[I]RASBURG — What might be Vermont’s last video-rental store lies on a long, lonely stretch of Route 5.
Nancy’s Video has stood there in Irasburg since 1990, eight miles southwest of Newport, and inside its walls Brien Lemois Jr. has been trying to outlast the inevitable.
“The industry’s been slowly dying over the last 20 years,” the 40-year-old store owner said on a recent afternoon. “People are more for convenience than for going to a store. Why go to a movie store when you can rent it off Netflix?”
With the rise of online streaming and kiosks like Redbox, that’s a question video-rental shops around the state seem to have been asking themselves. As Lemois puts it, they’ve been “dropping like flies.”
Google Maps turns up scant results for other shops, and the ones that do show up appear closed. Take Video Queen, which opened five years ago in Middlebury and as of last year housed a sandwich shop.
A 2015 article in Seven Days featured three rental stores that looked to be surviving industry trends. But Gagnon’s Video in Hardwick closed at the beginning of last year, and the phone number and Facebook page for Videos & More in Northfield have been disconnected and deleted.
The third store in that piece, Harry and Lloyd’s in Barre, stopped renting movies about a month ago, a representative said, focusing instead on retro video games.
And in April, the St. Johnsbury stalwart Video King announced it’d be closing this year.
Those closures are part of a national trend. An analysis published two years ago in USA Today found that about 86% of video-rental stores that were open in 2007 had closed.
In Vermont, that leaves Nancy’s, run by Lemois and Trish Jones, his wife. The gray vinyl-sided building is off a bend a few minutes from Coventry, across from a farm.
The store opened on June 6, 1990, founded by Lemois’ parents: Nancy and Brien Sr. The family had moved from the Providence, Rhode Island, area, where they lived just a few blocks from a Major Video, part of a rental chain bought out by Blockbuster in the 1980s. The younger Brien Lemois remembers going there as a kid, marveling at a play area set up inside.
Lemois’ sister, Barbara Annis, took over the shop after their father died in 1998. When she died in 2005, Lemois became owner. He and Jones started seeing each other in 2010, and around 2012 she came on as the store manager.
Why did Lemois decide to take the reins? “To keep it going,” he said. “I grew up in it. It was just second nature.”
In 1998, he said, the store had about 25,000 titles. Nancy’s started moving from VHS tapes to DVDs around 2000 before getting rid of tapes entirely in 2012, he said. These days, the store stocks 4,400 titles, and most of its rentals are new releases.
Nancy’s has 1,400 customers on file, according to Lemois and Jones, along with 1,000 “authorized members” — relatives or friends that customers OK to join their account.
Lemois has seen generations pass by in this store. People he knew as a kid have their own families. Children he met when he took over are now adults.
“For the longest time, the video store was like the neighborhood bar,” he said. He and Jones met in the store as children, in fact, when her mother would bring her there as a reward.
Part of what keeps a brick-and-mortar joint like Nancy’s alive are the close bonds developed with customers.
“They’re not blood family, but they’ve become family,” said Jones, 36, after listing off several regular patrons.
Getting to know families goes both ways: 3-year-old Samantha, the youngest of their five children, scampered around with a DVD in her hands that recent afternoon, stopping to pet the family’s Lab-mix puppy, Luna.
“The personal touch,” Lemois said, describing what a store like Nancy’s can offer in the age of streaming.
The couple has a good grip on their regulars’ tastes. They rattled off a few: Scott stops by daily for a new release; Ashley picks up old action movies for her husband; Dawn likes TV seasons.
“You get to know people’s personality more by what they watch,” Lemois said.
Sometimes, when stocking up on new titles through their distributor, the couple chooses movies they think certain customers will enjoy.
That kind of connection is something lost with the decline of local video stores, Jones said. “The more technology grows, the farther apart — the less human interaction you need,” she said.
The slow technological growth in the Northeast Kingdom is one reason Nancy’s is still around, Jones figures. According to 2018 data from the Vermont Department of Public Service, the Kingdom’s counties make up three of the five counties with the highest percentage of locations underserved by broadband internet providers. Essex and Caledonia counties hold the top two spots at 28.8% and 18.9%. Orleans County, where Nancy’s is, comes in fourth at 10.9%.
Slower internet speeds make it harder to stream video from platforms like Netflix or Hulu, so renting movies and shows in person becomes a viable alternative.
The Kingdom’s older population means there may be more customers who can’t afford cable or internet — or know how to use computers — which also helps, Jones said.
And Nancy’s has diversified. It shares a building with Green Mountain Sporting Goods, a gun and ammo store Lemois started that attracts a healthy stream of customers. The sporting goods store was incorporated in 2014, according to state records, and it’s “the only reason we’ve survived,” said Lemois. DVD racks sit across from a glass display case for pistols and rack of shotguns lining the wall behind it.
For now, Lemois and Jones are banking on their loyal customer base, the depth of their catalog and their ability to quickly bring in new releases. Lemois hopes the kids will take over the operation some day.
He’s sad about the shuttering of so many rental stores, the “piece of history that’s going to be lost.”
“But I’m kind of looking at the glass as half full,” he said. He and Jones are thinking about opening another location in nearby Derby, where they already have a second Green Mountain Sporting Goods.
Who knows, he wonders. “Maybe they’ll come back.”
