If local folks had known a local business was in trouble, would they have gone there first?

BY EILEEN BRADY
THE NEWS JOURNAL OF WILMINGTON, OHIO

Her business was there before Walmart arrived in Wilmington and became her strip-mall neighbor, bringing a great deal of retail traffic with it. Later, her business survived the superstore’s pullout and relocation outside of town. 
From Betamax to Blu-Ray, Jen Andorfer has rented it all at First Choice Video. She has worked there more than half her life and has owned the business since 1992. A teenager from Springfield who loved to watch movies, Jen also eventually owned stores in other southwestern Ohio cities, but the Wilmington store is the one that remains.
“It’s the only job I’ve had since I was 16,” Jen says. 
The Clinton County community embraced First Choice Video, and Jen returned the love. She has only raised prices twice in 23 years. Children can still pick a five-day rental for 99 cents. She rents five videos for five days for five bucks. She uses store walls

to remind people that troops are still fighting a war, that local Marines like Josh Sams have paid a dear price.

Still, it’s becoming increasingly tougher to stay in the video-rental business, which has been losing out to new technology in the form of Redbox, Netflix and various online streaming services. 
Even with a superbly organized local inventory of 20,000 movies, TV series and video games, as well as individualized recommendations, personal service and friendly faces, the small-business model of First Choice Video is being killed by the expedience of today’s technology. 
It’s simply more convenient to watch something online or to stop at a robotic box outside a grocery store.
Take, for instance, a friend of Jen’s who wanted to watch Season 3 of “Private Practice.” Jen invested the $38 to add the DVD to the inventory and received the $1.89 rental from it. Later, the friend told her she’d watched a new movie she got at Redbox. “No big deal,” her friend said. 
There are more and more people who find their entertainment elsewhere, and business is suffering. Jen is struggling to pay operating expenses, and it’s harder to compete with kiosks.
Redbox has become the most popular source of DVD and Blu-Ray disc rentals, according to the market research group NPD. The Convergence Consulting Group said that video store rentals would drop to just 13 percent of the total home video market in 2012.
The forecast is grim, and Jen is a realist. Yet she looks for reasons to keep opening the doors seven days a week.
“I’m not giving up, but I am at a crossroads, yes,” Jen says. She is working with Wilmington College students to create surveys and focus groups. She is trying to think outside the video box.
It’s easy to see why Jen is torn, as I watch her on a weekday morning, recognizing her customers and helping them find what they’re looking for — or what they hadn’t realized they were looking for. 
In a struggling economy like ours, people who can’t afford cable TV can spend a few bucks to rent seasons of their favorite TV shows, from “Alias” to “X-Files,” from “Downton Abbey” to “Sons of Anarchy.” They can let their kids rent a video game that, if purchased, would set them back more than $50. 
I’ve lived in communities that have rallied around independent bookstores, which also are being plowed under by online retailers and digital delivery. I could hear the “Buy Local” mantra in my head as I saw the prominent display of locally based “I’m Fine, Thanks” DVDs and the portrait of Josh Sams in his dress blues. 
Jen Andorfer helps Operation Thank You on her checkout counter: “Send some love to a soldier” reads a handwritten sign near a sample care package and brochures for the charity. She helped rally the community to attend Help From Home, a successful benefit for Sams. You don’t feel that love at Redbox; there are no hand-written hearts on a kiosk screen.
I think of the helplessness I’ve felt when a favorite local restaurant or shop is shuttered without warning. If local folks had known the business was in trouble, I’ve always wondered, would they have gone there first before taking their business out of town? 
Would Wilmington, in this instance, realize how fortunate it is to have both an independent bookstore and and independent video store? 
Would it help if there were a clean slate?
On Jan. 1, more than 23 years of late charges were deleted from the First Choice computers. All debts have been erased, and Jen has been focusing on “forgiveness” and how she might be able to apply it to her business. She has started a “clean slate” campaign on Facebook, and she wants people to stop by to let her help them find their next favorite movie.
Maybe she could lure back some of the occasional customers who didn’t want to show their faces after racking up a couple of weeks’ worth of late fees that would now be forgiven. Maybe the average Joe she misses would reappear in her store. 
Maybe community members would rally around a local business owner as she has done for them.