(Editor’s Note: This is the latest in a series of business history features. To suggest future Fifth Monday articles, please contact Gwen Moritz at GMoritz@ABPG.com.)
.3 million, Robert Oliver is looking to end the store’s 43-year run. ( Karen E. Segrave)
At 81, Robert Oliver knows about technological disruption.
His RAO Video store, a 43-year fixture on Main Street in Little Rock, is going down as one of the first and last outlets in an American industry driven and eventually killed by technology.
Decades before streaming, RAO staked a claim as the nation’s first video store — though there’s competition for that title. And further back, Oliver learned that time and progress halt for no job.
“Technology and advancements, they’ve eliminated all kinds of work in my lifetime,” he said. “I haven’t been able to pick cotton in 70 years!”
Laughter echoed through Oliver’s 7,000-SF residence above the shop as he laid out the likely final scenes for Little Rock’s oldest surviving video store.
Spoiler alert: It won’t be surviving long.
Oliver is selling his 18,400-SF building, and he’ll head into a million-dollar retirement if he gets even close to his asking price for 609 Main.
He showed a reporter an offer of $1.2 million from last month, shielding the name of the would-be buyer, but that deal collapsed. He’s now marketing the property again, and the store will close after he sells.
In his game room, surrounded by the movie screens he’s loved since working as a teenage cinema projectionist, Oliver said movie work was a picnic compared to his boyhood drudgery in the cotton fields around McGehee. “Picking cotton was the worst job I ever had, and I’ve had as many as five jobs at a time since high school.”
Sometimes at midday he’d lie on his cotton sack, resting “and praying for death.”
Back in those postwar years, as mechanization took over farming, Oliver was glad to let machines do the brutal work. Little did he know the trend would transform the Delta, which has hemorrhaged farm jobs and population ever since.
Later, during a 30-year career with what is now AT&T, Oliver installed mechanized telephone offices across the state, an innovation that made switchboard operators redundant.
“It was what they called a step-by-step office,” Oliver said. “It was mechanical, and it would do all those telephone operators’ jobs. We might go to a town with 70 to 100 telephone operators, and they’d all be put out of work.”
Sex Sells
Oliver felt for the operators, just as he feels for the five RAO employees who’ll lose work when he sells. Their domain, a 11,400-SF first-floor display space next door to the Arkansas Repertory Theatre, brims with 20,000 movie titles, down from 30,000 before a final sell-off.
Many buyers have patronized RAO, named for Oliver’s initials, since it opened at a different Main Street location in 1977. But business is at a standstill now as the coronavirus spreads, and it’s not a good time to try selling a building, Oliver said Wednesday. “The world is dead right now.”
Oliver bought the current building for $120,000 in 2001, and the three-story property on 0.16 acres is listed on Re/Max’s commercial website for $1.3 million.
Leading a reporter to the freight elevator, Oliver walked past walls of “adult” offerings, RAO’s lifeblood since the beginning. A toy room’s sign lays out the rules: “Must be accompanied by an employee and have ID (18+).”
For RAO, sex has always sold.
Erotic titles made up half of Oliver’s first movie order in 1977. “Five adult movies and five black-and-white Westerns,” he recalled. Ever since, erotica has been “the only real profitable part of the business, period.”
Oliver saw crazes and formats come and go, from renting out video players when they were newfangled and in few homes, to shifts from Beta to VHS, video discs and eventually DVDs.
He put in a vape shop about five years ago, and started selling CBD oil. “All that helped a little,” he said, but “it’s hard making money in the vape business.” He blames big tobacco scare tactics and a government tendency to meddle.
Years of downtown revitalization also took a toll, Oliver said, citing the special improvement district that created the Metrocentre and Main Street Mall projects downtown in the 1970s. Those developments closed Main Street to vehicular traffic for years, “really hurting business,” Oliver said.
The 1990s and early 2000s were RAO’s best revenue years, he said.
But the rise of video streaming and internet pornography intervened. Oliver believes “no intelligent man” should obtain erotica on the web, because of potential tracking. “My customers don’t even have to give their names,” he said, “just the birth date and take the movie.”
When the Tide Turned
As video chains dwindled nationwide starting about 10 years ago, RAO was buoyed by devoted clientele, and now Oliver stands to exit the industry in far better shape than Blockbuster, the industry titan that’s now defunct.
Just one Blockbuster store remains, independently owned in Bend, Oregon. It’s the last of 4,500 U.S. locations after bankruptcy liquidation and the final closing of corporate-owned stores in 2014.
“The turning point was the internet, and people streaming movies without leaving their house,” said Ira Belfer, owner of Captain Video in San Mateo, California, an independent holdout in the Bay Area. “Instead of going out for a pizza and then socializing at the video store, talking about what they want to see, they sit in front of a TV or computer and push a button.”
They’re missing expert advice and unexpected surprises, said Belfer, who once employed five at Captain Video but has skippered a one-man ship since 2009.
Blockbuster’s own moves harmed the industry, Belfer said. It grew too large, emphasizing the availability of every new title and setting off an acquisition wave that homogenized mom-and-pop shops and smaller chains. Blockbuster’s competitors bought up regional chains like the Family Video Supercenters, once the largest independent video chain based in Arkansas. North Little Rock’s Vincent Insalaco, the former Democratic Party of Arkansas chairman, sold the 44-store enterprise in 2002 to Movie Gallery Inc. of Dothan, Alabama, for an estimated price above $6 million.
Another questionable move by Blockbuster was eliminating late fees, which not only cost the chain itself $400 million a year, but also pressured smaller businesses that needed late fees for revenue and clout to force prompt returns, Belfer said. “No other business rents property without charging for more time. Imagine returning a car weeks late without expecting to pay more.”
Oliver was in business years before anybody heard of Blockbuster, which opened in Dallas in 1985.
“It ain’t like me to read the Wall Street Journal, but I just happened to read it one day, and it described video — how you can film things and watch them back on TV immediately,” Oliver said. “For me, it was a new freedom.”
The article said movies would soon be put on video, so in 1977, even before video movies were available locally, Oliver “rented a spot at the corner of Capitol and Main, a little kiosk that was 10 by 10 feet.” Since then, he estimates he’s handled “200,000 regular movies and 200,000 adult.”
Oliver likes life over the video store, and has few regrets. “I’ve got two pool tables, a sauna, a whirlpool, a tanning bed, two movie theaters,” he said, gesturing to walls lined with cobra posters and trophies for pool and bowling. “People tell me I don’t have windows, but what good are windows? I can always go outside.”
His history in Little Rock dates back 70 years, to when he moved with his family into the Hoffman Hotel at Markham and Victory. He went to Little Rock Central High School before graduating in 1957 in McGehee, where his father owned a gas station, the same year Central faced its integration crisis.
Oliver played several roles in Main Street’s history, including a bit as a lunch counter manager at McLellan’s, the grocery and variety store landmark at Sixth Street that closed for good on Christmas Eve 1975.
About 1958, with civil rights sit-ins making headlines, Oliver was in charge of one of two lunch counters, the one reserved for white diners. “One day I turned around and the whole white counter, which had 35 stools, was full of black people wanting service. It scared the hell out of me; I didn’t know what to do.” Police cleared out the protesters without arrests, he recalled.
But Oliver’s Little Rock days now appear numbered, and he envisions himself near his daughter and grandchildren in Florida. He plans to spend more time with his son’s family.
“The older I get, the more I hate winter, months and months of horrible rain and cold,” Oliver said. “There’s no reason to live like that if I can move to Florida. I’m thinking I’m 81 years old, I’ll have a million dollars in my pocket. It’s great!”
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