Winter evenings in Indiana can be long and dark. The sun sets early, and many of us huddle indoors at night - but that's not a bad thing. We can cook together, snuggle by the fireplace, and watch a good movie at home. It's a time to bond, play games, and build closer relationships - different than in summertime, when it's daylight out until nearly 9 p.m. and everyone is playing sports and enjoying the great outdoors.
Home movie viewing has really changed over the last decade or so. VHS or DVD rental has been around for a long time - many of us have gone to stores such as Blockbuster, or mom-and-pop-type stores such as Showtime Video in Leo, Indiana. But since 2004, there has been a revolution in this process - self-service kiosks such as the Redbox chain. With its $1 a night rental policy, Redbox is putting some of the traditional stores out of business.
Redbox opened its first kiosk in Denver, Colorado in 2004. In six years it has grown to 25,000 locations across the country. The Flextronics business in North Carolina has produced all these study, high-tech self-standing machines. You can reserve movies on-line, find locations on-line, and return your movie to a different location if that's more convenient.
In the Fort Wayne area, there are about 50 locations as of this writing. Some of the kiosks are outdoors, such as this one at a Walgreen's - you can pick out or return a movie in your topcoat and pajamas, if you like. Other locations are inside stores, such as WalMart. Other local businesses that host Redbox terminals are grocery stores such as Meier, Scott's and Kroger's, and CVS pharmacies. It probably gets the stores a little bit of auxiliary business, when people decide to save extra trips or do a little shopping while getting their movies.
The bad part of a Redbox rental is there is no human attendant on site to help with questions or problems. In severely cold weather it seems as though the terminals freeze up and won't work. Don't bother asking the clerks inside the CVS - they'll tell you they have no connection to the business, and to call the number on the DVD case or kiosk. I've done that, and the phone help has been satisfactory - as I recall I was put on hold for a while and had to listen to some annoying promotions I wasn't interested in. After waiting, however, I was given credit for an extra day for movies I couldn't return because the kiosk was frozen or wasn't working. It gave me another day to find a different terminal when I didn't have time to drive around Fort Wayne to find another one right then.
Redbox reports it has rented 1 billion movies already. They can even tell you where that 1 billionth movie was rented (somewhere in Florida). That's a lot of movies. Redbox may even be a short-lived fad, with the onset of other good services such as NetFlix and OnDemand, in which movies can be downloaded over the Internet so that you don't even have to leave your home.
Redbox titles can be somewhat limited, and popular choices are rented out, so you can't always get what you want. I have a list of the American Film Institute's (voted) top 100 movies of all time, and I'm slowly working my way through those films I've never seen and want to watch.
These aren't current titles one is apt to find in a Redbox rental. For example, I decided I wanted to show my husband the classic "Some Like it Hot" with Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis - I was able to download it over an Ipad. I don't have a connection to show it on a large screen, however. At Redbox, I was able to get a new release - "The Social Network," and something for children, an owl-themed animated flick called "Legend of the Guardians." Let it snow, which it still is doing - it's going to be a movie weekend.
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