The Blockbuster Chronicles - Chapter 5: The Customers

Becoming a manager changed the way I experienced customers. I was no longer only the employee who pointed toward the Drama section or checked a tape back in. When a situation became confusing, ridiculous, or angry, I was increasingly the person expected to solve it.

None of them, however, matched the dedication of one customer who loved Gary Oldman.

She was a young Asian woman who spoke very little English. She had recently moved to the United States with a sailor and seemed lonely and bored at home. One of the few things she could communicate clearly was her love for Gary Oldman after seeing him in The Scarlet Letter.

After working through the language barrier, I realized she wanted to rent every Gary Oldman movie she could find but did not know all the titles in which he appeared. I led her to our enormous movie directory, a reference book about the size of four phone books stacked together. It was essentially IMDb printed on paper, back when looking up an actor's filmography required upper body strength.

We went through Oldman's credits together and discovered that our store carried very few of them. The three available that day were Sid and Nancy, The Professional, and Air Force One. She rented all three, and I placed special orders for another five or six. She left delighted, and I felt good about helping someone find exactly what she wanted.

That feeling lasted until she stormed into the store the next day and accused me of tricking her.

She insisted that Gary Oldman was not in Sid and Nancy and that I had lied. I showed her the box, pointed to his name, and tried to explain that the punk rocker on the cover really was the same actor she loved. Gary Oldman rarely looks like the same person from one movie to the next, which is part of what makes him so good. Unfortunately, that versatility combined with our language barrier made my explanation nearly impossible.

No amount of evidence could convince her. Eventually, I apologized and gave her a free rental. Sometimes customer service means accepting that Gary Oldman has disappeared so completely into a role that you must issue store credit.

Another regular customer was an intensely religious woman with an eleven-year-old daughter. She frequently asked employees to recommend movies, then returned an hour later furious about the language, violence, or sexual content. She wanted every movie to honor God and contain no profanity, sex, or fighting. This eliminated most of the store, including a surprising amount of the Children's section.

I remember her berating one employee after watching Forrest Gump. The woman had asked where the movie was and chosen it herself, but when she returned, she behaved as though someone had forced her to rent it at gunpoint. The employee she confronted was also deeply religious and usually got along well with her. That did not protect her from receiving the blame for every objectionable moment in the film.

Our in-store televisions created another problem. Blockbuster supplied promotional tapes containing about thirty minutes of commercials, trailers, and music videos that repeated throughout the day. After hearing Sheryl Crow sing about soaking in the sun for the eighth time, even the most dedicated employee began to question the value of corporate branding.

Whenever Deloris was away, we sometimes replaced the promotional tape with an actual movie. During the day, we tried to choose something reasonably appropriate for families. Once the sun went down, our standards became more flexible.

On the day The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was released, we put it on and returned to helping customers. Our religious regular entered the store and recognized what was playing within thirty seconds. She ordered her daughter to cover her ears, covered her own eyes, and attempted to browse the store without looking at the televisions.

When she reached the counter, she told us we should be ashamed for displaying the devil's work in public. I could not help laughing, although I tried to disguise it as a cough. Apparently, orcs were unacceptable, but wandering blindly through a video store while your child navigated with her ears covered was perfectly sensible.

Then there was Tori, the customer who became something much more lasting.

Tori was fourteen when she developed a crush on my coworker Kenny, who was several years older than her. She came into the store almost every week, rented The Fifth Element, and stared at him with unmistakable affection. The routine was so predictable that we could practically set our watches by it. Tori would say hello, and Kenny would brush her off.

One day, her father approached Kenny and asked him to be a little kinder. He understood that a romantic relationship was inappropriate and would never happen. He simply hated watching his daughter leave the store hurt every week. I listened as this father tried to protect his child's feelings without embarrassing her, and I felt terrible for him. After he left, I told Kenny to ease up. Nobody was asking him to encourage the crush. He just did not need to be cruel.

The next time Tori came in, Kenny acknowledged her in the worst possible way. He told her sharply that he would never date a child, that he was seven years older than she was, and that nothing was ever going to happen between them.

The boundary itself was correct. The way he delivered it was needlessly harsh.

I heard the exchange from a few aisles away and watched Kenny storm past me afterward. I caught his arm and asked whether humiliating her had really been necessary. He said she needed to hear the truth, pulled away, and kept walking.

At that moment, I hated him.

Tori had tears in her eyes when I approached. I asked if she was okay and told her not to take Kenny's cruelty personally. Then I did everything I could to make her laugh. By the time her father arrived about twenty minutes later, she seemed like herself again. Unless you knew what had happened, you would not have guessed she had been crying.

After that, Tori continued coming in to rent The Fifth Element, but she talked to me instead of Kenny. I often thought it would have been cheaper for her to buy the movie than to rent it every week. Eventually, I understood that the movie was only part of the ritual. She enjoyed spending time with her father and visiting the people she knew at Blockbuster.

Her crush eventually shifted from Kenny to me. I was careful not to encourage it, but I also refused to humiliate her. I remembered what it felt like to have impossible crushes and how real they seemed at that age. Tori and I remained friends, with the boundary understood even if we did not always have the language to explain it.

Kenny eventually gave her my phone number, mostly to annoy me. His plan backfired. Tori and I occasionally talked on the phone, and our conversations were always friendly and appropriate.

Against all expectations, we stayed in touch long after I left Blockbuster. Over the years, we talked through engagements, marriages, my divorce, and countless ordinary changes in our lives. By the time I originally wrote these stories, she had become a mother to a beautiful daughter and had found a man who truly appreciated her. I was genuinely happy for her.

I never would have imagined in 2002 that the teenager who repeatedly rented The Fifth Element would become the person from Blockbuster I kept in touch with longest. Employees came and went. Managers transferred. Friendships that once felt permanent disappeared as soon as someone changed jobs. Tori remained.

The move placed us in a smaller store with fewer old movies, uglier shelves, and far more customers. At first, I resented what we had lost. Looking back, I remember the people more than the building. Some arrived angry about Gary Oldman. Some feared hobbits were the work of Satan. One walked in every week carrying the same movie and became my friend for decades.

That was the strange thing about working at a video store. People came through the doors looking for entertainment. Every so often, one of them became part of your life.