One of my favorite jobs was working in a video store. For those unfamiliar, movies were released on video cassette for home viewing. A video store was like a library but you paid to rent the title because at the time the retail prices were high. So, the video store was born. If I remember right, new releases were 3 dollars for one night. As the title aged,they would go down to 3 dollars for 5 nights and once they were mainstream titles, the went down to 1.50 for 5 nights.
The job entailed being a cashier to charge people for their selected rentals, any snacks they bought and any late fees they accrued due to keeping the video past the due date. Or you could work the membership desk to sign people up for memberships, answer questions about movies and check-in returned movies, making sure they were re-wound and ready to play before putting them on the shelf to be rented again. Please be kind -Rewind stickers were on every video tape.
People were usually in a good mood renting from the video store. One of the perks was getting to rent movies for free. We got coupons with our pay checks to rent for free. You could rent anything in the store for free. The coupons were for first run new releases.
The store I worked for was Video Central. It was owned by HEB and was competition to Blockbuster. I held that job for 4 or 5 years. It was fun.
Video stores started to struggle shortly after DVDs were introduced and again when netflix was launched. Unsure what the ultimate nail in the coffin was as I don't remember when streaming videos went mainstream.
However, there was something fun about going to the video store and browsing the covers on the shelf looking for a movie to watch. Kinda like a library. I don't know. It was an enjoyable past time. It was relatively cheap entertainment. Playing the movie on the VCR provided good enough quality. The audio signal was Dolby encoded and could do reproduce primitive surround sound effects with a modern receiver.
In a way it was the pinnacle of simplicity before the technology advanced and streaming became a viable option. Going to a friends house and renting "the fly" or all the "aliens" movies was fun. Or having fun renting Cape Fear combined with Basic Instinct was fun, too.
Too bad technology has advanced with streaming. For the age of the video store was the golden age of entertainment for Gen X. I miss those days.
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