And Not A Single Dwarf Was Grumpy

I started working at a video store in the summer of 1994 right after I graduated high school. It was not a national chain or anything like that, so it was a little different from the Blockbusters and Hollywood Videos.

Mainly it was because we had an ‘adult room’. This was Utah, so it wasn’t hardcore or anything, basically the same kind of thing you would get on cable. All of our videos had stickers on them with inventory numbers that we would use to check them in and out.

The adult videos were two digits longer than the rest of the videos, so it was always pretty obvious when you were entering them into the system. We would create a separate pile of videos that had to go back to the adult room when we were checking them in because a few of us had no desire to even go in there.

Adult videos were the most expensive. It cost $4 to rent one of those. In contrast, the kids’ movies were $0.25 to rent one. Or you could rent five for a dollar. These weren’t like full-blown Disney releases or anything. It would usually be things like episodes of ‘Blue’s Clues’ type stuff.

In fact (this is important) Disney hadn’t released a lot of their earlier videos yet, but they were about to start doing so in the fall of 1994. Snow White was the first title to be released on VHS in the Disney Masterpiece Collection.

A lady came in and rented four kids’ videos and an adult video. Whatever. I’m not here to judge. I charged her the $5 bucks and she left the store. I had been there long enough that I didn’t even really pay attention to the titles people were renting anymore. I just entered the numbers and verified that what was on the screen was the same as the video and case.

She seemed a little surprised at the price and had to go into her wallet for a couple more dollars.

She came back a couple of hours later, though. She looked like someone had painted her face red! She handed me a video: 

Customer: “I rented it by mistake.”

The title was ‘Snow White’. The inventory code was two digits longer than kids’ videos. Yup… Somebody put it away based on the title and completely ignored the fact it was an adult video. They also ignored the fact that Disney hadn’t even released it on VHS yet, so that should have been a clue. Our fault for assigning the newbies ‘video put away’ duty. 

Customer: “I thought I was getting five kids’ movies. It was weird when you charged me so much, but I thought maybe it was because Snow White was a new release, so it was more. I had some gardening to do, and I just wanted them to be entertained for the afternoon. I popped it in and went outside. I came back in maybe fifteen minutes later, and Snow White was doing terrible things with the seven dwarves!”

I will never forget that lady and I think about her often. I think about the absolute horror she must have experienced when she walked in and saw what was on the screen. I have no idea how old the kids were watching it, but I sure hope they were young enough to be oblivious to what was happening.

It’s a lucky thing she didn’t sue the video store. I’m sure today she would have said something about it on Facebook and had hundreds of people commenting and telling her to sue and she probably would have, but we were a little less influenced back then.