Thursday, March 31, 2016

The Coming Extinction of the Video Store and What It Will Mean for the Clerks Who Will Lose Their Jobs

WSJ reports:
Video store clerks are going the way of the dinosaur—and not the ones in Jurassic Park.

U.S. employers have added more than 13.8 million jobs since the labor market bottomed out in February 2010. But that steady growth has been uneven across sectors, underscoring the churn and displacement typical of a dynamic economy.

Indeed, a handful of industries have seen jobs collapse in recent years, perhaps none more completely than the video store. A fixture of the 1990s, the shops were done in by competition and changing technology, first from Netflix’s mail-order model and then by online streaming and video kiosks like Redbox.

The result? Employment in video tape and disc rental is down by almost 93% since its 1999 peak.
This, of course, is not a bad thing. Netflix and Redbox are better options.

Life is about change. The structure of an economy is continually changing. Jobs disappear in some sectors, resulting in workers having to move to other job.,

In a free market economy, there are always other job opportunities, We are never free from all want---thus, there is work to do.

And, certainly, if a person looking for work, couldn't find work, he would be far from being free from want. Thus, there is an internal contradiction in the idea that the loss of one job means the loss of all opportunities for work.

-RW

4 comments:

  1. Very true, but...why is this article in future tense? I can't remember the last time I saw a blockbusters or one of those independent mom and pop video stores that were everywhere 15 to 20 years ago. So I had assumed the video stores died ages ago. And if nobody noticed, then they couldn't have been that important.
    PS, anyone remember record shops?

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    Replies
    1. @Unknown,

      I haven't seen a regular video store since a long time, and those I do see are adult video stores and rental places. But with the availability of free internet porn, I just can't see how those places can keep themselves open, not unless they're meant to hide clandestine brothels.

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  2. I have seen a couple of video stores here and there over the past couple of years and I always wonder how they are still in business.

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