More Bad News from the Neighborhood

More bad news on Monday - Movies Worth Seeing, the local video store, is going out of business.  I guess in retrospect it shouldn't have been a surprise, given the demise of Blockbuster at Ansley Mall and Sage Hill, but I thought this would be different.  Movies Worth Seeing had classics and cult films and, well, Movies that were Worth Seeing, but not necessarily the latest Blockbusters.  And there were flyers for film festivals, and people walked there with their dogs.  The guys behind the counter always gave Bullwinkle a treat, and they knew a lot about movies. 

Monday night Tom and the girls separately went there to see what was for sale on the inventory liquidation and - I expect - to confirm that it was really true.  When they got back, Caroline said she had told the guy behind the counter that she was in mourning, and he said he was too.  Sarah said she felt old, that she would someday tell her children that when she was a kid, you had to walk to a store to rent a movie.  I didn't tell her that when I was a kid, if you missed a TV show, you had to wait for the reruns during the summer, that we didn't even have VCRs.  Talk about old.

I'll miss the walks to get a movie on a weekend evening.  I don't know what technology it is that's putting the video stores out of business - Netflix?  broadband? - but whatever it is, while using it one is less likely to talk to a neighbor who's out in their yard or walking a dog,  or for that matter, interact with a human being in any way. 

I'm sad for the owners and the people who worked there, sad for the neighborhood, sad for every kid who won't have the chance to discover a Movie Worth Seeing that they'd never heard of. 

Somehow, this does not feel like progress.