That kind of cool factor may be the salvation of a store many have written off over the years as hopelessly outdated. “I totally pass judgment on people,” Bendall joked. The ambience is that of a cool record store: punk reggae drifts over the PA, a vast collection awaits your perusal, and the customers desperately want to impress the staff. A man walking the aisles calls out “Blade Runner.” Bendall rolls his eyes good-naturedly and recommends something “a little less common” - a mind-bending time-travel indie flick called Primer. I ask for a recommendation for a good sci-fi. ![]() ![]() Of the best movies ever made (as rated by film magazine Sight & Sound), Netflix has a handful, while Pic-A-Flic not only has most of the movies, but has the expertise to point you toward them too.Īs we chat, a woman walks in asking for “the one about the little kid with the lamp? And the leg?”īendall, without missing a beat, directs her toward A Christmas Story. People can’t get any movie they want at home though, not really anyway while Netflix has just shy of 4,000 titles in Canada according to the website, Pic-A-Flic has nearly 10 times that many. “People can get any movie they want, apparently at the touch of a button sitting on their couch.” “Convenience is a powerful thing,” he said, jumping between speaking with me and helping a trickle of customers. ![]() Not that owner Kent Bendall doesn’t feel the pressure. Whole streaming services, like Quibi, have come and gone in the intervening years. It was early in 2016 when the Victoria Times Colonist asked, of Pic-A-Flic, “Who in their right mind would buy a video-rental store in the age of Netflix and shomi and 24-hour-a-day on-demand movies?”īy the end of that year, shomi was gone.
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