Family Video — The last video chain standing, until its landlord couldn’t save it

Family Video was the Midwestern video-rental chain that owned its own buildings, and in January 2021 its president announced that all of its remaining stores — around 250 of them across 17 states — would close. The final rental day was 6 January 2021, and the shutdown was complete by the end of February. Founded in 1978 by Charlie Hoogland as a video offshoot of his family’s Illinois distribution business, opening its first store in Springfield, Illinois, Family Video grew to roughly 800 locations and did something no other large rental chain managed: it outlasted them all. Blockbuster, Movie Gallery, and Hollywood Video each went down under debt and streaming; Family Video kept renting discs into the 2020s, the last big national rental chain on its feet.

The reason it lasted so long is the reason it belongs in this archive as a counterpoint rather than a copycat. Family Video, through its parent Highland Ventures, owned the real estate under most of its stores. While Blockbuster and Hollywood Video paid escalating rent on thousands of leased boxes — rent that turned a demand collapse into an unpayable fixed cost almost overnight — Family Video paid itself. Its occupancy cost was effectively flat, it could sublet unused square footage to a Subway or a Jimmy John’s, and it ran lean enough that a store needed only a fraction of the traffic to stay open. Owning the building was a quiet structural advantage that bought the chain an extra decade in a dying business.

But owning the building slows the bleed; it does not refill the store. Streaming drained rental demand through the 2010s, and the company leaned on its real-estate flexibility — adding a fitness brand and a cannabis-dispensary venture in some buildings — to keep the lights on. Then COVID-19 arrived. As president Keith Hoogland put it, the chain had faced “digital competition from Netflix and others for years,” but “nothing has been as devastating to our business as COVID-19”: the pandemic crushed foot traffic and dried up the supply of new releases as Hollywood delayed its 2020 slate. A video store with no new movies and no customers had run out of road.

Family Video’s fate is properly read as a shuttering rather than a court-ordered liquidation: a privately held, real-estate-rich company that closed its stores when the business stopped working, keeping the valuable property and winding down the rental operation. It was the last of its kind, and it closed not because it had failed where the others failed, but because even the smartest structural hedge cannot outlast both streaming and a pandemic at once.