Down At The Mall

Today is just the kind of sunny, pre-spring day that used to make it hard to stay behind the counter at the video store where I used to work. We used to prop the door open and let the fresh air in, waiting with limited patience for the next customer. Sundays were the worst. After an initial flurry of morning returns, the day would settle into a tedium broken only by the occasional late fee or phone call from the mom who wanted to keep that Berenstain Bears tape one more night because her kids absolutely adored it. Then back to the tedium.
To make the time pass with any speed at all, diversions were needed. There was never anything as extreme as the hijinks in the movie "Clerks", but I could certainly relate to Randal's mild antipathy for his customers: "You know who I could do without? I could do without the people in the video store." His friend Dante asks him, "Which ones?" Randal replies, "All of them."
That was the video business back in the eighties. There was still an air of privilege to renting video tapes. Beta had just been quietly phased out, even as we began to move away from our two-tier membership plan. I spent my days answering the same question for dozens of blank faces: "What's new that's good that's in that I haven't seen?"
I never screamed at one of these lost souls, but Sunday brought the biggest challenge. Saturday night was always our biggest of the week. All of our big hits were reserved for members on the weekends, and the newer the release, inevitably those were the last tapes to come through our drop slot. Why return a tape at ten in the morning if, technically, you had it until six o'clock that evening? That left me with the non-planning malcontents who expected to be surprised with a brand new copy of "Top Gun" that just happened to be on the shelf just for them.
That's when I would ask them if they had seen "Endless Love". "It features Tom Cruise in his prime, before he became just a Hollywood boy toy," I would tell them. Or I would give them one of my sure bets. Everyone who worked at the store for more than a month had one or two. Movies that they could rent out when "everything else" was gone that that sad little customer would come back the next day raving about. My buddy never failed with Alan Parker's "Birdy". He used to put it out with a money-back guarantee. "If you don't like it, it's a free rental." Partly due the fact that it is a very good film, but mostly because of his chutzpah, every one of those customers ended up paying for "Birdy".
Still, all of this left us with another six and a half hours to fill on a Sunday. We couldn't go outside, since we had to answer the occasional phone call, but that same phone allowed us to work deals up and down the strip mall in which we were trapped. Free movie rentals were the currency, and we bartered for pepperoni slices from the pizzeria and the occasional six-pack of beer from the liquor store. A few of our employees even arranged some chiropractic treatments in exchange for free movies.
What then, to do with the other six hours? Sundays were our Theme Days. We had "Big Rubber Monster Day" (Japanese Monster flicks), and "Whole Lotta Sweatin' Goin' On" ("Cool Hand Luke", "Das Boot"), and "Really Bad Musicals" ("Paint Your Wagon" - Clint Eastwood sings!). Then finally, blessedly, eight o'clock would roll around. On Sundays we closed early if only to limit the torment for those of us behind the counter. But our day was never complete without that one last desperate idjit squeezing in just before we got the sign flipped and the door locked. "What's new that's good that's in that I haven't seen yet?"