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41188825•03/31/15


“The stuff that dreams are made of.”


Home video store continues bringing family tradition to life


F CHARLES LEFEBVRE


or many, it was a weekly tradition.


The family would head down to the local video store and browse through the racks of movies. They would linger on a few titles, examining the


backs of the cases, reading the synopsis and the blurbs from critics. They would


then pick a couple movies to take home for the evening to watch and return the next day.


Video rental stores enjoyed record popularity in the 1990s and early 2000s, but began to decline in the mid to later part of the last decade. The largest chains, such as Blockbuster and Movie Gallery, have closed their doors for good, and there are very few independent video stores around due to the emergence of


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streaming services such as Netflix and other video-on-demand (VOD) services.


However, several remain, with one store in Brooks being one of the last places people in southern Alberta are able to rent movies.


Michael Macdonald is the fifth owner of Movie Experts, and has owned it the longest amount of time, taking over the store in June 2000. Macdonald says when he opened, it was the same time as VHQ Entertainment, a larger store, had opened in Brooks.


“We were on kind of the verge, it was one of the struggling stores and we kind of turned it into one of the top-10 video retailers in all of Canada,” he said.


Macdonald, an actor by trade, has been involved in the video industry since 1989.


“The only thing that could offer me shift work and do something I was passionate about was the video industry,” he said. “I got my first job when I was 15 at the video store in Brentwood Bay, B.C., and I’ve been in the industry one way or another. I’ve worked for them, I’ve managed them, I’ve run them, I’ve worked for distributors, I’ve set them up across Canada, I’ve been in just about every aspect of the video industry. The natural thing was, I’ve made so much money over the years for other people who I worked for, I thought the next logical progression is to own my store.”


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100 2015 REPORT ON SOUTHEAST ALBERTA


Macdonald says when he took over Movie Experts, the store was simply just a place to rent movies, with “a few chocolate bars and bags of chips” for sale. While video rental is still a focus of the business (the catalogue is “easily over 10,000”), he says one of the reasons Movie Experts is still around is because they’ve branched out from being strictly a video store to an entertainment destination.


“If you’re just a straight up video store, you’re probably not around,” he said. “We do CDs, we do special limited edition prints, we do all sorts of memorabilia, movie action figures ... if it is entertainment related and I can justify it, we can sell it.


“We’ve delved into it, we do very well with the vinyl. We just keep adding and adding and if it doesn’t work, we take it out, but if it does work, we build upon it.”


He says one of the other reasons video stores continue to survive is due to the collections they provide, although he knows there will be an end eventually.


“When it’s gone, there’s really nothing yet that can replace it,” he said. “You have Netflix and Netflix in Canada is three studios’ back catalogue, nothing newer than six months, and that’s just three studios out of a possible nine


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