Demise of DVD rental stores creates glut of cheap movies, with 20,000 piled up in Golden Square

Now with the advent of online streaming, the writing has been on the wall for DVDs since as early as 2012.

Bendigo was once home to a range of Blockbuster and Video Ezy outlets, but the recent closure of the last standalone rental store, in Flora Hill, signalled the end of an era.

Apart from the occasional DVD hire vending machine, there are now just two places in Bendigo where people can peruse DVDs to hire in a traditional format, embedded within a service station in Quarry Hill and a store on Prouses Road.

They are run by Country Road Video, which once had up to 70 outlets across regional Victoria. There are now just 12.

The recent closure of further Country Road Video outlets meant there was the inevitable glut of unused DVDs.

More than 20,000 of those have found their way to Bendigo, lining the walls of a former petrol station on High Street in Golden Square where they are being sold for as little as $1.

There are crates and boxes of DVDs stacked everywhere, haphazardly filling makeshift shelves for a few weeks until the store itself closes down and moves on.

But even at 9.30am on a Thursday morning, people are wandering through the shop – mostly parents with young children – buying piles of DVDs.

Country Road Video founder Gary Donaldson said people were still attracted to having a physical DVD for their collections – something online streaming could not offer.

“People like being able to have them in their own home to easily grab off the shelf,” he said.

Mr Donaldson said rental stores would not die out completely in Australia, and believed they could see a resurgence as people struggle with the costs of subscribing to streaming services, and a lack of a complete range of movies.

“They all come in complaining that they can’t get their favourite movie on Netflix or any of the others, or they’ve watched the ones that are available over and over and want something new,” he said.

“We’ve seen in the US that they’re actually reopening a lot of old rental places for new releases for that reason.

“It’s certainly a shrinking market here though.”

While many retailers, like JB Hi-Fi, still devote large portions of their stores to DVD sales, others appear to moving out of the DVD game.

Kmart recently announced the removal of DVDs, CDs and Blu-ray products from their stores to allow for more space for “activity-based kids products”.

Once the pop-up shop moves on from Golden Square, the DVDs will likely gather dust while they wait to be sold online.

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