The Strange Fate of Kim's Video ⇒

Karina Longworth gets investigative for The Village Voice:

The closing of a video store is not news. With Web streaming, the vanishing DVD sales market, and Netflix, it’s an inevitability. Usually, the fate of the physical videos after the store’s closing isn’t news, either. Maybe there’s a dollar sale. Maybe employees smuggle home the dead stock. The customers adapt. They find another video store. They use BitTorrent and YouPorn.

This is how it happens. If you’ve ever had a video-store membership, this has probably happened to you.

This is not how it happened with Mondo Kim’s.

Spending hours wandering Kim’s was one of my favorite things to do in NYC even before I lived there. I was sad to see it go, but I thought it was just the way of things. There’s more to it, though. Longworth travels to Salemi, Italy to find out what happened to one of the greatest video collections on the planet.