![]() And when the rental levels were unusually slow during the spring downpours and April school vacation week, she knew it was time to pull the plug. But Wissel, a 62-year-old Halifax resident who has multiple sclerosis, says she has been subsidizing the place for about a year. Wissel had hoped to keep the doors open until summer, when Manomet’s population balloons with vacationers. And the chains – Blockbuster, Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery – were closing stores left and right. By this time last year, she was the last independent mainstream movie rental shop left standing in the area. Wissel said her business at Pic-A-Flic probably peaked four to five years ago, when she could rent 500 or 600 movies on a Saturday night. It’s a shame, because it isolates people to their home and their computer.” ![]() And, of course, before consumers could rent a movie and have it stream across their computers almost instantly. Before Comcast amassed a decent-sized video-on-demand library. Before Redbox machines started popping up at supermarkets and convenience stores, offering movies for a buck a night. Of course, those were the days before Netflix gave viewers access to a seemingly infinite array of titles from their homes. There were two other video rental shops in Manomet at the time. But DVD sales and rentals were hopping when she bought the business. ![]() Wissel missed the video rental shop craze of the 1980s. This month, one of the last independent video shops anywhere south of Boston will close. She shipped off her library of DVDs, nearly 5,000 of them, to a liquidator Monday, and she is in the final days of selling her VHS tapes at $2.50 a pop for the popular titles and three for $5 for others. As a longtime film buff and entrepreneur, Elaine Wissel fulfilled a dream 12 years ago when she bought Pic-A-Flic in the Manomet section of Plymouth.īut Wissel was finally forced to pack that dream up in cardboard boxes. ![]()
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