Do you remember those Friday nights when the family would all get together, buy some candy, cook up some popcorn, and rent a movie from Blockbuster?
Nestled in the center of Aviation Mall is a time capsule of that era, the last of its kind in the area.
Since 2015, Valarie Haynes has run Play it Again, an entertainment store that has been preserving physical media – DVDs, Blu-ray disks and even some VHS tapes – in the age of streaming.
The building has ghosts of the young girls clothing store Justice that used to occupy the space, with flowery decorations along to tops of the wall, and the same color scheme, but otherwise, Haynes has brought back the retro feel of old video stores through her presentation of the media.
Everything has a classic cinema feel with genre sections and prices identified with movie stub signs.
People are also reading…
Tens of thousands of movies fill the store, allowing moviegoers to wander for hours. Maybe you’ll find an old favorite or walk home with a blind buy. Just be sure to pet the dog, Katerina, on the way out.
But unfortunately for cinephiles and lovers of the physical media experience, this summer will be Play It Again’s final showing.
Haynes has a long history of retail, bouncing from one type of store to the next. But a constant for her has been to sell movies in one way or another. Still, becoming a full-on movie store was entirely an accident.
“I helped my brother establish a store in Clifton Country Mall, and I helped run it, and then when he decided he was kind of done with the second store because he was trying to get rid of overstock, I bought it from him and then moved it here and added tons and tons of stuff,” Haynes said.
Slowly she added books, comics, games, and memorabilia to the shelves.
But why DVDs when audiences can stream a movie from Netflix? According to Haynes, it’s all about community and authenticity.
“You should own at least your favorite movies so you'll always have the original version,” Haynes said, referring to studios such as Disney, which interfere and re-work classic films, erasing imagery that may not have culturally aged well, or are way too late changes.
For example, some episodes from “The Office” and “Seinfeld” such as “Diversity Day” and “The Puerto Rican Day” respectively, had been pulled from TV syndication and streaming, but they could be found on disk at stores like Play it Again.
She also believes that people have a better experience when browsing in a physical location rather than a digital one.
“There's movies that they'll never even know existed because they're just streaming ones they were told about,” Haynes said. “But when you browse the shelves here, you'll come up with ones like ‘Oh, wow, what is this? Never heard of this.’ And then it gives you opportunities to watch movies you never even heard of.”
Haynes also mentioned that many movies can’t be found anywhere on streaming services, which raises another concern for film lovers: streamers can lose the rights to movies, and even if they were bought through iTunes or Amazon Prime, they’re gone forever with no money back.
At the end of the day though, the main draw for Haynes to own Play It Again were the friends she made.
“I get to see so many people I see all the time,” She said. “One customer was pregnant when she first came in, and now he's like nine or eight. I've seen him grow up. You get to know everybody that's my favorite part.”
She also says Aviation Mall is the best mall around, with strong emphasis in her statement.
So with all her passion for the store, why is she closing now? It’s not due to sales as some physical media skeptics would believe.
Haynes’ biggest supporter throughout all of her business endeavors was her husband, William.
“He was like my cheerleader no matter what,” Haynes said.
William Haynes passed away in 2020, and Valerie says it hasn’t been the same since.
“I actually haven't decorated since he died,” she said. “I used to decorate with all kinds of balloons on the windows…He liked the fact that it made me happy, so it made him happy. You know what I mean? What you do for a living matters and if you're happy, and you go home and you're happy, that made him happy… And now he's gone and it's time it's time to do something else.”
“It's not the same. When you watch a movie alone,” Haynes continued. “When we go to movies with everybody, you know, you come out of the movie theater, you're talking about the movie but when you're just watching a movie by yourself there's nobody to run it by, like, what you just saw. It's well… it’s awful lonely.”
Play It Again is where she has found her community again since her husband’s death.
“The customers make the difference? Absolutely,” she laughed. “There's so many people, I probably know 90% of the people that come in here. And they don't always come in to buy, and that's fine. But they come in and we chitchat we talk about things I find out.”
Haynes will keep the store open until the end of the summer, and in that time, hopes to find someone interested in buying her stock to keep physical media alive in this part of New York.