Local movie rental shop outlasting big boys

Customers inside Ninth Street Video linger in front of the movie racks, talk with one another and ask the cashier for recommendations. Some come from the adjoining Ragtag Cinema and Uprise Bakery with movies on the mind.

Owner Janet Marsh said the casual, open environment and discerning service distinguishes her shop from other movie rental stores.
“It’s like a cocktail party without any liquor,” Marsh said. “And 99 percent of the time, the topic of conversation is movies.”
The locally owned business has been recommending and renting movies to Columbians since 1992, and Marsh said the number of employees and revenue have been steady through the past 18 years despite growing competition and a move from Ninth Street.

The other movie rental stores in Columbia, outlets of retail giants Blockbuster, Movie Gallery and Hollywood Video, are getting driven out of business as Netflix DVD rentals by mail, Redbox $1-per-day DVD dispensers and home movies-on-demand grow in popularity.
But the small, service-based model with roots from Al’s Video and Columbia Photo has thrived locally.
Ninth Street Video took over the location of Al’s Video at 25 S. Ninth St., where Mustard Seed Fair Trade now operates. Al’s Video, an eclectic operation, liquidated its inventory and closed, though the store was still outfitted with shelves for DVDs and VHS tapes. Shortly thereafter, Columbia Photo chose to move into the computer market and sold its inventory of rental movies to Marsh and partner Sally Beattie.
Marsh said Columbia had been left without a place to rent interesting movies. “We were fulfilling a community entertainment need,” she said.
As Ninth Street Video moved to its new location on Hitt Street just south of Broadway, massive rental companies were beginning to collapse with the introduction of savvy new competitors.
Movie Gallery Inc., the operator of Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery video rental stores, announced in May that it intended to close its stores nationwide and liquidate its assets.
Movie Gallery closed its location at the Village of Cherry Hill in south Columbia in May and is preparing to close its other corporate-owned store on Rainforest Parkway in north Columbia. Over the holiday weekend, Hollywood Video on the eastern end of Broadway, another corporate-owned outlet, was advertising a going-out-of-business sale, with discounts of up to 70 percent off DVD purchases.
Blockbuster has two franchise operations in Columbia owned by a Kansas firm: one at 3305 Clark Lane and another at 3910 Peachtree Drive. The company lost $65.4 million during the first three months of 2010 and is seeking $150 million in financial investments to avoid having to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, according to an Associated Press report.
New innovations in distribution and technology might be partially responsible for the downfall of the movie rental giants.
Netflix burst onto the rental scene in 1997 with an entirely new business model featuring an online storefront. For less than $10 each month, its 13 million customers can have an unlimited number of DVDs mailed to their homes and stream Netflix movies from the company website. (New movie discs are mailed to customers after Netflix receives previously rented movies in postage-paid, company-provided envelopes.)
As luck would have it for Columbians, Netflix has a Columbia distribution center, which means movies can be delivered sometimes as soon as one or two days after ordering.
Another upstart, Redbox, offers hundreds of DVD selections in fully automated kiosks at the rate of $1 per movie per day. The chain has more than 24,000 rental kiosks in the US, including 14 at grocery stores and Walmarts throughout Columbia. Customers need only insert a credit card and choose a movie, much like a soda vending machine. The idea has proven to be a golden ticket, with more than 750 million rentals made in the company’s eight-year history.
What these high-tech innovations lack is precisely the strong point of Ninth Street Video — a vast selection of videos at hand with sales clerks to physically interact with.

The shop also has a well-maintained Web presence. The site, www.9thstvideo.com, allows customers to search its catalog of movies and scan genre-specific employee picks. Employees regularly update the Ninth Street Video blog and Facebook pages with new releases, summaries and links to movie reviews.
Marsh said the website is popular with the educational community. “Teachers and students use the website a lot to find movies for classes,” she said.
Marsh says that her store has the largest number of titles in the state. Ninth Street Video’s 7,900 DVDs span every conceivable subject from foreign films to documentaries to movies featured at both Ragtag Cinema and Columbia’s True/False Film Festival.

Marsh values having the Ragtag Cinema close by; the two businesses share customers and have forged a kind of symbiotic relationship. “It’s kind of like we’re cousins or something,” she said.
Marsh said the same kind of folks who see movies at Ragtag will walk next door to rent from her.
A sign by the cash register, for example, reads: “Please Give, a new comedy from Nicole Holofcener, opens Friday at Ragtag. Check out her other films here.”
The founders of Ragtag also run the True/False Film Festival, and Ninth Street has a separate section of documentaries from the festival.
The store is open 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Saturday and from noon to 11 p.m. on Sunday. It costs $3 to rent a newly released DVD for two nights or an older movie for three nights.
Marsh credits the shop’s success to the customer service she and Beattie and their part-time employees (a steady number of about nine) have been offering since they opened the store.
The staff will recommend movies to customers and chat with them about directors or genres they’ve enjoyed.
“These people watch movies all the time,” she said of her employees. Marsh confessed she’s a movie addict: “I feel kind of weird about it if I don’t have a movie to watch when I get home.”