was a gradual decline when DVDs came onto the market,” says Gamble. Prior to that, she adds, new releases could cost as much as $100 per copy to buyand around $70 for retailers. “Customers couldn’t go out and buy films.”
VisArt’s big Carrboro space next to Cat’s Cradle was the company’s last Triangle branch. It closed in 2011. That was preceded by two Durham closingsa store on Hillsborough Road and another on Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway. The demise of the latter, Jordan’s favorite, was likely hastened by the presence of a Redbox at the neighboring Harris Teeter.
Gamble’s long career in video rentals began at the trailblazing North American Video, created by Gary Messenger out of his garage in Durham in 1979. By 1993, he’d left the video business, but the chain continued until its last store closed in Raleigh last year.
Messenger says he’s sad to see Avid go.
“They were nice,” Messenger says. “They were knowledgeable. They knew what the shit they were talking about. It’s just a shame. The concept of a video store, and what a video store offered, was probably the neatest thing since sliced bread.”
In the current age of instant gratification, Messenger says, he laments the lost “family aspect” of old-fashioned video stores, where parents and their kids picked out movies together. Now, he says, that’s history.
In 2009, Weingarten Realty declined to renew Avid’s lease for the space next to Whole Foods.
Jordan had to move again.
“I had a five-year option,” Jordan says, “but I had to give them a three-month notice. And I waited until the last month, when my lease was expiring, and told them that I wanted to stay another five years. And they told me that it was too late.”
In one sense, that was OK. With Netflix and Redbox eating into his customer base, he struggled to afford the rent, which by then had risen to nearly $5,000 a month.
But while Avid’s next space, at 1918 Perry Street, was a simple walk across the street from Whole Foods, for the sizable portion of its clientele who were Whole Foods shoppers, the store may as well have moved across town.
Avid’s business fell off dramatically.
Jordan’s friend and former upstairs business neighbor, Bull City Records owner Chaz Martenstein, says Perry Street wasn’t great for him, either. He moved his store to Hillsborough Road in 2011.
“Perry Street is just a street,” he says. “It’s off the beaten path. You can’t keep the panhandlers away.”
To make matters more difficult for Jordan, he and Paige split in 2011.
With help from Martenstein, Jordan started to maintain an online presence. He began letting customers trade in old records and CDs for rental credit, and for the past couple of years, his used-record sales have sometimes beaten his video-rental numbers.
He started selling stuff on eBaywhich he’ll continue to do from home, after he no longer has to pay $2,000 a month rent for his brick-and-mortar business.
“I tend to focus on things that are difficult to find online,” he says. “I check the ‘closed’ listings frequently. I’ll find things I didn’t know were valuable and realize that I have it in the inventory, and I’m able to go and just pull it up and put it up on eBay. That’s something I’m going to lose when I close the store. This will all be in storage. So I won’t have that ability to, you know, realize that something is valuable and then go find it on the shelf somewhere.”
And his online customers won’t enjoy the benefit of his recommendations. If they don’t already know about the Akira Kurosawa films he owns, and the Fellinis, the Antonionis, the Herzogs, Dario Argento’s masterpieces and other Giallos, and Criterion titles that aren’t available for streaming, who’s going to tell them?
“Jason at the video store was great for that,” Martenstein says. “I could always go in there and tell him which genre of horror I wanted to watch that night, and he always had something to suggest. And he was always very right.”
This article appeared in print with the headline “Requiem for the Video Store”
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