It's a big part of who I am and it's a big part of my identity as a person and I have to thank Queen Video for a lot of that. It's always so great and so welcoming to just walk around and find new things and so it's really sad to see this one go. Video stores are great and they're going to be missed so much. Well I grew up in Toronto and I eventually made it to the University of Toronto and studied business and finished in 1980. Not a good time because there was a recession and there were not a lot of jobs in accounting and finance so I opened a stereo store here on Queen Street in 1981. It had one little tiny shelf of films, movies, VHS tapes for rent and I didn't even intend it to be a video store, it was a stereo business. But the stereo industry wasn't very good for an independent at the time and I noticed the movies, especially in this Queen West neighborhood, were doing really well, even though there was only 150 of them. So about a year later, I converted the store to just a video store. I was renting them for I think three dollars a night. Rentals were one night back then. Movies were costing about eighty dollars and I thought, well, even though I thought that university was a partial waste of time, one thing it taught me was the return on the investment. At three dollars a night for an eighty dollar item and they were going out every night, it was fantastic. I saw the potential. I was not a lover of films or cinema any more than the average person at the time but I saw the financial model had real potential. There's quite a few films in here that I had to buy from the filmmakers themselves, directly from them. Often, they were selling them out of their homes, like Frederick Wiseman, for example. He's an award-winning documentarian and I have his films. You can only buy them from him. That's just one example. So are you just, are those just being sold off? They're all mixed in, you know, if I started to pick out the gems, what would I do with them? I already have my other store, which is remaining open, so I'm just leaving them in here and the public really is unaware. It's just to them, everything is either available or not available, they don't really know. The people who are going to buy these esoteric titles, want those titles. So at least you're going to get, let's say somewhat informed purchasers and they're going to hold on to these things. They're not just going to, you know, they're going to watch them and flip them into the recycling. So there's there's a way in which it's the dispersal that troubles me because that means at best, one person is going to have a title and maybe that person will show it to a few friends but it's going to be restricted to that person. Whereas if it was here or at another institution that was interested in having the maximum number of people see those titles, they would live on through another version of curation, in a way. That's also one of the true losses here is that there will inevitably be titles that are available at a store like Queen Street that you will not find anywhere else online, anywhere. I mean, because the distributor has probably gone out of business and that means that the title is in some kind of limbo, which means that an online service isn't going to be able to pick it up because there's not going to be rights clearance or they wouldn't even know how to get it because that distribution stream is gone. What I would say is and this is where people are going to regret the loss of a store like Queen Street, is that you have expertise that you're going to lose, that people will actually be able to direct you to find the sorts of things that might interest you. If you don't know enough, you can go to a resource that's online but they can't tell you what to watch. Now, people say "Oh, we've got these services" like "if you like 'x' you'll like 'y'," but that's a pretty generic way of handling customer interest. Well, I was a customer here, my sister used to send me down here when I was about, you know, 15 because the place was open a few years prior to me working here. I used to come in, my sister used to send me down because she'd be at home with her girlfriends they'd have girls night and Queen Street wasn't the greatest neighbourhood, right, it'd be an evening and she'd kind of go "I'll give you five dollars if you go down a Queen Video and get some movies for us and you I'll buy you a treat" and like, you know, "Whatever you can get." Like "Go get a snack from McDonald's" or whatever it may be and I was like "So I'm going to get to watch a movie, I'm going to get paid and I'm going to get food?" I was coming in here for a couple of years and I just walked in here one day and was like "Howie, I need a job" and he was like "Yeah, yeah okay, sure, whatever." So I hounded him a few times and eventually he hired me. I grew up in the project Alexandra Park just a few blocks from here, so this was the local video store. It was a nice area, it was a rough neighbourhood. Growing up here, it was, you know, there's low-income housing, right. So there was really nice people that were hard-working and just, you know, struggling to get by and then there was bad people that would, you know, find the opportunity to sell there and pedal their drugs here. The 80s and early 90s, it was a bad neighbourhood, just a block up. Yeah, it's changed a lot. I mean, there still is rough patches. You see it at Queen and Spadina, you see it, you know, behind here they have a you know a detox centre here, all the troubled youth. That being said, it was nothing like the drug era of the late 80s and early 90s here. I think I'm pretty protective of my relationship with Chris. He's just such a genuinely nice guy. So I think it's super unfortunate that this thing that's been such a constant for, what I guess would be most of his life, is kind of falling away because I think that would be really, really hard on anybody and because I think he's been there since he was like like 16. 15 or 16? Having anything kind of, having the bottom drop out of anything after that amount of time, I think, would be extremely disorienting and strange. But I also feel like for the amount of time that he's kind of put into that place that, you know, he was probably not as appreciated as he should have been. I don't know if he still is but he was just extremely dedicated to Howie. I'm sure that he was, you know, especially when we were doing really, really well for those years, I think that he was probably very comfortable and compensated fairly. But like again, he liked being a martyr too, where he liked kind of pointing out how many hours he was putting in. But yeah, like he was coming in, you could always call Chris at like two in the morning if it was a Queen Video thing and he'd be over there, like huffing and puffing, ready to figure out what's going wrong. He works to make the store clean, does general repairs and then the biggest thing is he maintains this personal relationship with all of the customer base and that's the reason people come keep coming back. I've had people coming in, now that we're closing, that just want, they don't even want to buy anything. They've just come in to take a picture with me, bring me a bottle of wine and hug me and give me their number to stay in touch. I've had numerous customers just this weekend hugging me and they were crying because they're going to miss the place. I have a customer, particularly Muhammad, he's an older man. He used to live in the neighbourhood, he moved to Scarborough years ago. He comes in by Wheel-Trans once a week on Saturday to pick his movies for the week and he stays here for two hours while Wheel-Trans comes back and picks him up. I go get him a coffee from McDonald's and a muffin every week. He buys one week, I buy one week. I told him the week prior to us closing that it was happening and he sat there with his head down for two hours and he was like, almost in tears because he's been coming here for like 25 years. Howie and I used to go do trips sometimes and be like, I'd pull up a late list and I'd look at it and go "Howie, I've been calling this guy for six weeks, he's not bringing these movies back" and we were a small shop then and they were VHS, so they were like 80 to 100 dollars each. So it was imperative you get them back, because they would have two or three out, that's a lot of money. So Howie would be like "I'll come with you. Let's go knock on that door," and we would kind of go knock, "Give us our movies back," kind of trying to be intimidating. But it was fun, we used to do just to do stuff like that all the time. There was an era when we couldn't afford to lose movies. So if they weren't returned, we used to go to people's homes to knock on the door and ask for them back. Once we knocked on the door and it just swung open, two Doberman Pinschers came running at us, so we grabbed his door and shut it. Howie treated me well and you know he he treated me well, he's a great boss. He treated me well for a long time. Working for someone, you don't work somewhere for 28 years because you know, unless the money is amazing and you love it. Yes, I've had hours cut and etc. Those are the sign of the times, you know, so those are circumstances that are nature of the business. So what can I do, you know? Everything comes to an end, right. Like, this industry is struggled for a lot of years and what can I tell you? What can I say? Like, what can he do to make it better? Like, I don't know, you know? I'm feeling a bit relieved and I'm trying to reflect my account on 35 years of memories. It's going to take a while to do that.