Death of video: Site of last Civic Video hits market as small retailers continue legacy

Once a booming global industry, no town in the 80s or 90s was complete without at least one video rental store. Now, the site of the final ever Civic Video has hit the market after closing its doors just last year.

As the digitisation of the industry led to the demise of DVD and video rental stores, with major chains such as Blockbuster, Video Ezy and Civic Video collapsing worldside, a select few independent retailers are bucking the trend, continuing to tap into a market of consumers who value the nostalgia of a bygone era.

Fox Video in Queensland’s Rockhampton region will mark three decades of business in 2024.

Louise and Larry Fox remain in the DVD rental industry after three decades in business. Picture: Supplied

While the Mount Morgan business has reduced its hours of operation to five days a week for a handful of hours, owner Louise Fox, who runs the store with husband Larry, says operating the business has become somewhat of a hobby, with a touch of nostalgia.

“My other half, he’s one of those people, you know how some people don’t retire? Well, he is the type of person who works till he dies,” Mrs Fox told realcommercial.com.au.

“I keep saying, ‘We don’t have to do this anymore,’ and he doesn’t want to stop doing it but I don’t mind. It doesn’t eat up too much of my time, but I don’t enjoy it the way he does.”

From the street, Fox Video’s old school shopfront shows a small glimpse of the rows and rows of DVDS lining the shelves, which has been amassed and carefully curated for nearly 30 years.

Now somewhat of a novelty, independent video retailers are few and far between. Picture: Supplied

The collection of rental videos were discarded in 2009 when Fox Video moved to its Morgan Street premises, and Mrs Fox said she has lost count of how many DVD rentals are available for hire.

“I don’t know anymore,” she said. “There has got to be at least 20,000 here.”

While the store itself is like stepping back in time to a bygone period, so too are the hire fees – prices to borrow a DVD have not changed since Fox Video opened its doors in 1994.

A new release, for example, remains at $5.95, while a weekly deal bundle of movies is on offer for $10, a throwback many young people from the 1990s would fondly recall.

As Fox Video defies the odds to continue business in a new era of digitisation and streaming services, the site of the last ever Civic Video has hit the market in Sydney’s west.

No trace of the building’s movie rental history remains. Picture: realcommercial.com.au

Before: The Richmond complex is believed to be the site of the last Civic Video, before it closed down in 2023. Picture: realcommercial.com.au

Located in the Post Office arcade, Civic Video was one of the prominent arcade’s seven shops at 168-172 George Street, Windsor, and only shut its doors for the final time last year.

It marks the end of an era, with the major brands now only surviving in the memories of Australian consumers as their formers sites were sold off, closed or converted.

In the WA eastern suburb of Morley, Australia’s last standing Blockbuster closed its doors in 2019 and today there are no signs of the 510sqm building’s former heyday as it is now home to a King Hotpot Restaurant franchise.

Australia’s last Blockbuster, located in WA’s Morley, closed in 2019. The site has since been converted into a restaurant. Picture: realcommercial.com.au

PropTrack economist Anne Flaherty said most ex-video rental stores across the country have been relegated to standard suburban strip retail.

“They could be converted into literally anything, from a pharmacy to a café,” she said.

With the current retail landscape coupled with the rise of online streaming services, video rental stores were a business model that did not work anymore, she said.

“I think more generally speaking, it’s an incredibly tough time for retailers,” she said.

“Businesses are often finding that their profits are being squeezed by higher interest rates, higher costs and at the same time that that’s happening, we’re seeing people really cut back on their discretionary spending.

“For example, we’ve seen that the per capita retail spend in Australia has been really declining quite rapidly over the past two years.

“On the other side through, we are seeing that despite the fact that people are individually cutting back on how much they’re spending, the fact that we’ve seen such rapid population growth means that we actually have more people in the country spending.

“That’s actually one factor that’s helping to support retailers.”

The demise of a thriving industry

Perusing the shelves of your local Video Ezy, Blockbuster or Civic Video were a ritual of how many would spend a Friday evening in the 1980s and ‘90s.

But the rise of movie piracy, along with the new age of Pay TV, and streaming giants such as Netflix, this pastime is well and truly a thing of the past.

Browsing the aisles of the local video rental store was a weekly ritual in the 90s. Picture: realcommercial.com.au

While Mrs Fox said streaming undoubtedly has killed video rental stores, Pay TV was the first nail in the coffin for the industry in the late 1990s.

“Pay TV was like 1997 and a lot of video shops went out of business and it was that bad and nobody remembers,” she said.

In a strong contrast to when mainstream video rental stores were a staple of the 1990s and a multi-billion dollar industry at its prime, latest Census 2021 data found there were just 160 people employed in video and other media rental hiring services in Australia.

The nostalgia, customers love of their store and Mr Fox’s passion for the industry were the main reasons Fox Video remained in business today, Mrs Fox told realcommercial.com.au.

“My husband says he wants to put a donation box for outside for tourists,” she said.

“They come in and take photos …and then little kids go past and they go, ‘What’s that?’ They have no clue.”

A forgotten industry, video rental stores now attract tourists, colelctors and history buffs. Picture: Supplied

While there were still handful of video stores remaining in Australia, sourcing DVDS from wholesalers to hire out was becoming a little harder these days, she said.

“We are actually getting young families coming in who probably never even went to video shops when they were young,” she said.

“They are actually realising that something that was at the movies in December is now able to be gotten here.”