Say goodbye to Bob’s, one of New Jersey’s last video rental shops

BRICK, N.J. — Browsing the shelves at Bob's Video Time, filled with DVD titles ranging from the 1955 classic To Catch a Thief to Tyler Perry's Daddy's Little Girl and current films like Girl on a Train, Janet Morrow wept and leaned on her 14-year-old grandson for support.

The idea that after 27 years, Bob's is finally closing up shop — as one of the last video stores left in New Jersey and probably among only mere dozens left in the nation — made Morrow, 70, emotional.

"I was a charter member here. ... This is devastating," said Morrow, of Brick, who hasn't quite cozied up to the concept of obtaining films or games via digital download services like Netflix or on-demand cable — or even from a vending machine like Redbox.

"I don't usually get that emotional about stuff, but this is an example of how things are always changing in life ... how things change and nothing stays the same, and then you can never go back," Morrow said quietly to grandson Jason Komisar, in a kind of teaching moment where she sees an era ending.

"I guess I just came to say goodbye," Morrow said to Bob's owner, Bob Karpodinis, 62, who had tears in his own eyes as she told him how much she would miss the store.

"I thank you for your patronage all these years. We will miss you, too," said Karpodinis, who will close the store for good at 9 p.m. Saturday and move any remaining merchandise out by the next day to a warehouse where he and his wife, Donna, will operate an online mail-order video business. Since they announced on Facebook about a month ago that they would be closing, they have been selling off the DVD stock at discounted prices.

"It'll be OK, Grandma, you'll figure it out," Komisar said, looking around the 1,500-square-foot strip-mall storefront still filled with bright lights, movie posters, video containers, gaming systems, candy bars, and microwave  popcorn, and all the other trappings of what might have made such a location the hippest place in town when such businesses thrived in the 1980s and 1990s.

"I've never really been here before. ... This isn't how we do it," Komisar said of  standing in an aisle of a store and choosing something to watch based on thumbing through the selection of empty video cases.

For a time, it seemed as though every little outpost -- even in the most rural spots -- had some sort of video store, even if it was just a few shelves in the back of a gas station.

In populated areas like Brick, it was once as if there was one on every corner — at the height of the video store era, nearly a dozen were operating in this 32-square-mile Ocean County town alone.

Even as recently as 2008, there were 17,600 video outlets in the United States — everything from big chains like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video to supermarkets and little independents like Bob's, according to Sean Bersell, senior vice president of public affairs for the Entertainment Merchants Association, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit trade group representing DVD and video game retailers.

Bersell said that by the end of 2015, that number had dwindled to 4,400.  But as brick-and-mortar video stores have disappeared, the number of vending machines offering videos has increased from 17,800 to 41,000 during the same period.

Discs have held on because of generational issues, technological barriers in some areas where broadband is less reliable, and partly because the perceived economy of renting on a per-use basis instead of a service subscription, Bersell said.

But even in this Netflix-and-chill world — where you can have thousands of movies, games, and other downloads at your fingertips — DVDs you can hold in your hand will likely remain, Bersell predicted.

"I just don't see my mother ever doing it this way," Bersell said, referring to Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and other such formats.

"But then again, if 10 years ago you asked me if vinyl records would still be around, I would have said no ... and I would have been wrong. You look at places like Amoeba and you see that they are actually becoming more and more popular," Bersell said, referring to the Los Angeles music superstore Amoeba Music, which offers acres of vinyl records.

And back in Brick, Morrow — and enough others to keep Karpodinis and his wife, Donna, in business even after the giants like Blockbuster had left the scene — were still happy to get in their cars and drive over to Bob's to pick out a movie, pay as much as  $3.35 to rent it, and then drive back the next day to return it.  Besides movies, the store rented games and gaming systems.

"It became like a community within a community," Donna Karpodinis said. "I think people kept coming here to rent movies for so long because they liked the personal touch ... the community."

That's how other video outlets are still hanging on in the Philadelphia-area report. Like  CineMug on South Broad Street in Philadelphia, which opened in January 2015 as part video store, part coffee shop, according to owner Dan Creskoff, who was a longtime manager of several TLA video stores that closed a few years earlier.

Another former TLA manager, Miguel Gomez, opened his business Viva Video in Ardmore, Pa., in 2012 after purchasing — as did Creskoff — some of the former TLA video stock. Another store, Spruce Street Video on 12th in Philadelphia, has managed to survive since 1984 and is a LGBT-oriented video store geared primarily toward adult films.

In New Jersey, besides some ethnically oriented video outlets in the northern part of the state, the only other surviving independent video store appears to be Video Express in Yardville, just outside Trenton. Its owner, Ben Pasqua, agrees with the Karpodinises that the "heart of the business" is why such stores have held on so long.

"I think that people do appreciate that we're here," Pasqua said. "My wife often bakes cookies for our customers when we do special parties and events here, and they love it. I think it's little things like that that customers appreciate."