MELBOURNE – MY LOCAL VIDEO STORE IS SCARY

There’s a senile lady who owns my local video shop, Yvonne’s Friendly DVD Club. I guess her name’s Yvonne. She’s so uncomfortably mental that most people are too scared to go in and rent a movie and would rather stay home and, say, clean the scum around the plugholes with their fingernails. If they’ve ever been brave enough to enter and endure her schizoid customer skills, not to mention the sight of her metal-strength peroxide French roll, they’ve eventually been beaten down by her manic hand-written notes reminding them that they didn’t return disc 4 of season 5 of Roseanne or whatever. Yvonne makes renting a movie on a Sunday night more unbearable than the weekend long muntathon that you were trying to overcome.

Being the crazy entrepreneur, as DVD sales declined, Yvonne branched out. Next to the rows of old VHS tapes sprung film memorabilia–an Indiana Jones film poster and box set modestly priced at $1,000, a photocopied, water-damaged photograph of James Dean for $500, and foam cutouts of the Grease logo.

One day, in a weak moment, we decided to flick a few dollars her way, and after knocking a good $100 dollars off the price of the Grease sign, we walked out confused by the experience but with the foam piece of rubbish under our arms and only $25 missing from our wallets.

Since then Yvonne has added to her business acumen and become, in this order, a celebrant, a Mother’s Day shop, a friendly Internet café, and a new mother’s club. A one-stop shop, really. It would be the perfect place if you had just got knocked up, needed to fast-track a marriage before your Christian parents found out, and you’d forgotten to buy your dear mommy a present. In this situation, Yvonne would be sitting on a gold mine.

Instead, her extreme entrepreneurial skills have been rewarded by at least six cases of smashed front windows. People, she’s just trying to carve out a living. It’s not her fault she is retarded. It is a sign of the times though—if you try and fail and your idea of business is stocking as much shit onto shelves as humanly possible, rocks will shatter your dreams and your livelihood.

HG