I basically lived in a mom & pop video store in small-town America when I was a teen. They charge you $100 for failure to return because that's how much it cost for them to buy their rentable copy. Not returning or losing a copy really fucked their bottom line. They leased additional copies for $40-60 a piece that they had to return once said movie cycled out (who knows what those distributions companies did with VHS tapes that had been played a hundred times). Each copy had to be rented out a dozen times to produce a profit. They made most of their money renting from their extensive classic horror and children's movie selection - how I learned there were more than one Land Before Time movies (at the time). And this place also had a porn portfolio. VHS tapes of white trash fucking outside on dirty recliners in their dumpy yard. MMmm mmm. I do miss the experience of going to a movie rental place, but not how much it cost, having to return anything, rewinding tapes, driving anywhere, or dealing with other people.
Service Merchandise was where I went with my dad to pick up most of my Nintendo games. You had to "take a number", wait what felt like 30 minutes, eventually, they'd call you up to the register, you'd point at the inventory code in their fat catalog, they'd go in the back to get your copy, and it was a solid $60 for a copy of TENGEN's Afterburner. #WORTH That or Sears, where they had the Nintendo Demo unit with a playable version of Kung Fu on a limited timer.
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Sears 1994 catalog for PC Software.
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