1. Going out of business 2. Can't spell

They've got a couple problems over at Network Video on Queensberry Street in North Melbourne, but the inability to spell is probably the least of them.

They're an April Fool this year in ways that are both laughable and lamentable.

It would appear that this location is following in the footsteps of its brother over in Flemington. That makes a certain amount of sense, as video stores are finally revealing their lack of viability here in Australia, after bucking the trend for longer than in most first-world countries. But I thought that the former Video Ezy in Flemington -- which is closing its doors for good this weekend -- may have succumbed to some kind of lease issue, as the owners had already posted who the next tenants would be (a law office).

Now I know it's not just an isolated occurrence. Video stores, as an institution, may be facing extinction altogether here in Melbourne.

I'd gone by this location yesterday as a second option, now that the Flemington store was about to close. Although this store does not actually say it's going out of business, it does say that it's closed from "Staurday (sic) to Thursday." (Click on the picture to get a better view of the misspelling, if you care to do so.) A business open only for four hours on a Friday afternoon/evening -- which is having a major sale on all inventory -- is not long for this world, even if this place does claim to still be renting videos instead of just ridding itself of its stock.

Losing one random video store was one thing. Losing the only other one in the area I knew of is another.

I've still got the Hoyts kiosks, but they tend to be more oriented toward popular movies than arthouse ones, and they only carry movies from about the past year. Anything older than that, or more obscure than that, should be the domain of the video store.

But now that the video store is going bye bye, I'm guessing it will become almost impossible to get my hands on a physical copy of older or more obscure movies, unless I get it for free from the library. But the library is a crap shoot. You can't go to the library expecting to pick up a specific movie.

So we are now entering an era in which the only way to get certain movies will be online.

And I guess, really, that's just the world we live in, and I have to stop writing about it is as though it's something newsworthy. It's not the end of the world, is it?

Even the video store that's closing doesn't seem that worried about it. As the misspelled poster adorning the shop window advises, I guess I just need to chillax.