The only jobs I could get after graduating college were video rental store jobs.

A week or so after Kurt Cobain's body was found, I got a couple of phone calls. I'd been out of work since leaving college (I'd worked on campus during college, so that job disappeared after getting my degree...guess I should have stayed in school, huh?), so I took both jobs. One was at Hastings (a regional music/video/book chain out here in the Southwest), and one was at Video World (a local chain of video rental stores). The people at Hastings were astounded by my ability to restock videos (I was fluent in alphabetical order), but concerned that my second job was at a rival rental shop. I was given a choice: keep my 16 hour a week job at Hastings or keep my 25 hour a week job at Video World.

I stayed at Video World. I was an up-and-comer.

What happened after doesn't really matter. The fact is, video stores are pretty much gone. It was a boom industry in the 90s. There were chains, and there were local stores. Quentin Tarantino spent years at a video store before getting to make his own movies. It was kinda cool to be a video store jockey...kinda.

But now Netflix and Redbox have pretty much killed everyone else. All the Hollywood Videos (which bought out Video World here in ABQ) closed down. All the Blockbusters are gone. Most of the independent video stores in the Albuquerque area are gone, too. Some niche places remain because they have weird stuff no one can find.

And video streaming on demand movies are also doing a lot of damage. Eventually we won't be buying discs anymore, either. We'll all have one big hard drive in the sky.

It started a while back, though. We're just really feeling the disappearance now.

When new movies on VHS started selling for $20, the rental industry began its rather slow, but inevitable, slip to oblivion. DVDs steepened the slope. Not only were DVDs priced to sell when movies came out, they became an event. Every Tuesday (it was Wednesday in the beginning, but the media industry realized music and movies should be released on the same day...genius!) new movies came out and they were under $20. Why rent if you can buy?

I amassed a rather large DVD library due to a steady income and my love of watching movies. I didn't rent a video for years.

During this time, rental stores had to change from VHS to DVD. One of the reasons I stopped renting was the tendency of renters to use their rental DVDs as coasters. The other was that the stores upped rental fees from a buck to three or four (even though DVDs cost them less than retail to buy). I could buy a movie forever for just a couple times the cost of renting it for a night. I never looked back.

But during my last period of non-employment, I bought a chunk of movies from Columbia House and a few of them sucked. I didn't want to own them forever. So I weeded out my collection, sold most of the never-watch-again over Amazon and got a subscription to Netflix.

And now Netflix also has unlimited video streaming if you have an enabled player. Which I do.

A lot of the streaming is TV shows, but I watch a lot of movies, too. If it's no good, I stop it, delete from the Q and pick something else. I started watching "Lost" on the night the finale aired. "30 Rock" is pretty good. And "Party Down" is fucking hilarious.

But I digress.

What the demise of video rental stores means is that it's harder for those who are scraping by to get movies or TV shows to watch. You have to have a credit card (and stable address) for Netflix. Ditto the credit card for Redbox. So around here, you've got Hastings and not much else. It also means you can't have accounts at a bunch of different rental places, rack up a bunch of late fees and never go back again.

While I've never been in that situation, I've known a bunch of people who have been. And this just makes it a lot worse. Everyone deserves cheap, readily available entertainment.

It's practically a Constitutional right...right?

I can't believe no one is running for office on this issue.

Matt Worley isn't nostalgic for his old video store jobs, but he wonders what kind of employment recent college grads can get these days.