Four years ago, the owners of Scarecrow Video brought all their staff members together to deliver some bad news. Like video stores across the country, the business was struggling. Its rentals and purchases had decreased dramatically as customers flocked to online streaming services. The owners were writing their own checks just to keep the business running, but they couldn’t do it anymore. It looked like they might have to part with their collection of over 130,000 videos—one of the largest publicly available video archives on earth.
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So the staff came together to pitch their own proposal. The idea was simple: They would keep the collection together, in the same space and open to the public, but transform the business into a nonprofit. After some back and forth over details, the owners agreed to donate everything in the store—the films and the shelves they were stored on—to Scarecrow Video, the nonprofit.
The result is something like a museum mixed with a video store. A team of 20 volunteers devotes hours each week to collect movie returns and restock the shelves. Most evenings, they hold one of their many community outreach programs for the public, such as the Children’s Hour, an event with the public library across the street that features a series of stories, videos, and activities for kids that center on a specific theme.
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Four years later, Scarecrow Video hasn’t just survived, it’s done quite well. It took the staff less than a week to raise the $100,000 they needed to get the nonprofit off the ground, with donations coming from as far away as Australia, Japan, and Bulgaria. And each year when they ask for more money, they’ve been able to get it from a band of loyal patrons.
This is interesting–libraries (at least around where I live) often carry DVDs as well as books and Internet access, but this is the first time I’ve heard of a museum specifically for movies and TV that’s focused on being as open to the public and accessible as possible. Places like these will only become more important as time goes on!
Every time there’s a transfer of media format, something gets lost. Not everything that was available on VHS got released on DVD, not everything that was available on DVD is available online. Same with the transfer from vinyl albums to tapes to CDs. So yes, this is important and good.
In the Netflix Era, a Video Store Becomes a Cultural Asset
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