RAO Video Ready to Eject

Robert Oliver is expecting to close RAO Video after 43 years, but his Main Street run gives him a unique perspective on the rise and fall of the video rental industry.

Roll the credits: This is the end for RAO Video, which is calling it a wrap after nearly 45 years as a retail fixture on Main Street in Little Rock.

In the 1970s, Bob Oliver’s downtown shop staked a disputed claim to being America’s earliest video store. Without question, it was one of the first, and all through the Blockbuster era and well into the streaming recent past RAO held on as the industry it pioneered collapsed.

Finally, Oliver put the video store’s three-story building at 609 Main up for sale early last year, asking $1.3 million, and steadily sold off the inventory — including the X-rated titles that were always the store’s bread and butter.

This month he sold the 18,400-SF property for $850,000. “I cashed the check yesterday,” Oliver told Whispers on Sept. 3. “John Chandler bought it. I’ve got until Nov. 1 to get out.”

Oliver, who started RAO Video at a different spot on Main Street in 1977, moved to the 609 Main location after paying $120,000 for the property in 2001. He made a home in a 7,000-SF residence above the shop, with its two pool tables, sauna, whirlpool, tanning bed and two movie theaters. All it didn’t have was windows to the outside. “What good are windows?” Oliver would tell visitors. “I can always go outside.”

Chandler, the buyer, is a developer widely known for his work in North Little Rock, including retail and loft apartments in the 700 block of Main Street, the heart of the Argenta Arts District.

Oliver, who is 82, estimates that in his decades on Main RAO handled “200,000 regular movies and 200,000 adult.” Erotica was always “the only real profitable part of the business, period,” Oliver said in 2000.

After considering retirement near relatives in Florida, Oliver said last week that he was looking for a place in Little Rock or Hot Springs. But he said it’s “not a particularly good time to buy,” with home prices up sharply in Arkansas and across the nation.