BROOKSVILLE, Florida – Liz Medina [pictured] and Leigh Ann Zipp, partners in life and partners in work, are the new owners of a kind of store that is going away – a video store.
A neighborhood video store.
A video store that is not a Blockbuster.
A video store period.
Medina and Zipp are the successful co-managers of a St. Petersburg adult video and novelty shop called Southern Nights. They now live in Ridge Manor, though, and at their recently spruced-up Movie Buffs in the Sav-A-Lot plaza on the U.S. 41 business strip, they can be successful, they insist, in an increasingly old-fashioned industry through what some might see as an increasingly old-fashioned approach – community outreach, customer service and just knowing the names of the people who shop at your store.
“The little things,” Medina said one night earlier this week, “that are the big things.”
Today and Sunday, in what they’re calling on block-letter fliers a weekend “Holiday Blow Out,” there will be particularly cheap video sales, and free pizza from 1 to 8 p.m., and there’s always free popcorn.
Movie Buffs is a risk.
“But what is life?” Medina asked.
She is 45 and Zipp is 37. They moved to Hernando County late last year and bought Movie Buffs in mid September. The official grand opening was in early November.
They are getting themselves into a business that is gasping in the face of Internet downloads, cable and satellite providers’ movie-on-demand click-and-picks, the popular and growing online DVD rental company Netflix, low-cost DVD sales at places like Target, Wal-Mart and Best Buy – as well as the general movie-industry slump that has megaplexes coast to coast drawing smaller and smaller crowds.
Even the biggies in the video-store industry are listing.
Blockbuster is No. 1. Consistent quarterly losses.
Movie Gallery is No. 2. Consistent quarterly losses.
And of the estimated 24,300 video stores in the United States, only a few thousand are run by single-store owners, said Sean Bersell, vice president of public affairs for the California-based Video Software Dealers Association.
“But I feel like there’s room for all of us,” Medina said the other night.
“For us little people,” Zipp said.
In November 2003, Jack Valenti, then-chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, told the Associated Press that he thought video stores – big and small – could be obsolete by … 2005.
They haven’t gone the way of the cobbler yet, of course, but…
Here in Hernando, for example, County Line Video, Movies For All and Movie Buffs are the only video stores left that aren’t Blockbuster or Movie Gallery – of which, at the latest count, there are seven.
“Sometimes it hasn’t been easy – like lately,” 65-year-old County Line co-owner Kaye Bender said this week. Bender used to own four stores – in Palm Harbor, Hudson, Port Richey and Spring Hill. Now it’s down to just Spring Hill. She sells inflatable slides and bounce houses to help bring in money.
“In order to compete” as an independent, said Bersell, the VSDA spokesman, “you have to really work very hard to distinguish yourself in the marketplace.”
That’s the plan at Movie Buffs.
It sits in an old, dark parking lot between the Sav-A-Lot and the storefront Hernando-Pasco Hospice administrative offices, and the rent is $2,800 a month. But Medina and Zipp believe they can make this work – with work.
Hard work.
Lots of hard work.
They still work in St. Petersburg from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. They leave Ridge Manor at 8 p.m. They work nights and weekends up here.
Southern Nights is up for sale. Owner Will Buchanan said earlier this week that he includes Medina and Zipp in his proposals to potential buyers – “my right and left arms,” he calls them – but who knows whether a new owner will keep them.
For now, though, customers come in to Southern Nights just to say hey.
“If anybody can make it work in a neighborhood video store, it’s them,” Buchanan said.
Since they bought Movie Buffs, Medina and Zipp have painted inside the store in SpongeBob yellow and fire engine red, and they’ve passed out fliers in bingo parlors, mobile home parks and just about every business around the Hernando seat.
The other day Medina wrote a coupon for a free rental for the kid at the register at the nearby Subway. On a napkin.
VHS tapes go five for five bucks.
Late fees for those tapes?
Thirty cents a day.
They have a reserve list. They call you when the movie you want comes in. They are working on remembering names.
They have in the cooler orange, grape and strawberry Fanta and Crush, because kids like that, Medina said.
They will be working on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
Second-month sales are up $1,500 from the first month, Zipp said. More telling, perhaps, one customer brought two bottles of wine for them the other day, and Zipp got an ice cream sundae from a customer who just decided to get her an ice cream sundae because she wanted to and because it was nice. “So sweet,” Medina said.
One night this week, just before 9, Zipp made some popcorn in the old-fashioned popper on wheels that sits near the front door. The store started to smell like the movies.
“It’s as big of a risk as we’ve ever taken,” Medina said. She looked at Zipp. “But why not?” she said.