Get Your Erol's On

Before Netflix...before Blockbuster...there was EROL'S! Erol's Video Club was the original giant video store chain. Erol's was a Chicago based electronics store that sold TVs and Stereos. When VCR's hit the market, Erol's offered customers a chance to rent a handful of movies on video. Back then videos cost $100...nobody really bought movies for their home! Next thing you know, the VCR revolutionized the way we watch television and there was an Erol's video store on every other street corner.

Erol's was a fancy video store, and little movie nerd me loved it! First of all they had more movies then 10 regular video stores put together. And they had all kinds of other stuff on tape besides movies. I can remember renting the Go-Go's Live a half a dozen times. Erol's also had a monthly magazine that was delivered to your home. Each month I would gaze at all the movies coming out that I wanted to see but my folks wouldn't take me in the theatre. I used to save the magazines and then when I taped a movie off HBO I would cut out the little picture of the video box and tape it to the box of the tape I just made. I still have some of those tapes!

Another great thing at Erol's was their tapes of movie previews! You could borrow a tape...FOR FREE...of an hours worth of movie trailers. That's some fine viewing in my book! It didn't take long for me to watch all the trailer tapes they had!

What really set Erol's apart from the other videos stores was that the movies came in gigantic red boxes. These boxes were at least three times the size of a regular video tape box. Everytime Erol's got new movies it, the poor Erol's employees would have to cut up the original video boxes and literally paste them onto the huge red Erol's boxes. It was cool to be able to take home the box with the artwork and information on it, but if you rented more than two movies you would need a friend to help you carry the mammoth boxes to the car!

Erol's was eventually bought by Blockbuster. Erol's that were in competition with Blockbusters were closed, other Erol's became Blockbuster. I actually worked at a strange Erol's/Blockbuster hybrid for a while. The store said Erol's on the outside and it looked like an Erol's on the inside. But we wore Blockbuster uniforms and had Blockbuster video boxes. To complicate things even further we accepted both Erol's and Blockbuster membership cards. Oh, you can imagine how crazy it was!