Video Socks
Description: Originally known as Family Video Movie Club, Family Video was a family-owned video rental chain based in Glenview, Illinois that served the United States and Canada through more than 750 retail stores. While competitor's focused on saturating larger cities, Family Video locations were primarily established in rural areas, suburbs, and small-to-midsize cities. After the demise of America's two much larger video rental players, Family Video was the last rental chain in operation. Rather than depending on the revenue-sharing model used by others, the chain bought and owned its movies to keep all the rental profit, and also owned all of their stores, avoiding leasing issues that were largely responsible for taking other chains down.
Description: Despite the name, West Coast Video was a chain of video rental stores founded in Northeast Philadelphia in 1983 by Elliot Stone. During the next three months, Stone established a chain by launching three more stores, growing it to more than 200 locations in 1987. In 1988, West Coast acquired all 455 National Video stores, giving them a total of 660 stores and making them the world’s largest video rental chain at that time. Like most brick and mortar video rental stores, West Coast Video folded in 2009, but some existing stores continued to use the West Coast banner and run independently before eventually folding as well over the years that followed.
Description: If you lived in the greater Northeastern United States in the '80s and '90s, Video King Superstore was most likely your first destination to rent the latest movies on VHS. The first thing you noticed walking into a Video King store was the smell of the complementary hot, buttered popcorn, a favorite of kids accompanying their parents. The rest of the store was pretty standard fare — wall-to-wall videos organized by category, a few toys and collectibles, and eventually, video game rentals. In the early 2000s, as video stores began to buckle under pressure from online video streaming, Video King cut their massive stores in half and dropped 'Superstore' from their name, but this was short-lived, with the chain ultimately closing up for good.