Way back before DVDs were a thing, I was an assistant manager at a video store. We had three regular customers who were always late with their returns. Two we didn’t mind too much since they paid their fees without a fuss and were genuinely great people to deal with. Everyone knew them, to the point that we’d put aside copies of high-demand new releases for them. The manager would sometimes waive the fees or give them free rental coupons, just because they were friendly and polite.

Then, there was our would-be owner. Everyone knew her, too. I call her “our would-be owner” because every time she had a fee (and she always had a fee), she would insist that her husband was rich, and if we wouldn’t waive the fee, then she’d have him buy our store and fire us all. Seriously, I thought that was just a Hollywood joke until I met her. Strangely enough, the fee was never waived, and our store was never bought out. 

The kicker was the time one of her kids came in alone to rent a movie. That was unusual but not unheard of; parents would sometimes send their kids in while they were in one of the other shops. Of course, there was a late fee outstanding. I informed the kiddo that the fee had to be paid before we could rent anything else to him. Fortunately, the $20 he had covered it, and he happily left with his movie.

Two minutes later, our would-be owner came storming in, demanding that we return her money and appalled that we would “rob a child” by making him pay the late fee! It turned out she’d given him the cash and sent him in alone on purpose, believing that we would waive the fees because he was young.

Back when I worked at [Video Rental Chain Store], we would often cover other stores in our city — whether it was just because they were short one day, needed help with inventory, etc.

Another location was having their holiday party and obviously wanted all of their employees to be able to attend. They contacted our store to see if we could spare three people to cover their store from 6:00 pm to midnight. We sent one assistant manager and two regular employees. They got the keys and all the codes and were prepared to handle the evening.

Over the next few days, we started hearing chatter from the other store about something going wrong on that night. It was difficult to keep anything secret between the stores as a lot of people started at one location before transferring to another, and most of us remained friends outside of work.

It turned out that the assistant manager had made some changes to the receipts. We had the ability to add a message at the end of the receipt without approval from corporate — usually to advise of some promotion or something like that. For whatever reason, she typed in some rude message directed at customers. It was nothing blatantly offensive but definitely not something you’d want them to read. She meant it to be funny, but under those circumstances, it wasn’t.

The chatter was that this was a serious offense and that [Assistant Manager] knew there were going to be consequences, even though nothing was said by upper management.

Soon afterward, the store manager and district manager were there one day and wanted to know when [Assistant Manager] was scheduled. It was to be in another hour. They told us that they were leaving but to tell her to not clock in and to stay there until they came back. 

[Assistant Manager] showed up about fifteen minutes before her scheduled time, and we advised her of what the store manager and district manager had said. She saw the writing on the wall and just decided to quit instead, not wanting to get yelled at and fired at the same time, and just left.

The store manager and district manager showed up about a half hour after when [Assistant Manager] was supposed to clock in, wondering where she was. We said that she’d just quit and left. They both were stunned that she wouldn’t stay around at their direction.

I get why [Assistant Manager] had to be fired, but the amount of time between the incident and her quitting was about a week. Of course she was going to figure out something bad is coming. At the very least, they should have stayed around in the store if they needed to fire her.

One other employee got basically a slap on the wrist since he was aware of the changes to the receipt but wasn’t in charge. Nothing happened to the third employee since he was out on the floor the whole night instead of behind the counter.

Back in the days of video rentals, an angry customer stormed up to the counter and tossed a copy of the “The Passion Of The Christ” at me.

Customer: “Get me the English version, not the subtitled one!”

Me: “Ma’am, it only comes in this subtitled version.”

Customer: “No! My best friend said it wasn’t originally recorded in this Ara-whatever language you sold me!”

Me: “That’s Aramaic, and that was the language Jesus spoke at the time.”

Customer: “Idiot! The Bible is in English!”

This story happens in the late 1990s when video stores (and VCRs!) are still around.

During the midday slow period on a weekend, I get a phone call, but the voice is so distorted that I can’t understand a word the customer is saying. I tell him about the bad connection and suggest he come to the store, which he does. When he gets to the store, I find out the line wasn’t distorted; this customer has the most nasal voice imaginable. It makes the following conversation incredibly hard to understand on my end.

Customer: “Can I rent a VCR today but pay for it Wednesday?”

Me: “Anything you rent today has to be paid for today.”

Customer: “But I don’t have money today. I’ll have money Wednesday.”

Me: “We can rent it to you on Wednesday, then, no problem.”

Customer: “But I don’t want it Wednesday. I want it today.”

Me: “Then you need to pay for it today.”

Customer: *Speaking slowly* “But what if I rented it today but paid for it Wednesday?”

Me: “If you want to rent it today, you have to pay for it today.”

Customer: “But I don’t have money today.”

Me: “Then I can’t rent anything to you today.”

Customer: “Okay, but what if I rented a VCR today…” *pauses* “…but paid for it Wednesday?”

Me: “Then you can pay with a credit card today and pay the card off Wednesday.”

Customer: “I don’t want to pay with a card.”

Me: “Then you have to pay for it today.”

Customer: “But I don’t want to pay for it today. I want to pay for it Wednesday.”

Me: “Then you can rent it on Wednesday.”

Customer: “But… what if… I rented it today… but paid for it… Wednesday?”

Me: “Then you’d have to use a credit card that you could pay off Wednesday.”

Customer: “I don’t have a card!”

Me: “Then you can’t put the $50 deposit on a VCR we require anyway, so I couldn’t rent it to you.”

Customer: “I’m going to [Other Video Store across town].”

This is the abridged version of the conversation, too. It went on like this for several minutes.

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.