Despite how dead this store seemed, Albertsons recently added a large pickup storage area in what I'm guessing was the old video rental section (this is the only picture I could find from before it was redone). Maybe it gets a large proportion of its business from pickup orders, or maybe Albertsons is using it as a central delivery hub (they've done that with some oversized stores around here).
Speaking of video rental, I wonder if that "Albertsons Movie Night" fixture in the background (obviously now being used for video sales) could be old enough to date back to the video rental days. The overall design certainly looks old enough, but it has the Blu-Ray logo and I'm not sure if Blu-Ray was a thing when Albertsons still had video rental. (I have a skewed perception of these things, since I've never actually used a Blu-Ray!)
I'm not sure when Albertsons got rid of their video rental departments, but those Movie Night displays were something that were in several retailers in the late 2000s/early 2010s and which may still persist to today as some kind of impulse buy display for video sales. Sears had something similar, though you'd never find Blu-Ray movies there. You'd be lucky to find anything that wasn't overly-compressed DVDs full of westerns and such where they could fit ~6 hours of video on one DVD!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, given all of that, I'd be surprised if that rack was ever used for rentals. In some ways, it would be surprising if Albertsons is still selling DVDs today, but they might be. Perhaps DVDs still sell decently well in areas with spotty broadband. That may or may not describe this area, it is hard to say. I still see these DVD impulse buy displays in some stores though so it isn't out of the question! Of course, these displays don't have to compete against Redbox anymore!
I mentioned Sears, but that photo processing sign gives this front end a bit of a Kmart electronics department overly dated look to it! Of course, now that instant film cameras and disposable 35mm cameras have become trendy again, along with old 2000s/early 2010s era P&S digital cameras, maybe Albertsons can claim to be trendy with the kids with that display! The truth of the matter is that I never stopped using my circa 2009 Canon PowerShot Digital ELPH digital camera and I still use it for the bulk of my vacation photos! It is small enough to fit in my pockets, even with a protective sleeve on it, but it has a slider toggle for the zoom and a real shutter button which makes it a lot easier to get good photos than with a phone...at least in the way I like to take photos. I'd like to upgrade to a new camera, but pocketable P&S cameras are very expensive and there aren't many options, especially since whatever is being made is often out of stock due to high demand! It looks like the best non-superzoom P&S cameras are the all-weather ones, so that adds to the cost too.
A dSLR is an option as well, but then the portability factor is entirely lost. Oh well, I'll stick with my Canon as long as I can I suppose. I already retired my Nikon from the early 2000s, though I think I still have it. Of course, I still have my Olympus 35mm automatic P&S camera and my old Canon AE-1 35mm SLR if I really want to use those!
Interesting, I don't remember seeing these elsewhere, but maybe I just wasn't paying attention! I'm not sure how up-to-date the DVDs this store was selling were, but they were definitely still selling them. It is a little odd that they had DVDs for sale right next to the Redbox that was probably renting out some of the same movies, but the sale DVD market seems to have outlived DVD rentals!
DeleteMy parents were still using their Canon point and shoot camera from around the same era until sometime in the last few years, but it started becoming flaky (something about it draining batteries extremely quickly) and they weren't interested in buying a new camera when their cell phone camera was "good enough". And to be fair, now that I convinced them to buy a 13 mini like I have, it really is good enough, except for the lack of zoom -- the image quality is better overall than the cheap camera they bought way back when, and the bigger screen is helpful since their vision is not what it used to be. But I do miss having a proper optical zoom feature (and even the digital zoom on their old camera is better than on modern phones, somehow). Maybe someday I'll upgrade to a phone with optical zoom, but I'm not a fan of how big most modern phones (including all current iPhones) are!