Denise Haskew mourns the loss of the latest dedicated DVD store in her area, putting the blame not on online retailers, but on large retailers who just stock bestsellers.

Article first published: March/April 2008

That’s it. The last dedicated DVD/video store in my area has closed. No more Saturday afternoons spent browsing the world cinema section hoping to find a Kurosawa movie that is so obscure they forgot to put it on imdb, but which has just been rediscovered, remastered and rereleased to an eager audience of classic film buffs. A consequence of online shopping, I suppose. The internet killing traditional retailers.

Or that’s the official reason, anyway. But it can hardly be a coincidence that three local DVD shops have closed in the past 18 months, curiously coinciding with the opening of a large supermarket in the area. The supermarket, of course, also sells DVDs, just as it sells CDs and books (the music shops are closing too, and the bookshops are long gone). Now if this were all a result of online purchases and downloads, there only be grudging cause for complaint. Not only is online purchasing useful (if you know what you’re looking for or can spend hours browsing websites – and are prepared to wait a few days for delivery), but most websites offer a vast selection of titles.

Nevertheless, there’s no search engine yet invented that is as pleasing and efficient as browsing along a set of shelves. It may not have universal appeal, but there are still lots of people who like nosing around pokey old bookshops or picking up DVDs and CDs off a shelf and scanning the back cover blurb, with the added advantages of being able to read, watch or listen to your purchase as soon as you get home, and being able to talk to an assistant who does more than repeat the mantra, “if it’s not on the shelves, we haven’t got it”. You see, I believe that online retailers and specialist shops could coexist quite nicely.

No, the villain in this story is your supermarket and your big sheds.

You see, these bastards just skim off the cream. You won’t get beyond your 100 Top Sellers in your supermarket, whether it’s in books, DVDs or CDs. OK, you might get some bollocks celebrity soap star Keep Fit DVD, or a bollocks celebrity chef Keep Fat DVD, but you’re hardly likely to come across Les Quatre Cents Coups nestled between Bridget Jones’s Diary of Tedium and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Goblet of Uzbekistan. And you won’t even be able to browse properly without being jostled by hordes of people in tracksuits carrying widescreen TVs and pushing around shopping carts laden with ‘turkey drummers’ and ‘3 for 2 pizzas’, ineffectualy umpiring Olympic-style tantrum-throwing competitions among their noisy, sniffling, whining progeny.

Now it doesn’t matter how pedestrian some of the top-selling movies are, these films are the lifeblood of the independent retailer. They might sell dozens, or even hundreds of copies of a box office smash DVD, and the revenue from these titles enables them to carry more obscure titles for those who prefer a world that offers variety over economies of scale.

Is there anything that can be done about this? Well, I’m reminded of a legal battle that took place in the early 1990s. In essence, the consumer division of Kodak referred the Japanese government to the World Trade Organization for stifling competition with something colloquially known as the ‘Mommas and Poppas Law’. This made the rates cheaper to rent retail property by the square foot the less square footage you were renting. In other words, the opposite of economies of scale applied – you paid more per square foot for bigger premises. This had the effect of making it viable for small retailers to survive alongside larger retailers (which had their own economic advantages), the aim being to keep city centers diverse and thriving, rather than being populated by the homogenous mass of chainstores and out of town retail sheds.

Kodak’s gripe was that smaller retailers tended to stock only one type of film and, being Japanese, they tended to opt for Fuji. Eventually, the WTO made one of its few sensible decisions and ruled against Kodak, but, as I thought at the time, what the hell was the WTO having jurisdiction over what was essentially a matter of sensible Japanese social and urban policy?

I digress. The point is that governments constantly make economic policy supposedly to achieve some social good. The enlightened among us might say that that’s what Government is there for. Of course, if the economic policy favors big business, freemarketeers call it “sensible government” and “free trade”. If it favors small businesses or the public, they call it, “interfering big government” or “skewing the level playing field”, or some such nonsense.

I think the Mommas and Poppas Law is a great idea that I’d love to see extended throughout the world. But I’d also add an amendment of my own. I’d divide all goods on sale into a couple of dozen or so broad categories. I’d then increase the tax percentage paid on profits from any product outside the retailer’s “core” product (in the supermarket’s case, groceries). This would help small retailers to survive, increase diversity and enable me to buy a Kurosawa film when I wanted to. The alternative is a world in which all towns look the same, all clothes shops sell the same line of clothes in a ‘season’ and hypermarkets dictate what we wear, watch, read, listen to and think. Damn! We’re already there. Bastards!

Denise Haskew After 10 years as a television commissioning editor, Denise decided she needed a more intellectual challenge, so she gave it up to become a model. She has done all sorts of useless jobs, such as magazine publishing and PR. She plans to be on the first big spaceship to leave the Earth, alongside all the telephone sanitizers.