The Last Video Shop in the County

Fadwa's Video closes at nine and has done since 1998, and the sign in the window still says NEW RELEASES in a font that was modern once.

There are no new releases. There have been no new releases since about 2014, when the last distributor Fadwa dealt with stopped taking orders under a hundred units and she stopped being able to pretend she was going to hit a hundred units.

Nine hundred and eleven DVDs. Forty-two VHS in a crate marked FOR THE PURISTS, which is a joke that has now been running so long it has gone through irony and out the other side into sincerity.

Her nephew has explained streaming to her four times.

She understands streaming. She has streaming. She watched an entire Korean series on it in November and thought it was superb.

That is not the argument, and her nephew keeps having the wrong argument, and she has given up correcting him.

What the shop is actually for

A boy comes in on Thursdays. He is about fourteen and he does not have a card and has never rented anything.

He comes in and he goes to the shelf that Fadwa labels HORROR (SENSIBLE) — as distinct from HORROR (SILLY), which is a distinction the shop takes seriously — and he reads the backs of the boxes for about twenty-five minutes and then he leaves.

Twenty-five minutes, every Thursday, for two years.

Fadwa has never asked him about it. She has, twice, said "that one's good," and been right both times, and been rewarded with the specific look a fourteen-year-old gives an adult who has turned out to be a source of information rather than a problem.

A man in his sixties comes in most Saturdays and rents something and returns it unwatched and rents something else. He has done this for six years. Fadwa charges him and does not mention it. She assumes he is doing the thing where you keep a routine going because the routine is load-bearing, and she is not going to be the one who tests it.

There is a woman who takes out four films a fortnight for her mother, who has dementia, and who has been taking out the same four films for eleven months because they are the four films her mother will watch.

Fadwa keeps those four films behind the counter now. They are not on the system. If someone else asks for them they are out.

The economics

The shop loses about four thousand a year.

Fadwa owns the building outright — her husband bought it in 1991 and this is the single fact that makes the entire enterprise possible — and the flat upstairs is let, and the let covers the loss and a little more.

So: the shop is not a business. The shop is a hobby that occupies eleven hours a day, six days a week, and is subsidised by a tenant called Ravi who works in insurance and has no idea he is the patron of the last video shop in the county.

Her nephew has done a spreadsheet about the flat. The spreadsheet says the flat could be a second flat.

Thursday

The boy came in and went to HORROR (SENSIBLE) and read the backs of boxes for twenty-five minutes.

At the door, on his way out, without turning round, he said: "Are you shutting?"

Fadwa said, "Who told you that?"

"My mum saw it on the community page."

The community page has been shutting Fadwa's Video roughly annually since 2016.

"I'm not shutting."

The boy nodded at the door frame. Then he said, "Okay," and went.

He came back the following Thursday, which he was going to do anyway, and read the backs of boxes for twenty-five minutes.

But he came in through the door about four seconds faster than usual, which Fadwa noticed, and which she has thought about a great deal since, and which is not the kind of thing that goes in a spreadsheet.