The proud owner of Britain’s longest surviving DVD rental shop is still going strong after nearly 40 years despite the explosion of streaming sites like Netflix and satellite TV.
Colin Richards, 70, opened TVL Allstar Video in Haverhill, Suffolk, in 1984 leasing video tapes to other shops in a year when Footloose and Ghostbusters first appeared in cinemas.
His store now has around 8,500 DVDs that customers can rent for just £2 a week, including Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 film Forrest Gump – which has been rented at least 2,000 times.
Mr Richards believes the reason the store is still going is because the younger generation is going to the shop to get a retro experience.
He said: “A lot of our older customers are bringing in their children and grandchildren into the store to give them the experience the used to have on a Friday night.
“It’s very infectious because the children won’t even be able to walk past the shop without wanting to come in. Normally, they try and rent the same film, that’s their favourite, every time.
“Obviously people have streaming services at home, but the difference is when you come into the store and pick the movie, you make an effort to sit down and watch it.
“With streaming, you can easily be distracted and come away from it and do something else. But when you’ve got an actual disc, you tend to sit down and watch it – and that’s the difference.”
The video store is believed to be the last video store in the UK but Colin believes they have stayed open because they have ‘diversified into other things.’
Alongside renting DVDs, the dad-of-two also sells stationary, repairs scratched DVDs discs and runs a successful photocopying and printing service.
The store has also turned into a hub for the local community and Colin says they have customers who come in for a chat ‘on a daily basis.’
He said: “We have a lot of people who come into the store on a daily basis, because we’ve been here for such a long time. The older generation sometimes need help with filling out forms or getting stuff out of their forms, so they come in often just so have a chat.
“We might be the only person that they talk to that day. We’ve been here such a long time that people know we are here and know if they need help with anything, then they can come in and see us.”
When the store opened, it cost £1.75 a night to rent out a film but now customers have to pay £3.25 for a newly released film or £2 a week for any other film.
However Colin says that if they changed their prices with inflation, that one film would cost around £5 – £6 per night.
The grandad-of-four added that Covid was ‘an absolute nightmare’ for his business and it has been ‘very difficult’ to get some of his customers back.
Colin said: “In the 40 years that we’ve been trading, we’ve had lots of different competition such as Sky TV, which has affected our business.
“But Covid was an absolute nightmare for us, we were forced to close and the closure meant all our regular customers had to go and find a different source.
“It’s very, very difficult to get them customers back. It’s only in the first part of this year, we’ve seen the business slowly get back to some normality.”
