Best Video Stores and Places to Rent Movies in St. Louis, Missouri

I recently joined Netflix. I don’t rent nearly as many movies as I used to, so I got the monthly special for just $5.99. For that price you get two movies per month that you can keep for as long as you want. I might eventually upgrade to the $9.99 plan where you can get an unlimited number of movies one at a time. With both plans you create a list and as soon as you return the movie you have, they send you another one from the list. They say you get your movies in about one business day. My experience so far has been about two, but that’s still not bad.

The reason that I started using Netflix is that there seems to be a trend at the video store away from selection and towards stocking more and more new releases. I recently wanted to rent a copy of an older movie to show to some friends who hadn’t seen it yet, but there wasn’t a single movie store in town that still carried it. With over 65,000 titles in stock, Netflix had it and shipped it to me in a couple of days.

I started out renting movies when the VCR’s came out back in the eighties. I lived in a small town outside of St. Louis then and I remember the old Montgomery Ward store in town had a rack of videos in the corner. The video section grew and grew until, after a few months, the Montgomery Ward had been transformed into Rent N Go Video. Pretty soon it seemed that everyone was in on the video craze: the supermarkets and discount stores rented videos. They were at the Seven Eleven. The drugstore had them. The bait shop over on Highway F stocked them near the beer and night crawler cooler. If you knew the owner Andy at all, he’d show you his private stock in the backroom. You know, the ones not to be viewed by children.

When I moved back to St. Louis, a lot of the places that rented videos as a side business had removed them. They just couldn’t compete with the two giants: Blockbuster and Hollywood Video.