Why I miss the video store

Picture this. It's a random evening in 2004 and you feel like watching a movie. Of course, you and your friends only decide this at ten to eight. What do you do? YOU RACE to the video store that closes at 8:00 PM.

Time for an ode to the time when we didn't even know what binge-watching was. And had to bike to the video store on the corner. Ten things we all recognize. Here it comes:

1. Pedaling your lungs out to just barely grab that movie before closing time: we’ve all been there. And then quickly saying a little prayer on the bike that the movie you actually have in your head is still there.

2. Because you know: popular, new movies could easily be checked out by someone else, and then it was crying with a cap on.

3. And do we still remember that red or blue carpet? Or that employee behind the counter you were intensely jealous of because what a cool job that was? Getting paid to watch movies. Pfff.

4. Once inside, you rushed like a madman to your favorite aisle.

5. And you always grabbed that (compared to the supermarket) ridiculously expensive four-euro popcorn for the fun of it. Or a tub of Ben & Jerry’s. I mean: this was your only chance, you were always too late for the supermarket. Duh.

6. THEN YOU ALWAYS CHECKED WHO WAS IN THE PORN AISLE. THE CREEPS. HAHAHA.

7. If you wanted to check out a relatively new movie, you secretly hoped it would already be in the weekly movies instead of the daily movies. Do you know how annoying it is when you can only rent a movie for 24 hours? You’d have to bike back again tomorrow.

8. What you would definitely ‘forget’, after which you’d get a flipping mother, because those fines were heavy. You might as well have bought the movie.

9. If you rented a weekly movie, you’d seriously get sentences out of your mouth like: ‘You the first three days Mean Girls and I the second half of the week?’

10. Once home, you had to skip through a hundred trailers, then through the DVD menu (do we still remember that?) and after twenty minutes you could finally watch your movie. Oh, Netflix and Videoland online, I love you, but sometimes I miss the nostalgia and especially the outing to the real video store.